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revlyncox · 4 years ago

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Dreamers (2021)

Working toward a better world, a world of racial justice and an end to interlocking oppressions, requires imagination. On this weekend when we remember the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., let's also consider both the history of civil rights and the unbounded creativity of speculative fiction by writers of color as sources of inspiration.

Expanded and revised for the Washington Ethical Society, presented January 17, 2021.

“We are creating a world we have never seen,” writes Adrienne Maree Brown in Emergent Strategy. On this weekend, as we remember the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., support a peaceful transfer of power, and recommit to his legacy and the work of civil rights yet to do, it may seem like a luxury or a distraction to engage with imagination. It is not. Just like we cannot allow oppression to steal our joy, we cannot let it steal our imagination. Neither threats of violence, nor attempts to push us into re-creating a fictional and regressive society of the past, nor manufactured austerity preventing relief from reaching working people, nor white supremacy in any form should be allowed to steal our imagination. Our ability to dream of a better world is a matter of collective survival.

What does it take to dream big? What fuels our ability to imagine a future without limits like racism, classism, and sexism? Entering a dream state where equality is possible takes some practice. Music can get us there. Listening to activists who are moving our society forward can help us get into that frame of mind. Great art can invite us into that kind of transformational trance.

Dreaming is important. Dreaming gives us creativity, energy, and a warm vision around which we can gather a community. Dreaming is not enough. Once we have imagined a better world, we have to (we get to) build it, to keep building it, and to rebuild the parts that got torn down when we weren’t paying attention. The next step is to use those dreams as a doorway to action.

Dr. King’s words and actions demonstrated connections between systemic racial inequality, economic injustice, war, threats to labor rights, and blockades to voting rights. All of those forces are still relevant. He and the other activists of his era left a very rich legacy, for which we are grateful. We are not done.

I’ll be drawing today from Dr. King’s 1963 work, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” (Also available as an audio file from the King Institute.) I think the critiques he offered in that letter are still valid, especially for us in this community that strives to be anti-racist and yet must acknowledge that we are impacted by the norms of what King calls, “the white moderate.” His letter was a response to Christian and Jewish clergy, who had written an open letter criticizing nonviolent direct action. Though Ethical Culture uses different language and methods than our explicitly theist neighbors, I think it is incumbent upon us to hold on to the accountability that comes with being part of the interfaith community. So I believe this letter is written to us as well. Dr. King wrote:

I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the … great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises [us] to wait until a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I would like to think that, in this community, we have made some progress since 1963, and that majority-white communities have stopped explicitly trying to slow the pace of civil rights. Indeed, WES can be proud that racial justice has been woven into its goals from the beginning, though we must also be honest that a perfectly anti-racist history is unlikely. At the same time, I see people who claim to be progressive rushing to calls for “civility” or “unity” without accountability. Understanding the direct link between the intended audience of this letter and the people and communities with which we have kinship today is an act of imagination that we must embrace in order to learn from the past and to continue Dr. King’s legacy. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” can help us understand why we need to dream of something different in the world.

We need dreams and we need plans. We seek inspiration as we continue to work toward bringing a dream of economic and political equality fully into reality.

One place I turn for inspiration is toward socially conscious science fiction. Looking at how the art form has offered critiques of what’s wrong and pathways to what’s right, I see suggestions for how we can nurture the dream of a better world.

Science fiction has even helped me understand spiritually-connected social movements, such as the one depicted in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler. The series depicts a self-governing poetic community that tries to live sustainably in an environment affected by catastrophic climate change, and that maintains an improbable vision of exploring the stars. The poetry uses the word God, but not in the way that it is normally used. Recognizing that WES is not a community that makes use of theism, I hope you’ll be able to hear how that metaphor is used in the world of the story. In Parable of the Talents, the main character, Lauren Olamina, writes a poem for her community:

God is change

And hidden within change

Is surprise, delight,

Confusion, pain,

Discovery, loss,

Opportunity and growth.

As always, God exists

To shape

And to be shaped

(Parable of the Talents, p. 92)

In the book, the community that reflects on change in meditation and song is able to use that energy to maintain resilience, even in the face of white supremacist violence and criminalization. Butler imagines an inclusive community led by People of Color who strengthen and encourage one another, inject their strategic planning with an expectation for backlash, and still imagine and make their way toward a better world. Her books provide inspiration to those who know that the negative extremes of the world of the story are possible.

Socially conscious science fiction spins dreams that are extreme, that challenge us in good ways. In science fiction and in practical experience with progressive movements, we learn that dreams need help to become reality.

The alternate universe where justice rolls down like water may seem too fantastic to believe, it may be cobbled together in ways that seem mis-matched to mundane perceptions, and it will certainly take work to achieve. Nevertheless, like Dr. King, I believe “we must use time creatively.”

