The Cold War, Desegregation, and Affirmative Action

As the US Supreme Court aspires to drive a nail into the coffin of affirmative action, it is important to recognize how the Cold War helped to shape the mid-twentieth-century civil-rights people’s victories and the consequent policy of Affirmative Action in education.

Some may find that connecting the conflict between the US and the USSR to the formal establishment of African American citizen rights is far-fetched. 

But the facts speak otherwise. 

The US ruling class crudely portrayed the Cold War as a contest between those defending freedom and equality versus those imposing tyranny and enslavement. The US launched multiple cultural offensives to reinforce these views, sending books, movies, and diverse artistic figures and athletes throughout the world to signal its commitment to those lofty values.

But as the great postwar wave of decolonization swept the world and the US appeared too often on the side of the colonists, the moral high ground seemed impossible to maintain in the eyes of the critical non-aligned nations.

Even more devastating was the ugly face of racial segregation that existed de jure in the Southern, formerly Confederate states, and de facto in the rest of the US, with its accompanying violent enforcement. To the non-white majority of the world, this inhuman practice negated any proclaimed commitment to freedom or equality.

To meet this Cold War crisis, the US ruling class chose an approach that was both least costly to capital and its minions and most burdensome on the working people. Rather than returning to the unfinished business of post-Civil War Reconstruction, rather than attacking segregated housing patterns (disrupting profits in the finance, insurance, and real estate sector), rather than pressing fair employment (impacting corporate and business profits), rather than guaranteeing voting rights and fair representation (disrupting the political status quo), the US ruling class placed the burden of desegregation on those who were among the most vulnerable in US society: children. It was public schools and not neighborhoods, housing, public accommodations, businesses, government agencies, or corporations that would bear the brunt of desegregation.

With the Supreme Court decision-- Brown versus Board of Education-- US elites offered a “victory” against segregation to place before world public opinion. Because it was a court decision made by lifetime appointees, it had little negative impact on elected officials or the fate of their political parties. 

Of course, the court decision was only symbolic unless backed up with enforcement. It is likely that Brown versus Board of Education would have remained symbolic and another gesture of self-righteousness in the cultural Cold War since officials took little interest in forcing it on the bastions of racial segregation.

But Brown versus Board of Education did elevate racism to a place in the public debate. Also, it energized a growing resistance to segregation, adding a new generation of fighters to the struggle and legitimizing the fight. Without the growth and militancy of the peoples’ struggle, any promise offered by the Supreme Court decision would have faded, however.

For the most part, officialdom and the Civil Rights movement operated on parallel tracks, with Federal policies focused on school desegregation in the South and the movement tackling voting rights and desegregating public spaces. Elites largely sought to confine and retard the struggle for racial justice.

Nonetheless, the movement for racial justice forced a series of civil rights acts in the mid-1960s that addressed the harshest aspects of Southern segregation, supporting voting rights and the use of public accommodations, as well as denying workplace and housing discrimination in the US. 

With the murder of the most influential anti-racist leaders, the suppression of urban risings, and the political backlash of Southern reactionaries, the US ruling class called a halt to the school desegregation project. The landmark Millikin versus Bradley Supreme Court decision of 1974 settled the limits of public education desegregation at the border of wealthier suburbs. Desegregation was meant only for poor and working-class schools, and not for the schools of the elite. For US elites-- Cold War optics be damned-- the costs of racial justice would not be borne by wealth and power. No bus would transport urban Blacks to the rolling hills of suburbia; nor would any children of the petty-bourgeois find seats awaiting in city public schools.

Class critically intersected race at that juncture, a reality that continues to shape the contours of anti-racism going forward.

Of course, despite this setback, the struggle against racism continued, but as affirmative action-- a project to go beyond formal, level-playing field equality and place material support behind the economic mobility necessary for substantial equality. Behind affirmative action was the understanding that racial justice was an active process and not a static state of affairs, i.e. nominal equality. In other words, those disadvantaged by racism needed substantial advantages to continue their journey to equality.
Ideally, the impact of affirmative action would be race-neutral. African Americans could gain “advantages” without disadvantaging anyone else: jobs could be created in workplaces where they were underrepresented without denying jobs to any non-Black worker; mentorships and job-training could be made available to all; subsidized new or existing housing could be established; health care could be universal, etc. To use the term popular with pundits, affirmative action could be “win-win.”

When the win-win logic is true of society at large, it is the basis for socialism. 

But that is not the logic of capitalism. Capitalism is relentless competition: what the same pundits call “zero-sum.” Someone must win, someone must lose. When someone applies to the best public school, there is room for one more. When someone applies to a private school, some win, some lose.

Consequently, the logic of capitalist society produces smug winners and disgruntled losers. And affirmative action that advantaged African Americans produced many who were or felt they were disadvantaged. Under capitalism, social progress is always the class struggle over who will sacrifice, who will pay.

