N*gga Theory. Jody David Armour

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ the economic distress of poor and working-class whites because, thanks to a decades-long campaign to destroy support for the safety net by racializing government programs with tendentious tropes of Cadillac-driving black welfare queens and the like, they view such policies as handouts for Blacks and other people of color. Deep-seated psychological resentment and racial anxiety rooted in a sense of group status threat are uniquely, independently, and irreducibly racial problems that demand racial solutions.

      All too often, liberals pay lip service to the role of group status in the formation of political preferences, and yet they consistently lowball just how psychologically valuable it is to see one’s self as part of the dominant social group—they too often grossly underestimate the value of what Du Bois identified as the psychic boon of whiteness. They believe that people’s economic self-interest must logically take priority over other concerns. Alexander, for instance, argues that poor and working-class whites were persuaded by elites and capitalists to prioritize their racial status interests over their common economic interests with Blacks, “resulting in the emergence of new caste systems that only marginally benefit whites but were devastating for African Americans.”26 (Emphasis added.) But the data will show that the symbolic, psychic boon of whiteness—whites’ sense of dominance over America’s social and political priorities—is not some sop that “only marginally benefits whites.” As University of Pennsylvania political scientist Diana C. Mutz points out, “what we know about American voters is that symbolic appeals matter a great deal.”27 Psychologically and emotionally, seeing one’s self as part of a dominant group can feel real good.

       There is nothing “illogical” about people finding symbolic considerations more urgent and compelling than material ones. It is not “illogical” to weigh substantial psychic satisfactions against significant economic frustrations and conclude that the former outweigh the latter. Taking pride in one’s social identity, reveling in belonging to a certain social group—even an historically subjugated one—can bring as much psychic satisfaction to members of that social entity as great material compensation. As Maya Angelou puts it in “Still I Rise,” despite being trod in the dirt, “I walk like I’ve got oil wells/ Pumping in my living room.” It’s dangerous for a racially oppressed people in America to ever underestimate the psychic boon for white people of belonging to a racial group that has enjoyed social dominance in this nation since its inception, a feeling for many that is emotionally equivalent to (Angelou again) having gold mines “diggin’ in [their] own backyard.” To grasp the nuances of this nation’s primordial divide over race, we must never downplay its irreducible centrality and independent potency.

      Of course, both race and class matter, and both are central to a radically progressive racial justice agenda, for civil rights without economic redistribution will leave far too many truly disadvantaged folks behind. But it’s a grave mistake to view class-based policies as likely to reduce the racial resentments or status anxieties of white voters. Elected officials who embrace the misguided “economic anxiety” narrative in hopes of reducing the appeal of racist demagoguery may pursue policies that will do little to assuage the racial anxieties of whites who cast their 2016 ballot out of deep-seated fear that they were slowly losing their social standing in America and that Trump was the best candidate to reinforce this nation’s racist hierarchy. When these voters hear about racialized mass incarceration or rampant police misconduct or “inclusion, diversity, and equity” in schools and workplaces, they’re listening with ears attuned to demographic trends, cultural shifts, and anxiety about their own future. Unlike economic threats, status threats—anxieties about power, identity, and group superiority—strike at the heart of who and what one is, and what it means to identify as a white man, woman, boy, or girl in America. It may prove hard to economically “bribe” fearful whites to accept a somewhat higher standard of living in exchange for what many view as existential annihilation or, in the pungent phrasing of some ethno-nationalist scaremongers, “white genocide.”

      The economic anxiety explanation for Trumpism and white identity politics belongs to the category of what Paul Krugman calls zombie ideas—arguments that have been proven wrong, should be dead, but nonetheless “shamble relentlessly forward” because they serve a political purpose.28 For some, the economic anxiety narrative serves to promote a redistributionist economic policy. For others, the economic distress excuse props up the legitimacy and moral authority of American democracy. So pundits and politicians persist in trotting out the brain-eating economic anxiety theory despite the slew of zombie-slaying studies that offer plain conclusions: helping white voters feel less economic vulnerability does not automatically make them less prone to support racist policies and politicians.

      —

      The liberal New Jim Crow narrative also robs black folk of agency, treating racialized mass incarceration as an affliction foisted upon the black community by external actors rather than as what it actually is: a bottom-up phenomenon driven by moral condemnations of black wrongdoers by both nonblack and black citizens and elected officials. Think back to the height of hysteria about the crack plague and street crime, during the period when Blacks were being warehoused in prison blocks and jail cells at precipitously rising rates. Most members of the Congressional Black Caucus, responding to their constituents, voted in favor of the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which fueled the War on Drugs by establishing for the first time mandatory minimum sentences for specified quantities of cocaine as well as a 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack (more associated with black users) and powder (more associated with white users) cocaine. Seven years later, a 1993 Gallup Poll found 82% of the Blacks surveyed believed that the courts in their area did not treat criminals harshly enough; 75% favored putting more police on the streets to reduce crime; and 68% supported building more prisons so that longer sentences could be given.29 Widespread support for “get tough” crime policies among black citizens and politicians as prison populations exploded undermines the liberal New Jim Crow narrative’s core claim. Black folk, despite bearing the brunt of mass incarceration, fueled our own hyper-incarceration by looking at criminal justice matters through conventional moral lenses tinted with our own respectability politics.

      As Alexander notes, “violent crime tends to provoke the most visceral and punitive response” in concerned black citizens, who supported more prisons and longer sentences through these years.30 This cannot be argued away, as Alexander tries to, by distinguishing between “support for” and “complicity with” racialized mass incarceration,31 a distinction that dissolves under mild interrogation. Nigga Theory assumes that “law and order” black folk engage in meaningful moral reflection and make nuanced moral judgments, and are capable of critical self-reflection and self-revision, and thus open to persuasion, as people ready to think through what approaches to blame and punishment best serve the black community’s interest in equal justice for all. Widespread moral condemnations of black criminals—especially violent ones like Willie Horton, the dark-skinned convicted murderer featured in an infamous 1988 presidential campaign ad who escaped while on work furlough and then raped a white Maryland woman and bound and stabbed her boyfriend—percolated into the policies and practices of nonblack and black “tough on crime” DAs, police chiefs, politicians, and other “official” drivers of racialized mass incarceration. As I’ve been saying in print and in person for over 20 years, prevailing values and moral norms about blame and punishment, especially the blame and punishment of violent or serious black offenders, were—and are—the taproot of racialized mass incarceration. Black folk, despite bearing the brunt of such incarceration, unwittingly became accomplices of the carceral state and complicit in our own hyper-incarceration by adopting the same regressive moral framework in criminal matters. In addressing the future, any theory needs to address black as well as white attitudes and understandings.

      —

      To help humanize violent black offenders and keep them centered throughout our discussion, this book draws on one of America’s most powerful, provocative, transgressive, and disreputable N-word-laden forms of political communication and art: Gangsta Rap, a particular bête noire of proponents of respectability politics, who heap scorn on the genre for the violence, misogyny, homophobia, and materialism commonly associated СКАЧАТЬ