Class vs. Race

From Sarah Churchwell:

Everywhere Obama is praised for "telling the truth about race" -- but the success of his "race speech" is incessantly measured along class lines, because Obama actually charted a course through the crisscrossing lines of race and class, a complex social web that he described with great delicacy, but never named.

What was most remarkable about this speech to my mind was not that Obama confronted race "head-on," but that he repeatedly, and correctly, called race "a distraction," on both sides of the color line, from class issues. Just as black anger often proved counter-productive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle-class squeeze -- a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans also widens the racial divide.

In one sense, Obama's point couldn't be clearer: Race is a distraction from class-based inequities. And if we dismiss working-class resentment as camouflaged racism, we will be distracted by the specter of race. So why has no one noticed that the much vaunted "race speech" is also a class speech?

The answer to that is very complicated, but its roots can be traced in large part to what Obama referred to as the nation's "original sin" of slavery. In order to tell the truth about race in the U.S., we must tell the truth about slavery: which is that slavery was not racially motivated; it was economically motivated, and justified by means of race.

Race was invented in order to rationalize slavery: If black people are inferior, they deserve enslavement (or so went the logic). Racism is an effect of slavery, not the other way around. Once slavery was abolished, not only did racism not disappear, neither did the economic system it upheld. Slavery was simply replaced by a new feudal system known as sharecropping. The legacy of slavery comes from the sustained political, legal and economic effort to link permanently an entire group of people to poverty -- and to mystify that systematic disenfranchisement by making up something called race, which could serve as a distraction.

It's harder to talk about class in America than it is to talk about race. It's not surprising that Churchwell writes for a paper in the UK.  It's simply not a subject that an American journalist would touch if he wants to have a career in the mainstream media.

We think about class in cultural categories rather than in economic categories, and all the confusion follows from that.  We don't see George Bush as a member of the power elite because he's a fundamentalist Christian and talks like a redneck. Many Americans deluded themselves into thinking that he was a regular guy that they could sit down and have a beer with: "He's alright.  Not like that Al Gore fella, or Kerry."

Americans think that they have a classless society, but they are profoundly committed to class, even if they are not aware of it.  Instead they call it the American Dream. This dream stipulates that any American or one of his  children can become royalty, you know, like Donald Trump. So we can't critique class arrangements  in America because to do so would require a critique of the American Dream. America isn't America if it doesn't give everybody the "opportunity" to become a millionaire, or now with inflation, a billionaire.

It's part of our dysfunctional mythology, a mythology that surreptitiously measures human worth primarily in economic terms and comes up with all kinds of excuses to justify it, just like the southerners justified slavery and Jim Crow. Most Americans would probably insist, good Christians that they are, that they don't measure human worth materialistically, but they still subscribe to the validity of the underlying economic-worth mythology. The contradictions are not something these Americans are prone to think about too much. It's just part of the cruder level of the Calvinist narrative they unconsciously absorbed in childhood.

Nevertheless, this is the big contradiction that shorts out the brain and makes it impossible to think clearly about our economic arrangements. It's a contradiction that makes cogent analysis seem un-American rather than just plain common sense.  And this in turn structurally reinforces the elements in the American system that insure over time that the rich to get richer and those in the middle and at the bottom get poorer.

That this is happening since the so-called Reagan Revolution is obvious, and the evidence for it is powerful (start with the hardly radical Kevin Philipps if you need to be eased into it), but still we refuse to talk about it. It's too hard to think about; it requires understanding something about big picture. And even though it's the common experience so many Americans who are feeling the squeeze, It's not common sense to talk about it because it has been branded as leftist class warfare talk. That's what those leftists in the universities talk about, and Main Street does not see them as part of their tribe.

The Materialist American Dream is a mythology that structurally reinforces the power elite's strategy to divide and conquer, and so we all lose by default.  And so the power elite during the Reagan/Bush period, most intensively since the Robber Baron era, have gradually imposed its agenda without a whimper of resistance from the Main Street citizenry who pay the price for it. And people with any sense wonder why the media gets all caught up in whether Obama is wearing his flag pin or whether his pastor or wife hates America? The power elite smile that Cheshire cat smile. It's just too easy to keep Americans distracted.

Churchwell ends her piece with these two paragraphs:

I am not saying that race per se doesn't exist, or isn't a problem in the U.S. On the contrary. But we will never solve the problem of race in America until we do exactly what Obama suggests: See it for the distraction it is. It was invented to deflect attention away from economic, legal and political inequalities. And the longer the Democrats ponder the complexities of identity politics, the more distracted they will become from the issues that are actually driving voters -- including their utter disillusionment with the current administration and its catastrophic policies.

The irony is that Obama's speech urging us not to be distracted by race has so far had quite the opposite effect. Obama now needs to confront with equal candor the lesson we were taught by that "first black president": It's the economy, stupid.

At some point, let us hope, Americans are going to learn how to separate out the cultural from the economic issues in the political sphere.   Until they do so, things will remain hopelessly muddled.

Comments

[Brian]

Americans think that they have a classless society, but they are profoundly committed to class, even if they are not aware of it. Instead they call it the American Dream. This dream stipulates that any American or one of his children can become royalty, you know, like Donald Trump. So we can't critique class arrangements in America because to do so would require a critique of the American Dream. America isn't America if it doesn't give everybody the "opportunity" to become a millionaire, or now with inflation, a billionaire.

Conversely, there is an older and more traditionally conservative view on class that also holds sway among a certain segment of the populace: the idea that you should know your place, stay there, and shut up; that upward mobility, even to the extent that it's actually achievable, is a thing to be disdained and discouraged.

It's the idea expressed in the old Southern expression "Don't get above your raisin'", and it's at work among those inner-city youths who accuse each other of "acting white" or "selling out".

[Jack Whelan]

Brian--

I think you point to an interesting schism in the American soul, neither side of which is very healthful. The south has always been a more overtly classist society, and bears more resemblance to Latin American plantation societies than it does to what we more ordinarily think of as "America" as a place for the fulfillment of the American Dream. The dream was there for southerners, too, but only for the already elite--not blacks and white trash.

Cash's "The Mind of the South" is pretty vivid in its descriptions of how the Bourbon planter class used race and resentment of Yankee elites as part of its divide-and-conquer strategy to keep poor whites in their place.

Things have changed and are changing in the South, but I know until recently I had assumed that they had changed a lot more than they actually have, especially among the elites. The argument that Michael Lind makes in his "Made in Texas" is that these southern Republicans are trying to use the tried and true divide and conquer techniques perfected over a couple of hundred years to "intexicate" the rest of the country. I talk about the book a little here: http://afterthefuture.typepad.com/afterthefuture/2006/02/getting_intexic.html

[Matt Zemek]

All this distracting talk about race is something for which the Clintons will have to answer when they visit their own pastor... and/or pray in private.

That statement sounds hateful, but it's meant merely to shine a light on how the Clintons' fueling of the race-centric quality of this campaign is and has been (and will continue to be) so thoroughly harmful for the country, a profound missed opportunity that is allowing Americans--as Jack accurately noted--to remain distracted when we should be dealing with and solving problems of substance.