Nevertheless, well-intentioned, anti-racist liberals pressed affirmative action on US capitalism with some success. Gertrude Ezorsky, a leading theorist of affirmative action, notes that “A dramatic increase in black employment and promotion occurred at specific companies that adopted affirmative action plans. These companies include AT&T, IBM, Levi-Strauss, and Sears Roebuck,” (Racism And Justice, the Case for Affirmative Action) She also noted that by ”...1982, 20,000 black officers had been added to police forces around the nation.” This squares with the ruling class’s determination to make police and military action against the colored peoples not look like white on Black or white on non-white violence.

Ironically, one of the greatest successes of the affirmative action era was Richard Nixon’s Justice Department-initiated Philadelphia plan to integrate the building trades. Blacks in the Philadelphia building trades went from one per cent of all workers to twelve per cent by 1982.

But as Ezorsky concedes, affirmative action declined drastically in the 1980s: “After 1980 there was a dramatic decline in the enforcement of AA [affirmative action] through the federal compliance program. The effectiveness of AA also declined as a result of Supreme Court decisions during the 1980s.”

With the courts, politicians, and the media fleeing affirmative action remedies that would address material class inequality, liberals and social democrats shaped anti-racism into “glass-ceiling” anti-racism. That is, the battle for racial justice became merely an effort to absorb more African Americans into the petty-bourgeoisie and into elite circles. 

Token or role-model representation is sold as an incentive for working class and poor Blacks. This pick-yourself-up-by-your-bootstrap version of anti-racism reached its zenith with the elevation of Barack Obama into the highest seat of political power. The celebration of Obama, and the relatively robust growth of a Black petty-bourgeoisie, left the inner-city impoverished, powerless, and nourished only by symbolic victories.

The gap between white and Black income and wealth remains relatively the same as half-century ago-- worse for most, better for some. Educational inequities, segregated housing, poor infrastructure, and marginal employment remain the fate of many, if not most African Americans. Urban ghettoization-- once a basis for a measure of racial solidarity-- has been shattered, not by emancipation, but by colonization: the brute force of gentrification.

For the “new” anti-racism-- with its rejection of the class dimension-- language, gestures, symbols, and manners are the target of self-satisfied justice warriors and not material deprivation or class exploitation. Where a leader like Martin Luther King found the continuation of the Black struggle in the fight of Memphis garbage workers seeking better pay, today’s NGO-sponsored “organizers” look to call out verbal clumsiness, historical anachronisms, and “microaggressions.” They look to create “safe spaces” where diversity can be smugly celebrated. They can locate the roots of racism in the twisted minds of white racists, but not in a socio-economic system that benefited, and continues to benefit, from the competition that racism generated and from the super-profits that flowed from a racial division of labor.

Accordingly, the “new” anti-racists are less attentive to the macroaggressions of inferior health care, low-paying jobs, substandard housing, and still segregated, poor education. Since exploitation, poverty, and despair have come into existence, privileged reformers have blamed the victims for the evils that exploitation, poverty, and despair spawn. It is no different with today’s liberals who organize marches, seminars, and rallies decrying the violence and drug use plaguing our poorest communities, while overlooking the meager material conditions that are the fertile soil of social self-destruction.

When commentators announce the death of affirmative action, citing the recent decision, Students for Fair Admissions versus Presidents and Fellows of Harvard College, they are profoundly mistaken. Affirmative action has been dead for a long time, eviscerated, ignored, evaded, and demonized since the 1980s.

Racial preference is deemed necessary at elite, ruling-class training academies like the Ivies because their admissions policies are so riddled with legacy, athletic, donor, and faculty admissions. As guardians of ruling-class liberalism and custodians of ruling-class mythology, these largely private institutions hide the unjustifiable privilege shown to those without merit behind a cynical veneer of racial and ethnic sensitivity, hoping that it will mask class privilege. The Supreme Court decision was not a blow to long-abused affirmative action, but to a cynical system of elite privilege; it was a reminder of its hypocrisy. 

Affirmative action in higher education-- offering, affirming, and sustaining opportunities for Black students-- is easily achievable today in community colleges, colleges, and public universities by simply eliminating the huge student-loan debt that burdens those without means now and going forward. The thousands of public institutions of higher learning are eager to accept students.

Free admissions-- a realistic demand for a peoples’ movement-- would be a long step toward restoring the promise of authentic affirmative action. 

Rather than indulging the current class-blind anti-racist fashion of policing speech, humor, body language, books, and statues, an authentic anti-racism can seek to remove the material roadblocks to equality, as King and his predecessors sought. Of course, there is a cost to equality, a cost to real, and not fanciful, formal opportunity. And that burden should be borne by those who have benefited from racism: the rich and powerful.

Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com

Norman Finkelstein: A National Treasure?

Among the most dangerous people in the US are those who actually once fervently believed the foundational myths of the country’s social and political order. 

