World Historymr.o’s
2021年3月2日Download here: http://gg.gg/ohzaf
*Nazis were given ’safe haven’ in U.S., report says. 14, 2010, 10:28 AM UTC / Source: The New York Times. By ERIC LICHTBLAU. A secret history of the United States government’s Nazi.
*Abreast of present day is s bulletin board displays. Daniel Keys (left) and his unit of study. O,s thr ugh current lii t tr i readings.
*Contemporary world issues such as globalization, economic interdependence, terrorism and world cultures will also factor into our analysis of international conflict and cooperation. Additionally, in order to be competitive in the 21st century, this class will model and require 21st century values and skills which include research skills, group.
*World History Most Important Events
*World History Mr O Sullivan
*World History Mr O S P
*World History Mr Smith
*World History Mr O Song
Dr van Hook, inspired, so he said, by the Masters, issued a series of letters in support of Leadbeater, calling for his reinstatement. The first of these appeared in April, 1908, and was titled The Enemies of Mrs Besant are the Enemies of Charles W. Leadbeater, of the Masters and of the Future Religion of the World.
Anyone trying to take the politics of race seriously over the past decade of American political life could plausibly be diagnosed with an acute case of intellectual whiplash. A mere eight years ago, Barack Obama broke a historic barrier long taken to be impermeable and became our first African American president. Throughout our mainstream media and most centers of respectable opinion, a veritable orgy of self-congratulation ensued. The refrain went like this: After so many thankless years of stalemated racial progress, of a widening racial wealth gap, of welfare repeal and elite white retrenchment, of privileged white uprisings against the putatively illiberal forces of identity politics and “political correctness,” America had put its race problem decisively in the past. The newly enlightened American consensus had magnificently smote down the petty grievances of all the naysayers, from megacelebrities like Kanye West to the grassroots advocates of reparations for slavery to the ingrates like me in the critical race theory academy.
Yes, in the blink of an eye, the American republic had become “post-racial,” even as African Americans themselves begged to differ. The cultural revolution presaged by figures like Oprah Winfrey had been brought to outlandish, unexpected political fulfillment by Barack Obama, a world-class orator and impeccably credentialed son of the American meritocracy. From the canyons of Wall Street to the banks of the Potomac, a cry of rejoicing went forth. The painful, violent legacy of white supremacy had been repealed, in one miraculous fell swoop; the guilt-averse white majority and the grievance-prone Black minority could come together as one, in a blessed state of ur-American forgetfulness, and get down to business at last!
As it happened, the shelf life of post-racialism turned out to be far shorter than its cheerleaders supposed. A mere eight years later, white voters tossed the historic breakthrough of 2008 into the dustbin of history, alongside other half-digested political trendlets, like “the year of the woman” and “the peace dividend.” The symbolic breakthrough of Obama’s election has plainly given way to a terrifying new political order that is anything but post-racial. White voters overwhelmingly rallied to the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, a leader whose racist worldview is emblazoned at the base of his career in the same way that his name is plastered across his global real estate empire. In naming white-nationalist propagandist Steve Bannon as his closest White House adviser and elevating Jefferson Beauregard Sessions—a son of Alabama’s white-supremacist political elite who was deemed too racially retrograde for a federal judgeship in the Reagan era—to the highest position of federal law enforcement, Trump has clearly rendered all talk of post-racialism a laughable dead letter.
Still, how does one account for this mind-bending shift in the prevailing terms of racial discourse? The temptation is great, when presented with such dramatically self-canceling evidence for both the obdurate survival of a racist power structure and the surface appearance of racial progress in the person of Obama, to declare one of these outcomes simply unreal. The genuine America, in this binary scheme, would be either the one that voted in Barack Hussein Obama or the one that voted in Donald John Trump, and the other would be a short-lived fever dream.