Dreams Are Extreme

The first thing to note about dreams, whether sleeping or socially conscious, is that they are extreme. Things that would be totally absurd or unthinkable in everyday reality are woven into the fabric of a new vision. The dream might be a positive one, in which we imagine what it would be like to live in a better world. On the other hand, dystopian dreams can also be effective at stirring us to action. In an imagined world, we are met with the possibility that a flaw in our current society might go too far. Absurdity comes uncomfortably close to the truth.

Dr. King spoke about the role of discomfort in “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” saying that nonviolent direct action is meant to bring that discomfort to bear so that those in power will sit down and negotiate, to recognize people of good conscience. This is different from using violence as coercion, which is destructive to democracy; this is using peaceful means to declare the right of people to have a voice in what concerns them. Dr. King writes:

Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. I just referred to the creation of tension as a part of the work of the nonviolent resister. This may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, but there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth.

Tension has a place in literature and drama that can also be used for racial justice. I once served as an intern at a regional theater. In one of the plays we presented that year, the plot hinged on something unexplainable and highly improbable, which is one definition for science fiction. It was the 1965 play Day of Absence by African American playwright Douglas Turner Ward. In the story, white citizens of a racist town awaken one day to find that all of the African American residents have mysteriously disappeared. They slowly come to realize that they cannot function without the neighbors they mistreated and took for granted. Rather than try to solve their problems, they spend the rest of the play panicking and blaming each other in comedic ways.

Between the satirical script, the exaggerated makeup, and the abstract set, the show turns reality inside out in an effort to alter the audience’s collective conscience. Day of Absence shines a spotlight on the links between racial oppression and economic oppression, and is an incitement to join a movement for change. Consistent with the Revolutionary Theatre aesthetic, the play is meant to make people uncomfortable. We should be uncomfortable with the real systems of inequality parodied in the play.

It worked. Audiences were uncomfortable. Some patrons were able to take that discomfort and use it to grow. Some patrons were not ready to deal productively with their discomfort. For art or spirituality or dreams or anything else to offer the chance for transformation, creating the opportunity can’t wait until everyone is equally ready to begin the journey.

One goal of satire is to take something that is true and to exaggerate it until the truth cannot be ignored. When that something is oppression, making art that can’t be ignored and suggesting a justice-oriented overhaul to society is going to seem extreme to some people.

Speculative fiction by writers of color, even when not satirical, can also use exaggeration for a positive effect. The 2019 HBO Watchmen series explored this, creating an alternate history that lifted out problems with racism and policing in our own timeline. The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin explores extremes of climate change and identity-based exploitation, and weaves in glimpses of generational trauma between parents and children trying to survive in a society that rejects their wholeness. Extremes in literature can reflect back to us the plain truth.

Similarly, a dream that draws people together for the hope of a society that is very different from what we have, a dream that re-imagines the future of justice and economic opportunity, is going to be considered extreme, which is not a good thing by some standards. Every time there is a popular movie or TV show in the science fiction/fantasy genre that uses multiracial casting, and every time a speculative fiction novel by a writer of color receives sales or awards, there are claims that social justice warriors are running amok, or that trends have gone too far. Allowing for multiracial imagination is considered a violation of balance, a bridge too far. Inclusion is considered extreme, rather than a tool for bringing imagined futures into being.

Dr. King explored this critique of extremism. In “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” he expresses some initial frustration at being labeled an extremist for his peaceful methods. It seemed that any movement toward change was too radical for the white moderate clergy. But the status quo was not and is not acceptable. Dr. King writes:

So I have not said to my people: "Get rid of your discontent." Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. And now this approach is being termed extremist. But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." … (Dr. King gives a few more examples before he goes on.) So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? … Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists. (paragraph 24)

I believe the nation and the world are in need of creative extremists. We need dreamers. We need bold playwrights, courageous writers, and artists who cannot be ignored. We need the power to imagine a more just and radically different future.

Dreams Need Help to Become Reality

Another point that connects science fiction with visions of equality is that dreams need help to become reality. We hear often that “the arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” but the unwritten part of that is that actual people have to do some bending. Dr. King wrote about that, too; though he uses “man” in a way that was common at the time to mean people of all genders, and he invokes his own religious tradition, we can all hear the collective responsibility in this passage. In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Dr. King wrote:

Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity. (paragraph 21)

We can and should have hope. We still need to act according to our values. No act of encouragement, no vote cast, no letter written is a wasted effort. We must use time creatively. In the case of arts, literature, and entertainment, we must also use time travel creatively. Progress does not happen by accident.

Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Uhura in the original Star Trek series, spoke about the creation of her character and why she chose to stay on the show. None of it was an accident. When she first met with Gene Roddenberry, she was in the middle of reading a book on Uhuru, which is Swahili for freedom. Roddenberry became more convinced than ever that he wanted a Black woman on the bridge of the Enterprise. Nichols said:

When the show began and I was cast to develop this character – I was cast as one of the stars of the show – the reality of the matter was the industry was not ready for a woman or a Black and certainly not the combination of the two (and you have to remember this was 1966) in that kind of role, on that equal basis, and certainly not that kind of power role.

