I find this article by Thomas J. Sugrue in The Nation mag to be a wonderful and refreshing relief after the race and gender wars of the last few months of Obama/Clinton bashing. I’ve spent some time wondering how all the emotional and intellectual energy used to name and confront the meaning of slips of the tongue and a man’s pastor could conceivably change anything, since no social action occurred that could conceivably lead to structural change, assuming as I do that structural or systemic change is required. Imagine if all that passion and intelligence were used to organize and build coalitions between men, women, and racialized people of both sexes? Are we spinning in circles in the blogosphere and in alternative and mainsream media? More often than not, I think we are.
Sugrue explains why that is so, with respect to race and racism. Vast numbers of young African American men are not in prison because Don Imus is a racist prick. I think many of Sugrue’s arguments can be applied to the issue of gender oppression, though it obviously requires a close and careful analysis in its own right.
Here’s a bit of Sugue’s excellent article:
Ford’s critique of the race card is rooted in a larger, institutional understanding of racial discrimination. “Our tools for describing, analyzing, and righting racial injustice assume that racial injustices are the work of racists,” he writes. Such tools create confusion when applied to what Ford provocatively calls “racism without racists,” which is what occurs when people get trapped in the legacies of discriminatory policies. The result is disabling. The scandal-hungry media feast on ridiculous or exaggerated charges of racism while ignoring the real problems of racial inequality in their midst. Whenever the race card gets played, by either a multiculturalist or an opponent of affirmative action, it trivializes racial inequality and oppression and harms the cause of civil rights: “Practices that create a permanent underclass,” he writes, “are unjust in a different and more profound way” than isolated, arbitrary acts of prejudice. Fingering a few bigots–rightly or wrongly–does nothing to challenge pervasive educational and housing segregation, the black-white wealth and health gaps, or the disproportionate impact of the prison-industrial complex on young black men.
If there is one lesson to be learned from the past half-century of struggle for racial equality, it is that accusing elite blacks of selling out, calling on poor blacks to shape up or ship out and making a high-minded effort to change the hearts and minds of white Americans have not fundamentally reshuffled the deck of racial inequality in America, especially when black interests threaten white power and privilege. Change did not come only because of high-minded rhetoric or hope. It took the coercive power of the federal government and courts to desegregate schools. The opening of the American workplace did not happen because the shingles fell from the eyes of racist employers. It took grassroots activism and the threat of disruption, along with litigation and the power of regulation, to break down Jim Crow on the factory floor and in the corporate office.
The struggle for racial equality and its partial and incomplete victories are forgotten in our confused time. The politics of race in 2008 is, more than ever, a politics of national redemption through personal transformation. It is all strangely removed from the experience of most black and white Americans. Despite more than a half-century of progress on racial matters, rates of black-white segregation remain incredibly high; neighborhoods and public schools in the North and South remain separate and unequal (and, despite our myths of progress, they are resegregating); and blacks fare worse than whites on nearly every measure of health, well-being and success. Nearly half of African-American children live in poverty, and there are more black men in prison than in college. Black households have on average only 10 percent of the wealth of white households. The current housing crisis affects all Americans, but blacks are disproportionately represented in the ranks of those with subprime loans and foreclosed properties. All of these amount to a crisis–but one that is almost wholly absent from the political agenda. So long as the battle for racial justice continues to be fought on the battleground of hearts and minds, so long as it misinterprets the gauzy politics of symbolism and rhetoric as victory, and so long as it holds out the misguided hope that ferreting out the last hard-core racists or sellouts will transform American life, then the day when “we shall overcome” will remain a distant dream.
If Barack Obama should become President of the United States, does anyone think that he would be able to substantially reduce the number of young African Americans in US prisons, up against the prison industrial complex? If so, just how would he do it? And if he somehow managed to start down that road, does anyone seriously think he would get re-elected? And if not, does anyone seriously think that anything he’d managed to change for the good couldn’t easily be undone? That it wouldn’t be undone? Ronald Reagan set the US back about a century. Bush has probably set the US, and the world, back another hundred. One man, no matter how audaciously hopeful, cannot change this using the tools at hand. No one could. Many people want to believe he can. At best, Obama is naive. At worst, he lies. Likely, somewhere in between.
mirabile dictu 