The truth, however, is more complicated. To borrow a turn of phrase that helped make Barack Obama famous, the country that elected both him and Trump is “one America.” And to complicate things still further, the very rhetoric of post-racialism that greeted Obama’s ascension to power has proved instrumental in the dumbfounding political rise of Donald Trump, the man who is in every way the photographic negative of Barack Obama. The feel-good presuppositions of post-racialism played directly into the evasive habits of the white supremacist heart, permitting Americans to congratulate themselves for achieving a historic breakthrough that had very little to do with our actual racial history. In I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck’s timely documentary on James Baldwin’s unaddressed legacy of racial advocacy, a telling moment occurs. U.S. attorney general Robert Kennedy, keen to assuage civil-rights leaders impatient with the slow pace of progress in Washington, prophesizes that the strides being made toward racial equality are actually so dramatic that within forty years America might well see its first Black president. Kennedy’s timetable was off by a decade or so, but the relevant point here comes in Baldwin’s rejoinder. The African Americans he knew in Harlem, Baldwin says, were less than bowled over by the palliative promise of a president to call their very own:
That sounded like a very emancipated statement, I suppose, to white people. They were not in Harlem when this statement was first heard. They did not hear (and possibly will never hear) the laughter and the bitterness and the scorn with which this statement was greeted. From the point of view of the man in the Harlem barbershop, Bobby Kennedy only got here yesterday and now he’s already on his way to the presidency. We’ve been here for four hundred years and now he tells us that maybe in forty years, if you’re good, we may let you become president.
In other words, Welcome to history, Mr. Kennedy. And now that we’re at the other end of our landmark first African American presidency, we might well say by way of summation, Welcome to history, white America. The brutal fashion in which Trump’s rise repealed virtually every plank of post-racialist self-congratulation underlines how flimsy and premature the celebrations of Obama’s top-of-the-ticket symbolic breakthrough were. What’s more, the contrasting personas of the two presidents speak volumes about who gets to enjoy what kinds of power under what terms in our very much still-racialized political life. Where Obama solemnly obeyed every command that issued from America’s meritocratic superego, Trump has slithered directly into the Oval Office from the heart of our white business civilization’s political id. Where Obama extolled bipartisan reason, Trump stokes social-media resentments; where Obama pursued chimerical “grand bargains” with the GOP Congress and its private-sector retainers, Trump claims to embody the sharp-eyed “art of the deal”—i.e., the art of presiding over a gamed system in which he’s always assured to take the other contracting party for a ride.
Unreasonable Differences
To better understand how our country’s racial derangements have lurched into the foreground once more—like Michael Myers in a Halloween sequel—let’s examine just how vanishingly thin the original conceit of American post-racialism was, in that long-ago time known as 2009. And this, in turn, entails taking measure of how its signature enabling myth of colorblindness worked to reinforce the very structures of racial power that were supposedly in the process of being overcome. The legal and activist struggles of the first post-civil-rights generation of African Americans represent a key pivot point in this story by triggering the emergence of (on the one hand) critical race theory and (on the other) the embrace of the abstract ideal of colorblindness as an established historical fact.
The very rhetoric of post-racialism that greeted Obama’s ascension to power has proven instrumental in the political rise of Donald Trump.
The prevailing understanding of racial justice that had come to a head in the early 1980s premised racial liberation on the enlightened terms of rationality. Accordingly, racial power was seen as “discrimination,” a deviation from reason that was remediable through the operation of legal principles. Civil rights lawyers and liberal allies may have differed on the need for targeted interventions to help along the universalist repudiation of racial distinction. But they shared a baseline confidence that once the irrational distortions of bias were removed, the underlying legal and socioeconomic order would revert to a neutral, benign state of impersonally apportioned justice.
Yet by the 1980s and 1990s, this liberal equation of the rule of law with racial liberation was ripe for reconsideration, as Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, and my other colleagues in the emergent legal movement of critical race theory insisted. The problem, from our vantage, was not simply the takeover of the judiciary by right-wing judges, but also the broader political and institutional limits of “reason” itself. And this epistemological critique was not simply a “philosophical” one—it was embodied in a new protest politics by critics who argued that no neutral concept of merit justified the lack of minority law professors at elite law schools, or that no neutral process of principled legal reasoning could justify the racialized distribution of power, prestige, and wealth in America.
Critics of white supremacy in the broader academy—working in the tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois and other trailblazing scholars of color—had demonstrated in various disciplinary settings just how notions of scholarly objectivity and other canons of academic professionalism served to rationalize the existing American racial order. Law’s apparent intimacy with that order, however, presented a unique site for an intellectual sit-in. And for those of us advancing critical race theory, the considerable blowback we encountered, from the legal academy to the liberal press, worked to confirm our own intuitions that the voices of mainstream civil rights advocates and liberal university administrators were effectively drowning out more urgent claims on behalf of racial justice and reparations. Without entirely meaning to, we happened upon a crack in the facade of the status quo that provided a fuller vision of a social order “caught in the act” of reforming.