Nichols was also an accomplished singer and stage actress. The producers never told her about the volume of fan mail she was receiving. She was considering leaving the show to join a theatrical production headed for Broadway, when she was at an event (probably a fundraiser for the NAACP, but Nichols doesn’t remember clearly) and was asked to meet a fan. The fan turned out to be the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He told her how much he enjoyed the show, and that it was the only show he and his wife allowed their children to stay up late to watch. She told him that she was planning to resign. “You cannot!” he said. Nichols goes on:

Dr. King said to me, ‘Don’t you understand that you have the first non-stereotypical role in television in a major TV series of importance, and you establish us as we are supposed to be: as equals, whether it’s ethnic, racial, or gender.’ I was breathless. ‘Thank you, and Yes, I will stay.’

Nichols’ decision to stay had a ripple effect. Whoopi Goldberg said that the first time she saw Lieutenant Uhura on television was a major turning point for her as a child. Mae Jemison, the first African American astronaut in space, spoke about Uhura as an inspiration. Stacey Abrams is a fan.

The inner workings of a TV show with cheesy special effects, beloved as that show may be, might seem inconsequential to the future of human rights. I maintain that anything that expands our ability to dream of a better world is necessary. Stories that give us building blocks for change make a difference. And representation matters. People are hungry for diverse, respectful, innovative stories. Representation increases the chances that someone from a marginalized group can get the resources to tell their own stories rather than relying on the dominant group to borrow them. In this age of communication, it is possible to engage people from all over the planet in a conversation about our shared future. The trick is that we have to work to make sure all of the voices are included. The dream of a better world needs people who can make it a reality.

Imagination is key, and it is a starting point. In Emergent Strategy, Adrienne Maree Brown writes:

Science fiction is simply a way to practice the future together. I suspect that is what many of you are up to, practicing futures together, practicing justice together, living into new stories. It is our right and responsibility to create a new world. What we pay attention to grows, so I’m thinking about how we grow what we are all imagining and creating into something large enough and solid enough that it becomes a tipping point.

Earlier, you heard another quote from the book, in which Brown names the Beloved Community that we can use imagination to grow ourselves into. She names “a future without police and prisons ... a future without rape … harassment … constant fear, and childhood sexual assault. A future without war, hunger, violence. With abundance. Where gender is a joyful spectrum.”

Brown frames this imagined future world, this Beloved Community, as a project of both imagination and community organizing. A better world is possible.

Conclusion

The arts, in particular science fiction, can ignite a kind of a dream state. By using time and time-travel creatively, we can envision a world of justice, equality, and compassion. We have yet more ways to craft stories and plans that respect the inherent worth and dignity of every person. The dream of economic equality, the dream of equal voting rights, the dream of equal protection under the law all need foundations built under them.

If we wish to count ourselves among the dreamers, let us take action. We can continue to build coalitions with partner organizations of other faiths and cultures. We can send representatives to workshops and meetings, and listen carefully to their findings when they return. We can read about dismantling oppression and share what we find with each other.

This community is a place where we can dream freely. Let us use time effectively. Let us enter into the powers of myth, creativity, and art to imagine a better future. And then let us work and plan to make that better future come to pass. May our dreams refresh us and energize us for the tasks ahead.

May it be so.

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topmixtrends · 7 years ago

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IN HER 1981 keynote address to the National Women’s Studies Association, the poet and freedom fighter Audre Lorde described the perils of some such gatherings. She told her audience that “I speak out of direct and particular anger at an academic conference, and a white woman says, ‘Tell me how you feel but don’t say it too harshly or I cannot hear you.’” Lorde then asked: “But is it my manner that keeps her from hearing, or the threat of a message that her life may change?” Lorde was up against “white fragility,” but the problem then lacked a name.

The person providing the name has been Dr. Robin DiAngelo, whose doctorate in education from University of Washington analyzed the racial discourse of white preschool teachers. An award-winning professor who has increasingly turned to being a facilitator of workshops designed to teach whites to frankly discuss their own racial position, she first used “white fragility” in a 2011 article. Her work has informed many experts in multicultural education and activists in social movements. In the book under review here, DiAngelo mostly lets readers figure out what white fragility is by trickling out interesting concrete examples, often from her workshop experiences. Through the years her most succinct definition has specified,

White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation.

There rages among antiracists and those who imagine that we are past all that a pretty fierce debate over the merits of asking people to confront, in an organized way, the advantages accruing to them as whites. On the right, DiAngelo is already attacked, as is critical whiteness studies generally. Indeed, one perverse dimension of such venomous attack is an ability to perpetually gin up outrage and white fragility around academic studies of whiteness as if it were a new and intolerable thing, a quarter century after the first such attacks. Now that DiAngelo’s book has appeared on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list, she is almost certain to become the outrage du jour.

