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Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Addendumb on Race

Yes, I really did say that some of this going on and on about how insulting it is to be told it would be foolish not to vote for those who want to achieve more of what you do rather than voting for (or enabling by not voting at all) those want to achieve the opposite of what you do feels a little bit weird and racialized to me.

I am a white guy, my beloved boyfriend of eight years is a white guy, a non-negligible minority of my marvelous students at the San Francisco Art Institute and at Berkeley have been white guys, clearly there is nothing wrong with being a white guy nor do I think every white guy is inevitably inherently racist. Nothing in the first paragraph implies otherwise, so don't be stupid if you can help it, and don't expect me to publish racist crap in the Moot.

I must say, I happen to believe that part of what it means to be an anti-racist white guy (of whom I believe and hope and mean to be one, as is my boyfriend, and, yes, of course, as are many other white guys I fondly know and don't) is to be aware of the ways in which as white guys we are beneficiaries of white-racist privilege, which, among other things, means that we may not be aware of some of the costs exacted on others by racism unless we devote effort to that awareness (as surely we should if we want to declare ourselves to be anti-racist, right?) simply by virtue of the fact that those are not costs we bear, especially given the other costs that no doubt demand our attentions on our own terms.

You may recall the absurd brou-ha-ha that erupted during the 2008 Presidential campaign when Obama spoke in a San Francisco rally to the reasonable bitterness that settles in after generations of neoliberal abandonment of the middle class and wealth concentration and then was criticized by both McCain and Clinton as "condescending" in his choice of the word "bitter" to describe this state of mind. It wasn't difficult to discern the facile cultural politics of staging a stealthy confrontation of San Francisco values against small town 'Murcan values in this criticism, nor were many blind to the opportunistic mobilization of available racial resentments in the attack.

I am starting to feel comparably creeped out at least some of the time when I hear people drawing attention first of all, over and over again, very particularly to the ways in which they feel insulted, denigrated, patronized by the Administration's attitude toward criticisms from "the left" or "the base" (and almost invariably the insulted person feels themselves to represent that base and feels that their prioritization of concern with feeling insulted is likewise representative). I also think there is a certain privilege, not exclusive to but certainly inclusive of race-privilege, that drives some of the more flabbergastingly unrealistic expectations of some Obama critics who seem to have expected dramatically more progressive reform at dramatically lower cost in terms of struggle dramatically more rapidly and deeply from this Administration and its actually precarious majorities in a moment characterized by unprecedentedly irresponsible Republican obstructionism, global financial collapse, and (at least) two catastrophic wars, and all in less than two years' time.

I'm not saying that all Obama critics are racist. At least not all the ones from the left. After all, right here on this blog this very day I have mentioned a number of critiques of the Obama Administration -- from white guys, yet -- with which I personally sympathize (HAMP, civil liberties, imperial executive, and don't get me started on drone attacks).

I'm just saying that there is an available raced privilege likely inflecting and maybe opportunistically mobilized in at least some of what is read (misread?) as a "punch the hippies first" strategy on the part of the Obama Administration.

And it is precisely because most of those critics would presumably earnestly want and mean to be anti-racist themselves that they might want to pause and think about the extent to which their personalization of the case for voting their objective interest whatever their disappointments as an insult rather than an appeal and the scope of the expectations which have been disappointed in the first place may reflect privilege as well.

If your criticisms aren't racist, great. I'm just as sure that sometimes that's true as I'm sure that more often than we'd like it isn't.

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