What lessons might we draw from this intellectual odyssey? Chiefly, the precedent of the critical race movement’s broader public reception serves to remind the disenchanted race reformers of the post-Obama age that things have been ever thus. Consider the striking parallels between the alleged post-racial dispensation ushered in by Obama’s election and the impasse that civil rights activism met head-on in the 1980s. Barack Obama’s shattering of the glass ceiling resembles nothing so much in our civic culture as the removal of the “White Only” signs that came down in the 1970s in the last redoubts of the Jim Crow South. And like that undeniable symbolic victory, Obama’s moment of deliverance proved astonishingly short-lived. The continuing battle over racial power simply expanded to a new frontier.
In the same way that the triumph of formal equality did not signify the end of racism, President Obama’s victory did not symbolize its demise in 2008. Now that we’ve begun to live under the race-baiting rule of our first modern white-nationalist president, this point shouldn’t need belaboring. But the unfinished business represented by this sea change needs urgently to be acknowledged and addressed. The luxury of mistaking symbolic breakthroughs at the top of our political order for organized and sustained racial progress throughout is no longer on the table. Our challenge now, as it was in the 1980s, is to preclude efforts to repress the ongoing contestation over racial power.[1] We can’t permit the legacy of post-racialist error that has helped to create the conditions for the white-nationalist risorgimento under Trump to be more of the same faux-enlightened talk of racist barriers definitively overcome. Now is hardly the time to effectively banish all talk of racial injustice to the unincorporated nether reaches of political discourse.
Post-Racial Nonsense
Within the Obama-era bid to characterize America’s newly transformed social order as “post-racial,” a striking bit of legerdemain took hold. The term worked both to de-historicize race in American society and, perversely enough, to reframe the idea of racism as something that was very much the opposite of the lived experience of race in America. Under this inside-out account of our racial history, a post-racial America was, by definition, a racially egalitarian America, no longer measured by forward-looking assessments of how far we have come, but by congratulatory declarations that we have arrived.
In one sense, there’s nothing conceptually new about this. For two decades, an entire industry of lawyers, politicians, pundits, and foundations rallied around the banner of colorblindness in an effort to convince judges, policymakers, and voters that the project of racial reform was completed long ago.[2] Colorblindness fueled a host of right-wing projects throughout the 1990s and the early twenty-first century, including Ward Connerly’s assault on both affirmative action and the collection of racial data,[3] along with efforts by others to attack the Voting Rights Act and Title VII. With the rhetoric of colorblindness thus conscripted as a justification of first resort for rolling back the gains of the civil rights revolution, moderates and liberals—together with the traditional civil rights establishment—regarded it with a good deal of justified suspicion. In his 2000 presidential run, for example, Al Gore likened the colorblind rhetoric of the nineties GOP to a “duck blind” offering cover to the forces of racial reaction.
On the right, meanwhile, this faux-colorblind consensus found its bottom-feeding nadir in Dinesh D’Souza’s counter-empirical 1995 tract The End of Racism. According to D’Souza, race exists only as an opportunistic political “card” to be played in a never-specified game. The impression of enduring structural racism—self-evident to anyone spending more than twenty minutes or so studying actual American history—comes off in this right-wing fantasia as an unfounded moral panic spread by identity politicians.
Regrettably, a host of similarly ahistorical thinkers saw their moment after the election of Obama and sought to insert the colorblind politics of racial denial into nearly all mainstream discussion of race. To borrow a simile from the same era’s pop-culture discourse, colorblindness resembled a cult music act or arthouse movie hit that never quite broke through to a mainstream following. It was post-racialism that conferred rock-star status on the marketing stratagems of colorblindness, and rebranded the product with an internationally recognized symbol attached to its conservative rhetorical posture.
And so it was that when post-racialism rode to the center of American political discourse on Barack Obama’s coattails,[4] it carried along with it both a longstanding liberal project of associating colorblindness with racial enlightenment and a conservative denunciation of racial justice advocacy, reverse discrimination, and grievance politics. Obama’s widely heralded avoidance of so-called racial grievance not only opened the door to a new era of American politics[5]—it also opened up liberal and progressive civil rights constituencies to the strategic evasions of racial justice agendas forged among leading practitioners of retrenchment politics such as Dinesh D’Souza and Newt Gingrich.