At one extreme of progressive opinion is the position taken by the political scientist Adolph Reed and the literary scholar Walter Benn Michaels. They discern in activism and education around racism the diversionary initiatives of a “class” of academics, middle managers, and political hired hands who, consciously or otherwise, divert attention from the hard facts of economic inequality and keep us preoccupied instead with obsessing about identity. This “antiracism/industrial complex” — odd that a nation so bereft of industrial jobs is said to keep generating these complexes — allegedly expresses the interests of a professional/managerial class serving capital. The counter-positions to those of Reed and Benn Michaels hold that stark racial inequality continues and that something like what feminists called “consciousness raising” has value where whiteness is concerned. Whites — the feminist imagination of a process with the oppressed themselves at the center is perhaps insufficiently emphasized in the antiracist variant — might then puzzle out the miseries, to others and themselves, done in the name of adherence to a set of unexamined assumptions and fiercely defended privileges.

Neither position very much encourages constructing a balance sheet regarding what antiracist seminars, study circles, workshops, and certificates might achieve. Neither much notices the differing ideologies and material realities under which they operate. For Reed and Michaels, the antiracist consultant is a class enemy; the more sympathetic, myself included, are sometimes too tempted to then suppose that the well-meaning consultant ought not be criticized, or even that the critiques are themselves simply evidence of a desire for what DiAngelo calls “comfort” and “white-centeredness” among the critics.

To occupy more fruitful ground, treating the contradictions and success of the book together seems apposite before I offer a closing section on the challenges and possibilities of antiracism training. White Fragility fascinatingly reads as one-part jeremiad and one-part handbook. It is by turns mordant and then inspirational, an argument that powerful forces and tragic histories stack the deck fully against racial justice alongside one that we need only to be clearer, try harder, and do better. On the one hand, as its subtitle suggests, the book underlines how wildly difficult it is for mere conversation to break through layers of defensiveness among whites. The sedimented debris of past injustices conspire with current patterns of white advantage to make white employees and even white activists very hard to coach toward any mature questioning of racial oppression. Their practiced (in all senses of the word) resort to defensiveness and even tears in squelching talk about such advantage is both reflexive and conscious. That very fact adds to opportunities for race talk to devolve into a need to validate the good intentions of individual whites at the expense of serious consideration of either structures of white supremacy or its impacts on its victims. Seldom can anyone learn anything.

On the other hand, White Fragility and DiAngelo’s website offer lists, links, and rules for working antiracist magic, making the task seem at times straightforward and centered on the skills of the workshop facilitator and perhaps on lay people adopting and adapting her wisdom. “Robin DiAngelo is,” Michael Eric Dyson writes a little oddly, in a generous and apt foreword, “the new racial sheriff in town.” DiAngelo is able to bring a “different law and order to bear upon the racial proceedings.” She can, he holds, deliver results by making whites own up to fear, pain, and privilege. If we do things right, the movement, workplace, or the congregation will change and grow, at the very least coming to contain better people. In tone and content, the book jars against itself. The can-do spirit of the workshop and primer knocks against the sober accounts of the utter embeddedness of white advantage in structures of both political economy and of personality and character. Such jarring is not indefensible. We live in contradictions and we do what we can. “Optimism of the will,” the Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci enjoined, but also “pessimism of the intellect.” The danger perhaps arises when doing ameliorative work well begins to seem like a strategy for deep structural change.

The subtitle itself suggests how hard it is for a book to thread needles that a society and the states of its social movements do not provide us with the resources to thread. I never blame an author entirely for his or her title and subtitle, as I have unhappily learned from personal experience how the marketing department can commandeer the naming of books. But whomever gave it to us, the subtitle of White Fragility offers a telling example of the apt severity of the book’s analysis clashing with its search for a plausible fix. It promises to tell us “Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism,” a real problem, but one deepened even more by the fact that white people do in fact drone on about race and racism. They speak privately, rehearsing what I have elsewhere called “whitelore” and to a remarkable extent casting themselves as the victims of racism. When a Donald Trump or a Rush Limbaugh markets himself as having the courage to defend in public what “you” already know and say, they trade on an extensive, if intellectually impoverished, discourse.

Thus the challenge only seems to be getting whites to open up and fill a void. At its best, DiAngelo’s work knows this well and emphasizes likewise that whites are not in the main vexed by being actually fragile around race. The more exact and obdurate problem is that they tend to be sullen, anxious to defend advantages, and given to performing a stance of fragility. It is less clear that all readers will know as much or that allowing them to acknowledge what underlays their fragility will change their attitudes.

