N*gga Theory. Jody David Armour

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СКАЧАТЬ to black America—you might earn fancy degrees and make big cash, but you cannot cash in your face, for the face of crime in the eyes of law enforcement and civilians alike is black. As Jay-Z puts it in “The Story of O.J.”:

      Light nigga, dark nigga, faux nigga, real nigga

      Rich nigga, poor nigga, house nigga, field nigga

      Still nigga, still nigga

      To signal its sharp departure in style and substance from conventional morality and respectability politics, as well as to keep the independent importance of race at all times front and center, the central argument of this book, Nigga Theory, adopts a profane, transgressive, disruptive, and disreputable N-word-laden rhetoric steeped in irony, inversion, and oppositional black art of the kind crafted by politically conscious N-word virtuosos like Pac, Nas, Cube, and Hov.

      I understand readers who nevertheless inwardly recoil at every utterance of the ugly epithet. I respect the N-word abolitionists who have protested some of my N-word-laden performances, exhibits, and speeches because, in their view, the word’s racist roots make it inherently hateful and hence make some of my celebrations of its “virtues” misguided hate speech. I once shared that view myself. Like many others, I viewed the N-word as a variety of what the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) calls “fighting words,” words that “by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.”18 I quoted that language to Santa Monica police officers in my explanation of why a white male store clerk’s application of the N-word to me during a verbal exchange provoked a reflexive backhand. I avoided charges and a mug shot, but it was not my proudest moment. And still, despite my longstanding visceral distaste for the violent insult, I have become convinced—by many radically progressive black writers, performing artists, poets, philosophers, and commentators—of the unique rhetorical efficacy of the N-word. When black folk use it with care and precision to disrupt and displace dehumanizing discourses about them, they ultimately enact their own transgressive, transformational word work.

      —

      Nigga Theory refuses to reduce race to class (Rich nigga, poor nigga ... still nigga), while some progressive narratives carelessly conflate the two. “All of Us or None” is a terrific grassroots organization of formerly incarcerated men and women whose name is the perfect slogan for a politics that centers incarcerated violent black offenders and refuses to leave them behind; but for Michelle Alexander, its importance lies in its ability to encourage political solidarity between blacks and poor and working-class whites.19 For many on the left, the election of Donald Trump was a confirmation of the standard liberal account of why poor and working-class whites support racially illiberal politicians and policies. Economically distressed working-class white people, anxious about trade and lost manufacturing jobs and the decline in their overall economic level, especially after the 2008 Great Recession, felt financially “left behind” and so sought solace in the catharsis provided by hating and hurting Blacks, Latinos, Muslims, foreigners, in a word, others, and thus cast ballots for Trump to shore up their social status and threatened sense of social superiority, to give themselves a form of cultural and psychological compensation, a psychic benefit, that W.E.B. Du Bois calls the “public and psychological wage” of whiteness—an anodyne for their economic pain and suffering and anxiety.

      Alexander agrees; she claims that conservatives garnered the votes they needed to create racialized mass incarceration by “appealing to the racism and vulnerability of lower class whites, a group of people who are understandably eager to ensure that they never find themselves trapped at the bottom of the American totem pole.”20 Thanks to the special susceptibility of poor and working-class whites to racist demagoguery, according to Alexander “a new system of racialized social control [namely, the New Jim Crow] was created by exploiting the vulnerabilities and racial resentments of poor and working-class whites.”21 In his polemic about the dangers of “identity politics,” Mark Lilla makes a similar point:

      Marxists are much more on-point here…people who might be on the edge are drawn to racist rhetoric and anti-immigrant rhetoric because they’ve been economically disenfranchised, and so they look for a scapegoat, and so the real problems are economic.22

      Even conservatives got in on the-bashing-the-white-working-class act, in Kevin D. Williamson’s National Review article about the allegedly strong support for Trump among working-class whites. He states, “The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.” The conservative commentator continues: “the truth about these dysfunctional downscale communities, is that they deserve to die.”23 Marxists, liberals, and conservatives found common ground after Trump’s election in stereotyping and scapegoating working-class whites as broke and bitter and therefore especially prone to rabid irrationality.

      This claim is deeply classist claptrap. It impugns the character of honest hardworking white people struggling to scratch out a living in America’s casino economy and implies that economic suffering somehow robs white people of moral agency, clouds their conscience, makes them especially susceptible to ethno-nationalist demagoguery, and impels them to make racially illiberal choices. Of course many white working-class people voted for Trump, but even more middle-class whites did. The insecurity they felt was not primarily economic. The 2016 election of Donald Trump provides a rare opportunity to test and debunk the class-anxiety canard. On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump went beyond racially charged dog whistles and code words and unapologetically wore his racism on his sleeve, rising to political prominence by pushing “birtherism,” a conspiracy theory that the country’s first black president was not an American citizen.24 He declared in his Presidential Announcement Speech that undocumented immigrants from Mexico were “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” During his campaign, he tweeted an image of a masked, dark-skinned man with a handgun alongside a set of points about deaths in 2015, including the wildly false and inflammatory claim that 81% of whites are killed by blacks (in reality roughly 82% of white murder victims are killed by whites each year). He vowed to ban Muslims from entering the United States while signaling potential support for a Muslim registry (raising the specter of Manzanar-style internment camps). He asserted that a Latino US District Judge, Gonzalo Curiel, presiding over civil fraud lawsuits against Trump University, could not be impartial because he was “of Mexican heritage.” Amid protests over fatal police shootings of unarmed black people, he railed against a “war on police” and promised to institute a national “stop and frisk” policy that had already been struck down as unconstitutionally discriminatory in his own New York.25

      Poor and working-class whites, the ones suffering the greatest economic distress in the four years leading up to Trump’s election, were not more susceptible to his brand of white identity politics than better-off whites, and indeed, it was well-off whites who were more likely to support Trump. Research shows that even whites who voted for Obama in 2012 and switched to Trump in 2016 were motivated to do so by racism, not economic anxiety, and that racism can make people anxious about the economy rather than the other way around. White identity politics carried Trump to the White House, not economic anxiety. Simply put, race trumped class in 2016. White nationalism trounced economic equity. Racism was a much more powerful force in the election of Donald Trump than white working-class economic disenfranchisement.

      Facts matter in the fight against racial oppression in America, including facts about voter motivations. Those who see economic and financial insecurity as the root cause of Trumpism and other kinds of racially illiberal demagoguery will seek to curb racism through policies that strengthen the social safety net. But universal basic income, “Medicare for all,” or other redistributionist economic policies, although they deserve our support because they’re morally right and economically feasible, will not win over Trump voters—these voters are more fearful of losing their dominant status as white people within a demographically diverse and ever-evolving nation than they are about economic issues. СКАЧАТЬ