Politically Corrected
Indeed, in retrospect, it’s astonishing just how quickly this project of ideological fusion was carried out. On the day of Obama’s election, CNN’s confident panel of experts declared that the biggest losers in Obama’s victory were Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and by extension, the entire civil rights leadership, who were presumably now the newly unemployed.[6] This same “Mission Accomplished” refrain caught on among a host of white liberal pundits who proclaimed that the great attraction of president Barack Obama was that he entered the sanctum of American executive leadership unburdened by any confrontational old-school civil rights baggage. In this moment, the human tragedies and acts of sheer courage that characterized the civil rights struggle were reduced to historical dead weight. As if on cue, an admiring chorus of observers took immediately to marveling at the new president’s unflappably cool demeanor and temperamental intolerance for “drama”—and most especially the racial kind. With palpable relief, the guardians of official discourse came together as one to announce that “with Obama now in the White House, we can put race behind us.”
Now that we are battling the Trump White House, we can see more clearly the many hidden costs of the premature stampede to “put race behind us.” Not only did Trump’s successful white-backlash candidacy for the Oval Office revive Nixonian tropes of Black lawlessness and depravity—complete with gruesome caricatures of life in Black-majority inner-city neighborhoods and calls for a return to white-authoritarian “law and order”—but it also relied on an overt platform of racist retrenchment that prior Republican presidents had voiced only in code.
Ronald Reagan famously launched his 1980 presidential run with a brash stump speech steeped in states’-rights rhetoric—the already amply coded discourse of choice for white supremacists—in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. But Trump’s strategy upstages the dog whistles of the Reagan years and rouses the walking-dead body of white redeemer politics circa 1876. In promulgating the false narrative of rampant voter fraud in southern states such as Florida, Trump directly summons the specter of Black “mob rule” that rationalized the institution of Jim Crow voting restrictions in the late nineteenth century. And in his notorious stump refrains about the dismal (and mostly fabricated) violent crime waves in our multiracial inner cities, Trump summons an image of Black and colored bodies strewn throughout Am
https://diarynote.indered.space
*Nazis were given ’safe haven’ in U.S., report says. 14, 2010, 10:28 AM UTC / Source: The New York Times. By ERIC LICHTBLAU. A secret history of the United States government’s Nazi.
*Abreast of present day is s bulletin board displays. Daniel Keys (left) and his unit of study. O,s thr ugh current lii t tr i readings.
*Contemporary world issues such as globalization, economic interdependence, terrorism and world cultures will also factor into our analysis of international conflict and cooperation. Additionally, in order to be competitive in the 21st century, this class will model and require 21st century values and skills which include research skills, group.
*World History Most Important Events
*World History Mr O Sullivan
*World History Mr O S P
*World History Mr Smith
*World History Mr O Song
Dr van Hook, inspired, so he said, by the Masters, issued a series of letters in support of Leadbeater, calling for his reinstatement. The first of these appeared in April, 1908, and was titled The Enemies of Mrs Besant are the Enemies of Charles W. Leadbeater, of the Masters and of the Future Religion of the World.
Anyone trying to take the politics of race seriously over the past decade of American political life could plausibly be diagnosed with an acute case of intellectual whiplash. A mere eight years ago, Barack Obama broke a historic barrier long taken to be impermeable and became our first African American president. Throughout our mainstream media and most centers of respectable opinion, a veritable orgy of self-congratulation ensued. The refrain went like this: After so many thankless years of stalemated racial progress, of a widening racial wealth gap, of welfare repeal and elite white retrenchment, of privileged white uprisings against the putatively illiberal forces of identity politics and “political correctness,” America had put its race problem decisively in the past. The newly enlightened American consensus had magnificently smote down the petty grievances of all the naysayers, from megacelebrities like Kanye West to the grassroots advocates of reparations for slavery to the ingrates like me in the critical race theory academy.
Yes, in the blink of an eye, the American republic had become “post-racial,” even as African Americans themselves begged to differ. The cultural revolution presaged by figures like Oprah Winfrey had been brought to outlandish, unexpected political fulfillment by Barack Obama, a world-class orator and impeccably credentialed son of the American meritocracy. From the canyons of Wall Street to the banks of the Potomac, a cry of rejoicing went forth. The painful, violent legacy of white supremacy had been repealed, in one miraculous fell swoop; the guilt-averse white majority and the grievance-prone Black minority could come together as one, in a blessed state of ur-American forgetfulness, and get down to business at last!