The author’s keen perception, long experience, and deep commitment make White Fragility revealing as to how whites hunker down and huddle together for warmth. In movement settings, I have seen the term white fragility deployed to great effect, especially in the least scripted scenarios. In its appreciation of the emotional content of white identity’s many associations with misery, it calls to mind the indispensable work of the theologian Thandeka in Learning to Be White, though the latter leaves more room to acknowledge that the pain of white racial formation is profound and real as well as contrived. As Katy Waldman has written in The New Yorker, DiAngelo has issued a necessary “call for humility and vigilance.”

Though at times White Fragility envisions race as a durable category — even calling for whites to have more “racial stamina” in order to question whiteness — it does not imagine anything redemptive about whiteness and hopes at least for so-called white people to become “less white.” It is uncommonly honest about the duration and extent of entrenched injustice and provocative on the especially destructive role of progressive whites at critical junctures. How often, in the age of Trump, do we read that: “White progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color?”

Nevertheless, for me White Fragility reads better as evidence of where we are mired than as a how-to guide on where we are on the cusp of going. Its pessimistic half convinces more than its optimism. Without more than appeals to logical consistency and to conscience, what lasts beyond the workshop is likely to fade. There is no firm sense of the politics that might be productively attached to the attack on white fragility and white supremacy to which DiAngelo is passionately committed. Between the book’s lines, some sort of reparations for slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration would seem the logically desired outcome, but DiAngelo elaborates little regarding what comes after white fragility.

Part of the problem is a certain reticence to become curious about what antiracist training is, who it has as an audience, and what are its limits. Is the workshop the project of a union, a church, a radical collective, or, as is so often the case, an employer? This difference goes unexamined. It includes much textured description of training sessions, but perhaps too little about their contradictions and limitations.

Beyond the contradiction belabored above — the one setting powerful structural and emotional causes for white fragility against discursive and voluntary solutions — several other (potentially productive) difficulties arise. What voices and eventualities are relatively missing from the description of the workshops deserves consideration. As Waldman points out in her appreciative review, the role of people of color in the sessions described is pretty scant. They appear as rightfully suspicious and not active at times or as weighing in late in the proceedings or afterward with a critique that enables the facilitator to reflect and grow, modeling the overcoming of white fragility. But the substance of their contributions and the ways in which they might become more central to the discussions remain unclear. The very important and often transformative moments when people of color disagree with each other in discussions of race are perhaps subjects for another book. The labor historian in me also wonders how many antiracism workshops take place in workplaces, and whether we should not emphasize that those interactions are management-sponsored as well as workplace-centered. As much as Starbucks, for example, seems to enter the side of the angels by undertaking diversity training, they and other corporations also manage workers hierarchically, and use their antiracism training in marketing, in damage control, and in combating litigation. Such corporations are themselves in large measure responsible for the obscene racial wealth gap in the United States. Under their auspices may not be the most favorable setting for workers to find their ways beyond racism.

Full disclosure: I have had an inglorious and meager career — okay, the better noun is surely side hustle — in giving non-corporate antiracist workshops, in addition to being a historian of race and class. If asked to do so by unions or by friends wanting me to do something extra when in town to do an academic talk, I grudgingly assent. The critical legal theorist john powell and I long ago prepared a questionnaire on whiteness. I still sometimes trot out a few questions from it — “When are you white?” or “What would you put in a display on white culture?” — to try to break through to frank discussions very like those DiAngelo has honed strategies for encouraging.

Sometimes, such antiracism without a license has proven to be a wonderful learning experience, more for me than my interlocutors. The best examples came a quarter century ago. I was still trying to figure who the “white worker” was, past and present, and why so much of her or his political behavior accented the “white.” So I just asked, particularly in workshops in Missouri sponsored by the New Directions Movement within the United Automobile Workers and the summer schools of the United Steelworkers: “Why would anyone want to claim the identity of ‘white worker?’” The students were perhaps two-thirds white, and it was the white trade unionists who first answered. They said that if you were white you could get a job in higher-paying skilled trades, that you could get a better interest rate and buy a house in any neighborhood, that your kids could go to better schools, that cops were less likely to hassle you and your family. That is, they understood acutely — in that setting anyway — the advantages attending whiteness.

The remarkable matter-of-fact set of insights that those workers presented, reinforced by interspersed comments from African-American workers, suggests that White Fragility may — if taken as panacea rather than as a useful corner of a big problem — be too pessimistic as well as too cheery. Some of the critique of whiteness may already reside in the heads of ordinary whites, though sadly what they already know can increase defensiveness as easily as decrease it.

Long ago, in The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin invited a dis-identification from whiteness so that whites in the United States might join in the “suffering and dancing” around them. More than ever in our moment we need just that. In my view, such a change will come when whites are swept into social movements that express the interests of humanity and that probably will seldom have whites at their center. White Fragility — indeed any single book — cannot conjure up such movements. But it does much help us to get there.

David Roediger chairs the American Studies Department at University of Kansas. His recent Class, Race, and Marxism (Verso) has won the C. L. R. James Book Prize from the Working Class Studies Association.

The post On the Defensive: Navigating White Advantage and White Fragility appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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deniscollins · 8 years ago

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Outraged in Private, Many C.E.O.s Fear the Wrath of the President

What would you do if you were a CEO appointed to a Presidential Advisory Committee and you were upset with a series of presidential reactions, but also aware that resigning from the advisory committee may result in President Trump criticizing you on Twitter: (1) resign and clearly state your reasons, (2) resign but don’t say anything in public criticizing the President, or (3) not resign? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

At what point do the C.E.O.s of the largest companies in the United States tell President Trump that enough is enough?

Not yet, apparently.

On Monday morning, President Trump went on a tirade against Kenneth C. Frazier, chief executive of Merck, the pharmaceuticals giant. Mr. Frazier, one of the nation’s most prominent African-American chief executives, had announced through his company’s Twitter account that he was resigning from the president’s American Manufacturing Council in response to Mr. Trump’s refusal over the weekend to immediately and directly condemn the white supremacists and neo-Nazis carrying swastika flags in Charlottesville, Va. Mr. Trump had pinned the blame for the bigotry and violence — which left one anti-bigotry protester dead — on “many sides.”

“America’s leaders must honor our fundamental values by clearly rejecting expressions of hatred, bigotry and group supremacy, which run counter to the American ideal that all people are created equal,” Mr. Frazier said.

Within minutes on Monday, Mr. Trump, in far less time than it took him to react to the violence in Charlottesville, was on Twitter criticizing Mr. Frazier. “Now that Ken Frazier of Merck Pharma has resigned from President’s Manufacturing Council, he will have more time to LOWER RIPOFF DRUG PRICES!”

Later, Mr. Trump renewed his criticism of Merck, tweeting: “@MerckPharma is a leader in higher & higher drug prices while at the same time taking jobs out of the U.S. Bring jobs back & LOWER PRICES!”

The silence from the larger C.E.O. community about Mr. Trump’s reaction to the situation in Charlottesville has been remarkably conspicuous, even as one of their own has now been attacked online by the president.

By Monday evening, at least two other C.E.O.s had stepped forward. Kevin Plank, the founder of Under Armour, announced on Twitter that he was resigning from the American Manufacturing Council, saying, among other things, that his company “engages in innovation and sports, not politics.” He did not refer to the president, though.

Mr. Plank was followed shortly after by Brian Krzanich, the Intel chief executive, who announced on the company’s website that he would step down from the council as well. “I resigned because I want to make progress, while many in Washington seem more concerned with attacking anyone who disagrees with them,” he said.

A few big-name corporate leaders released innocuous statements over the weekend condemning the violence by white supremacists in Charlottesville. But with the exception of Mr. Frazier, none appear to have directly condemned the president’s choice of words, which have been a lightning rod for Americans from many quarters, even among many Republican lawmakers and Trump supporters.

At a news conference on Monday, after a barrage of blistering criticism, the president said that “racism is evil.”

As the day wore on, several executives, including Meg Whitman of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, made statements in support of Mr. Frazier, while others — including Tim Cook of Apple, and the Business Roundtable, which represents some 200 C.E.O.s — condemned the racism on display in Charlottesville.

But notably, not one executive on any of the president’s various councils said anything directly about the president.

The statements from American chief executives that came closest to criticizing Mr. Trump’s language came from Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs and Mr. Krzanich of Intel.

Mr. Blankfein tweeted on Monday morning: “Lincoln: ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ Isolate those who try to separate us. No equivalence w/ those who bring us together.” (Mr. Blankfein is not on any of the president’s councils, which may make it easier for him to be critical.)

Mr. Krzanich put it this way: “There should be no hesitation in condemning hate speech or white supremacy by name. #Intel asks all our countries leadership to do the same.”

Marc Benioff of Salesforce aimed at Mr. Trump with a sarcastic post, saying: “Thank you @realDonaldTrump for calling to Love thy neighbor, value equality, & calling evil by name.”

But how can so many other American business leaders and senior executives remain quiet about the president’s reaction? Where is the moral courage to stand up?

After all, most companies these days spend countless hours talking about their culture and values. Just last week, Google publicly fired one of its engineers within days of his writing a memo that questioned whether “personality differences” between men and women led to there being fewer female engineers in the technology industry.

How can people like Adebayo O. Ogunlesi, a lead director of Goldman Sachs and an infrastructure investor, remain a member of Mr. Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum — a role highlighted on Mr. Ogunlesi’s company biography? How could Mr. Ogunlesi, an immigrant from Nigeria who was a clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall of the Supreme Court, stay silent?

As Justice Marshall himself famously said, “Where you see wrong or inequality or injustice, speak out, because this is your country. This is your democracy.”