As it happened, the shelf life of post-racialism turned out to be far shorter than its cheerleaders supposed. A mere eight years later, white voters tossed the historic breakthrough of 2008 into the dustbin of history, alongside other half-digested political trendlets, like “the year of the woman” and “the peace dividend.” The symbolic breakthrough of Obama’s election has plainly given way to a terrifying new political order that is anything but post-racial. White voters overwhelmingly rallied to the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, a leader whose racist worldview is emblazoned at the base of his career in the same way that his name is plastered across his global real estate empire. In naming white-nationalist propagandist Steve Bannon as his closest White House adviser and elevating Jefferson Beauregard Sessions—a son of Alabama’s white-supremacist political elite who was deemed too racially retrograde for a federal judgeship in the Reagan era—to the highest position of federal law enforcement, Trump has clearly rendered all talk of post-racialism a laughable dead letter.
Still, how does one account for this mind-bending shift in the prevailing terms of racial discourse? The temptation is great, when presented with such dramatically self-canceling evidence for both the obdurate survival of a racist power structure and the surface appearance of racial progress in the person of Obama, to declare one of these outcomes simply unreal. The genuine America, in this binary scheme, would be either the one that voted in Barack Hussein Obama or the one that voted in Donald John Trump, and the other would be a short-lived fever dream.
The truth, however, is more complicated. To borrow a turn of phrase that helped make Barack Obama famous, the country that elected both him and Trump is “one America.” And to complicate things still further, the very rhetoric of post-racialism that greeted Obama’s ascension to power has proved instrumental in the dumbfounding political rise of Donald Trump, the man who is in every way the photographic negative of Barack Obama. The feel-good presuppositions of post-racialism played directly into the evasive habits of the white supremacist heart, permitting Americans to congratulate themselves for achieving a historic breakthrough that had very little to do with our actual racial history. In I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck’s timely documentary on James Baldwin’s unaddressed legacy of racial advocacy, a telling moment occurs. U.S. attorney general Robert Kennedy, keen to assuage civil-rights leaders impatient with the slow pace of progress in Washington, prophesizes that the strides being made toward racial equality are actually so dramatic that within forty years America might well see its first Black president. Kennedy’s timetable was off by a decade or so, but the relevant point here comes in Baldwin’s rejoinder. The African Americans he knew in Harlem, Baldwin says, were less than bowled over by the palliative promise of a president to call their very own:
That sounded like a very emancipated statement, I suppose, to white people. They were not in Harlem when this statement was first heard. They did not hear (and possibly will never hear) the laughter and the bitterness and the scorn with which this statement was greeted. From the point of view of the man in the Harlem barbershop, Bobby Kennedy only got here yesterday and now he’s already on his way to the presidency. We’ve been here for four hundred years and now he tells us that maybe in forty years, if you’re good, we may let you become president.
In other words, Welcome to history, Mr. Kennedy. And now that we’re at the other end of our landmark first African American presidency, we might well say by way of summation, Welcome to history, white America. The brutal fashion in which Trump’s rise repealed virtually every plank of post-racialist self-congratulation underlines how flimsy and premature the celebrations of Obama’s top-of-the-ticket symbolic breakthrough were. What’s more, the contrasting personas of the two presidents speak volumes about who gets to enjoy what kinds of power under what terms in our very much still-racialized political life. Where Obama solemnly obeyed every command that issued from America’s meritocratic superego, Trump has slithered directly into the Oval Office from the heart of our white business civilization’s political id. Where Obama extolled bipartisan reason, Trump stokes social-media resentments; where Obama pursued chimerical “grand bargains” with the GOP Congress and its private-sector retainers, Trump claims to embody the sharp-eyed “art of the deal”—i.e., the art of presiding over a gamed system in which he’s always assured to take the other contracting party for a ride.
Unreasonable Differences
To better understand how our country’s racial derangements have lurched into the foreground once more—like Michael Myers in a Halloween sequel—let’s examine just how vanishingly thin the original conceit of American post-racialism was, in that long-ago time known as 2009. And this, in turn, entails taking measure of how its signature enabling myth of colorblindness worked to reinforce the very structures of racial power that were supposedly in the process of being overcome. The legal and activist struggles of the first post-civil-rights generation of African Americans represent a key pivot point in this story by triggering the emergence of (on the one hand) critical race theory and (on the other) the embrace of the abstract ideal of colorblindness as an established historical fact.
The very rhetoric of post-racialism that greeted Obama’s ascension to power has proven instrumental in the political rise of Donald Trump.
The prevailing understanding of racial justice that had come to a head in the early 1980s premised racial liberation on the enlightened terms of rationality. Accordingly, racial power was seen as “discrimination,” a deviation from reason that was remediable through the operation of legal principles. Civil rights lawyers and liberal allies may have differed on the need for targeted interventions to help along the universalist repudiation of racial distinction. But they shared a baseline confidence that once the irrational distortions of bias were removed, the underlying legal and socioeconomic order would revert to a neutral, benign state of impersonally apportioned justice.
Yet by the 1980s and 1990s, this liberal equation of the rule of law with racial liberation was ripe for reconsideration, as Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, and my other colleagues in the emergent legal movement of critical race theory insisted. The problem, from our vantage, was not simply the takeover of the judiciary by right-wing judges, but also the broader political and institutional limits of “reason” itself. And this epistemological critique was not simply a “philosophical” one—it was embodied in a new protest politics by critics who argued that no neutral concept of merit justified the lack of minority law professors at elite law schools, or that no neutral process of principled legal reasoning could justify the racialized distribution of power, prestige, and wealth in America.
Critics of white supremacy in the broader academy—working in the tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois and other trailblazing scholars of color—had demonstrated in various disciplinary settings just how notions of scholarly objectivity and other canons of academic professionalism served to rationalize the existing American racial order. Law’s apparent intimacy with that order, however, presented a unique site for an intellectual sit-in. And for those of us advancing critical race theory, the considerable blowback we encountered, from the legal academy to the liberal press, worked to confirm our own intuitions that the voices of mainstream civil rights advocates and liberal university administrators were effectively drowning out more urgent claims on behalf of racial justice and reparations. Without entirely meaning to, we happened upon a crack in the facade of the status quo that provided a fuller vision of a social order “caught in the act” of reforming.
What lessons might we draw from this intellectual odyssey? Chiefly, the precedent of the critical race movement’s broader public reception serves to remind the disenchanted race reformers of the post-Obama age that things have been ever thus. Consider the striking parallels between the alleged post-racial dispensation ushered in by Obama’s election and the impasse that civil rights activism met head-on in the 1980s. Barack Obama’s shattering of the glass ceiling resembles nothing so much in our civic culture as the removal of the “White Only” signs that came down in the 1970s in the last redoubts of the Jim Crow South. And like that undeniable symbolic victory, Obama’s moment of deliverance proved astonishingly short-lived. The continuing battle over racial power simply expanded to a new frontier.
In the same way that the triumph of formal equality did not signify the end of racism, President Obama’s victory did not symbolize its demise in 2008. Now that we’ve begun to live under the race-baiting rule of our first modern white-nationalist president, this point shouldn’t need belaboring. But the unfinished business represented by this sea change needs urgently to be acknowledged and addressed. The luxury of mistaking symbolic breakthroughs at the top of our political order for organized and sustained racial progress throughout is no longer on the table. Our challenge now, as it was in the 1980s, is to preclude efforts to repress the ongoing contestation over racial power.[1] We can’t permit the legacy of post-racialist error that has helped to create the conditions for the white-nationalist risorgimento under Trump to be more of the same faux-enlightened talk of racist barriers definitively overcome. Now is hardly the time to effectively banish all talk of racial injustice to the unincorporated nether reaches of political discourse.
Post-Racial Nonsense
Within the Obama-era bid to characterize America’s newly transformed social order as “post-racial,” a striking bit of legerdemain took hold. The term worked both to de-historicize race in American society and, perversely enough, to reframe the idea of racism as something that was very much the opposite of the lived experience of race in America. Under this inside-out account of our racial history, a post-racial America was, by definition, a racially egalitarian America, no longer measured by forward-looking assessments of how far we have come, but by congratulatory declarations that we have arrived.