Mr. Ogunlesi declined to comment, through a spokesman.

What about Indra Nooyi, the Indian-born chief executive of PepsiCo? She is a member of the president’s business council and has long been a vocal advocate for minorities. The company said this year that it “does not tolerate bigotry or hate in any form.”

When I contacted her about Mr. Trump’s remarks over the weekend, a spokesman directed me to a tweet that clearly didn’t mention the president: “Heartbroken by the violence in #Charlottesville. Hate and intolerance are a betrayal of what we stand for as Americans.”

In truth, it should not fall to C.E.O.s who are members of minority groups to speak up. They face enough pressure already.

Some people who have less at stake are going on the record to support Mr. Frazier’s stance against the president. Tom Glocer, the former chief executive of Thomson Reuters, wrote on Twitter on Monday: “Ken has stood up for true American values. I call on all other members of Trump’s image-burnishing committees to do the same.”

Privately, many chief executives say they are fuming, outraged by the president. (This after many of them campaigned to get on Mr. Trump’s committees.) But many are too scared to say anything publicly that could make them or their company a target of Mr. Trump’s wrath.

Indeed, Mr. Trump’s vitriol against Mr. Frazier and Merck — a company that depends on the government as a buyer for many of its drugs — will perhaps have an even greater chilling effect on other C.E.O.s who may consider speaking out. (The potential for economic retribution against Merck also demonstrates just how brave Mr. Frazier was in taking a stand.)

When I asked one chief executive Monday morning why he had remained publicly silent, he told me: “Just look at what he did to Ken. I’m not sticking my head up.” Which, of course, is the reason he said I could not quote him by name.

The same trepidation may explain why people like Mr. Ogunlesi don’t say anything. He runs an infrastructure fund that will most likely have to do business with the federal government. And Ms. Nooyi’s PepsiCo, for example, was briefly boycotted by Trump supporters when she made some comments that were construed as critical of him.

Other C.E.O.s, like Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, have contended that they consider it part of their patriotic duty to remain on the president’s business council, even when they disagree with things Mr. Trump says or does.

“It is very hard if you say, I’m going to go off an advisory group or not do A-B-C, because you disagree on one issue,” Mr. Dimon said in early June after Mr. Trump withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, a move that Mr. Dimon was against. Elon Musk of Tesla and Robert Iger of Disney resigned from the council in protest.

“Honestly, no one is going to agree with every president or prime minister on every issue, so I don’t want to overreact to it,” Mr. Dimon said.

Lawrence Summers, who has served as Treasury secretary and president of Harvard, said in response to Mr. Dimon’s rationale at the time to Bloomberg News: “At what point as a patriot is your allegiance to your country rather to your president? I’ve always thought of my allegiance as a patriot as being to my country.”

On Monday, Mr. Dimon, who is the chairman of the Business Roundtable, put out his own statement about the violence in Charlottesville, but nothing about the president.

C.E.O.s have faced the question of how to address the president when they disagree with him before — over immigration, say, or the Paris climate accord. Each time, the executives have justified their silence by saying it is more valuable to be at the table than not.

That’s a valid argument — to a point. If the president isn’t following your advice or the values you espouse, when should you get up? Of course, big policy decisions like tax reform remain just around the corner, so many executives are desperate to keep a line open to the president even if it is only one-way.

It is a fair critique of the president that he didn’t immediately and directly condemn the bigoted actions over the weekend and call them out for what they were — remarks that tacitly helped normalize such hate.

While C.E.O.s may call out the hate, will they have the fortitude to call out the president?

#Politics

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kansascityhappenings · 8 years ago

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Man accused of ramming protesters pictured with racist group

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CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — The man accused of plowing a car into a crowd protesting a white supremacist rally in Virginia had been photographed hours earlier carrying the emblem of one of the hate groups that organized the “Take America Back” campaign.

Vanguard America denied on Sunday any association with the suspect, even as a separate hate group that organized Saturday’s rally pledged on social media to organize future events that would be “bigger than Charlottesville.”

James Alex Fields Jr. Photo by Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail via Getty Images

The mayor of Charlottesville and political leaders of all political stripes vowed to combat the hate groups and urged President Donald Trump to forcefully denounce the organizations that had promoted the protest against the removal of a Confederate statue. Some of those groups specifically cited Trump’s election after a campaign of racially charged rhetoric as validation of their beliefs.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced late Saturday that federal authorities would pursue a civil rights investigation into the circumstances surrounding the crash. The violence and deaths in Charlottesville “strike at the heart of American law and justice,” Sessions wrote. “When such actions arise from racial bigotry and hatred, they betray our core values and cannot be tolerated.”