In one sense, there’s nothing conceptually new about this. For two decades, an entire industry of lawyers, politicians, pundits, and foundations rallied around the banner of colorblindness in an effort to convince judges, policymakers, and voters that the project of racial reform was completed long ago.[2] Colorblindness fueled a host of right-wing projects throughout the 1990s and the early twenty-first century, including Ward Connerly’s assault on both affirmative action and the collection of racial data,[3] along with efforts by others to attack the Voting Rights Act and Title VII. With the rhetoric of colorblindness thus conscripted as a justification of first resort for rolling back the gains of the civil rights revolution, moderates and liberals—together with the traditional civil rights establishment—regarded it with a good deal of justified suspicion. In his 2000 presidential run, for example, Al Gore likened the colorblind rhetoric of the nineties GOP to a “duck blind” offering cover to the forces of racial reaction.
On the right, meanwhile, this faux-colorblind consensus found its bottom-feeding nadir in Dinesh D’Souza’s counter-empirical 1995 tract The End of Racism. According to D’Souza, race exists only as an opportunistic political “card” to be played in a never-specified game. The impression of enduring structural racism—self-evident to anyone spending more than twenty minutes or so studying actual American history—comes off in this right-wing fantasia as an unfounded moral panic spread by identity politicians.
Regrettably, a host of similarly ahistorical thinkers saw their moment after the election of Obama and sought to insert the colorblind politics of racial denial into nearly all mainstream discussion of race. To borrow a simile from the same era’s pop-culture discourse, colorblindness resembled a cult music act or arthouse movie hit that never quite broke through to a mainstream following. It was post-racialism that conferred rock-star status on the marketing stratagems of colorblindness, and rebranded the product with an internationally recognized symbol attached to its conservative rhetorical posture.
And so it was that when post-racialism rode to the center of American political discourse on Barack Obama’s coattails,[4] it carried along with it both a longstanding liberal project of associating colorblindness with racial enlightenment and a conservative denunciation of racial justice advocacy, reverse discrimination, and grievance politics. Obama’s widely heralded avoidance of so-called racial grievance not only opened the door to a new era of American politics[5]—it also opened up liberal and progressive civil rights constituencies to the strategic evasions of racial justice agendas forged among leading practitioners of retrenchment politics such as Dinesh D’Souza and Newt Gingrich.
Politically Corrected
Indeed, in retrospect, it’s astonishing just how quickly this project of ideological fusion was carried out. On the day of Obama’s election, CNN’s confident panel of experts declared that the biggest losers in Obama’s victory were Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and by extension, the entire civil rights leadership, who were presumably now the newly unemployed.[6] This same “Mission Accomplished” refrain caught on among a host of white liberal pundits who proclaimed that the great attraction of president Barack Obama was that he entered the sanctum of American executive leadership unburdened by any confrontational old-school civil rights baggage. In this moment, the human tragedies and acts of sheer courage that characterized the civil rights struggle were reduced to historical dead weight. As if on cue, an admiring chorus of observers took immediately to marveling at the new president’s unflappably cool demeanor and temperamental intolerance for “drama”—and most especially the racial kind. With palpable relief, the guardians of official discourse came together as one to announce that “with Obama now in the White House, we can put race behind us.”
Now that we are battling the Trump White House, we can see more clearly the many hidden costs of the premature stampede to “put race behind us.” Not only did Trump’s successful white-backlash candidacy for the Oval Office revive Nixonian tropes of Black lawlessness and depravity—complete with gruesome caricatures of life in Black-majority inner-city neighborhoods and calls for a return to white-authoritarian “law and order”—but it also relied on an overt platform of racist retrenchment that prior Republican presidents had voiced only in code.
Ronald Reagan famously launched his 1980 presidential run with a brash stump speech steeped in states’-rights rhetoric—the already amply coded discourse of choice for white supremacists—in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. But Trump’s strategy upstages the dog whistles of the Reagan years and rouses the walking-dead body of white redeemer politics circa 1876. In promulgating the false narrative of rampant voter fraud in southern states such as Florida, Trump directly summons the specter of Black “mob rule” that rationalized the institution of Jim Crow voting restrictions in the late nineteenth century. And in his notorious stump refrains about the dismal (and mostly fabricated) violent crime waves in our multiracial inner cities, Trump summons an image of Black and colored bodies strewn throughout Am
https://diarynote.indered.space
コメント