Police charged James Alex Fields Jr. with second-degree murder and other counts after the silver Dodge Challenger they say he was driving barreled through a crowd of counter-protesters, killing a woman and wounding at least 19 others. Hours later, two State troopers were killed when the helicopter they were flying in as part of a large-scale police effort at the rally crashed into a wooded area outside the city.

In a photo taken by the New York Daily News, the 20-year-old Fields was shown standing with a half-dozen other men, all wearing the Vanguard America uniform of khakis and white polo shirts. The men held white shields with Vanguard America’s black-and-white logo of two crossed axes. The Confederate statue of Robert E. Lee was in the background.

Heather Heyer, 32 years old, was killed and 19 others injured when they were struck by Fields’ car. Photo by Matthew Hatcher/Getty Images

The Daily News said the photo was taken about 10:30 a.m. Saturday just hours before authorities say Fields crashed his car into the crowd at 1:42 p.m. The Anti-Defamation League says Vanguard America believes the U.S. is an exclusively white nation, and uses propaganda to recruit young white men online and on college campuses.

In a Twitter post, the group said it had handed out the shields “to anyone in attendance who wanted them,” and denied Fields was a member. “All our members are safe an (sic) accounted for, with no arrests or charges.”

In blog posts after the violence, the Daily Stormer, a leading white nationalist website that promoted the Charlottesville event, pledged to hold more events “soon.”

“We are going to start doing this nonstop,” the post said. “We are going to go bigger than Charlottesville. We are going to go huge.”

Saturday’s chaos erupted as neo-Nazis, skinheads, Ku Klux Klan members and other white supremacist groups staged a rally to protest the city of Charlottesville’s plans to remove the Lee statue. Peaceful counter-protesters arrived and marched downtown, carrying signs that read “black lives matter” and “love.”

The two sides quickly clashed, with hundreds of people throwing punches, hurling water bottles and unleashing chemical sprays. Some came prepared for a fight, with body armor and helmets. Videos that ricocheted around the world on social media showed people beating each other with sticks and shields. Amid the violence, the Dodge Challenger tore through the crowd.

The impact hurled people into the air and blew off their shoes. Heather Heyer, 32, was killed as she crossed the street.

“It was a wave of people flying at me,” said Sam Becker, 24, speaking in the emergency room where he was being treated for leg and hand injuries.

Those left standing scattered, screaming and running for safety. Video caught the car reversing, hitting more people, its windshield splintered from the collision and its bumper dragging on the pavement. Medics carried the injured, bloodied and crying, away as a police tank rolled down the street.

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe declared a state of emergency, police in riot gear ordered people out of the streets, and helicopters circled overhead, including the one that later crashed. Both troopers onboard, Lieutenant H. Jay Cullen, 48, and Berke M.M. Bates, one day shy of his 41st birthday, were killed.

Officials have not provided a crowd estimate but it appeared to number well over 1,000.

McAuliffe and Charlottesville Mayor Michael Signer, both Democrats, lumped the blame squarely on the rancor that has seeped into American politics and the white supremacists who came from out of town into their city, nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, home to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s plantation.

Fields’ mother, Samantha Bloom, told The Associated Press late Saturday that she knew her son, who had recently moved to Ohio from his hometown in Kentucky, was attending a rally in Virginia but didn’t know it was a white supremacist rally.

“I thought it had something to do with Trump. Trump’s not a white supremacist,” Bloom said.

Trump criticized the violence in a tweet Saturday, followed by a press conference and a call for “a swift restoration of law and order.”

“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides,” he said.

The “on many sides” ending of his statement drew the ire of his critics, who said he failed to specifically denounce white supremacy and equated those who came to protest racism with the white supremacists. The Rev. Jesse Jackson noted that Trump for years questioned President Barack Obama’s citizenship and his legitimacy as the first black president, and has fanned the flames of white resentment.

“We are in a very dangerous place right now,” Jackson said.

Speaking at a news conference on Saturday, McAuliffe said he spoke to Trump on the phone, and insisted that the president must work to combat hate.

On Sunday, he reiterated that the angry political rhetoric needs to stop.

Trump “needs to come out stronger” against the actions of white supremacists,” McAuliffe told reporters at the First Baptist Church in Charlottesville. “They are Nazis and they are here to hurt American citizens, and he needs to call them out for what they are, no question,”

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo launched an online petition Sunday calling on Trump to denounce Saturday’s white supremacist rally.

The violence prompted responses from around the country, including in West Virginia and Florida, where activists and others pledged to work to remove Confederate statues in their cities, staged protests against white supremacy, and planned candlelight vigils in support of Charlottesville and in honor of the victims.

from FOX 4 Kansas City WDAF-TV | News, Weather, Sports http://fox4kc.com/2017/08/13/man-accused-of-ramming-protesters-pictured-with-racist-group/

from Kansas City Happenings https://kansascityhappenings.wordpress.com/2017/08/13/man-accused-of-ramming-protesters-pictured-with-racist-group/

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