It’s the true believers-- we who are schooled on republican virtues, democratic procedures, universal equality, and fair play that are said to be deeply embedded in the US experience-- who become radical crusaders when their beliefs are shattered by the truth.

The true believers are cast as traitors to humanity, nation, race, or creed when they turn on those who foster a false loyalty or cheap patriotism based on lies or deception.

The late Daniel Ellsberg was one of these soldiers of truth. Once a handmaiden for US foreign policy, experience brought home the murderous, cynical, and false execution of that policy. At great risk-- even physical risk-- Ellsberg bravely cast aside his privileged, highly respected position and exposed the ugly, hypocritical US intervention in Southeast Asia, an engagement that led to and fueled the savage destruction wrought by the Indochinese war. Ellsberg devoted the rest of his life to opposing the abuse of his once deeply felt ideals.

Thinking of Ellsberg before his death while reading Norman Finkelstein’s new book, I’LL BURN THAT BRIDGE WHEN I GET TO IT! I could not help but see Finkelstein cast in a similar light. Certainly, they are different people, with different burdens, and different circumstances. But they are alike in important ways: both have shown uncommon courage and uncompromising idealism. Both have known the lash of ostracization. 

Where Ellsberg’s idealism was violated by the US empire’s betrayal of his ideals, Finkelstein’s idealism forces him to stand almost alone against cherished beliefs that none dare challenge. Ellsberg confronted US power, Finkelstein attacks the sanctity of conventional, officially-protected thought.

Finkelstein’s new book is not easy to discuss. It is many things-- not in a bad way, but in a personal, boldly eccentric way.  He is a remarkably good writer: a careful grammarian, a skilled wordsmith, with a keen, logical mind. No doubt the logical construction of his arguments inflames his foes even further.

The book is divided into two sections: 1.) an extensive argument against the latest fashions of the academic left, capped with an effective critique of their embodiment, Barack Obama, and 2.) an ambitious attempt to defend a John Stuart Mill-inspired account of academic freedom and academic responsibility. 

In Part I (Identity Politics and Cancel Culture), Finkelstein effectively foregoes theoretical foreplay and leaps right into discussions of some of today’s more prominent, celebrated figures, locating them and their ideas within the framework of a purported remolding of anti-racism. With the writings and initiatives of Kimberlé Crenshaw, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin DiAngelo, and Ibram X. Kendi, Finkelstein finds a bogus path to curing racism as a societal cancer, a path strikingly deviated from the tradition of his (and my) past heroes and heroines in the struggle against racism and racial inequality. 

Finkelstein carefully, and in great detail, challenges the scholarship of the writers and the political weight of their ideas. His own scholarship is impeccable, though he favors the time-honored effectiveness of hitting the nail on its head until the head breaks off! He is relentless.

To many of the young, college-educated activists who have come to understand the scourge of racism through Crenshaw, Coates, DiAngelo, Kendi, and their colleagues, the Finkelstein critique will itself appear as racially insensitive, an attack on identity that is truly worthy of cancellation. 

Finkelstein counters this “Little Red Book” mob reaction by extensively and passionately quoting from his own anti-racist icons: Frederick Douglass, WEB DuBois, Paul Robeson, and Martin Luther King. His brilliant contraposing of DuBois against Kendi is a veritable seminar in deep and productive anti-racist thinking. The contrast alone diminishes Kendi’s thought. Shrewdly, Finkelstein lets the history of sacrifice, defiance, activism, and razor-sharp analysis by these giants of human advancement address the shallow bromides of smug, secure, petty-bourgeois academics. 

From the perch of an insular, arid academic office, the question of racism is a question of manners and self-styled group recognition; from the path that Douglass, DuBois, Robeson, and King trod, the question of racism was a question of emancipation, ending exploitation, and achieving economic security.

If I had my preferences, the author would have broadened his attack beyond these mostly African-American intellectuals to include the vast body of US academics engaged in navel-gazing and supplicating before the ruling class. When leading philosophers are reduced to pondering the depth of “sentiments” and public intellectuals are selling the empty, emotive catch-all-that-we-hate concept of “authoritarianism,” the commodification of anti-racism earns no special place. Intellectual life as contained in academia in general is numbing. 

Finkelstein expresses a well-earned contempt for Barack Obama, his hypocrisy, and his self-regard. In many ways, Obama gave agency to appearance over substance in a way similar to the scribblings of Crenshaw, Coates, DiAngelo, et al. Obama sold the appearance of change and delivered none.

By contrast, Finkelstein casts Bernie Sanders as an authentic agent of change shackled by the Democratic Party leadership. But surely Sanders knew about those shackles and did little to break them. In the end, he, too, sold the appearance of change and delivered none, though perhaps not as cynically as did Obama.

Finkelstein’s politics are influenced by his earlier immersion in Gang of Four Maoism. Forgoing his parents’ Popular Front leftism for REAL revolution, the author’s fingers were burnt. Like so many recovering Little Red Bookers, he now struggles to imagine any politics not going through the Democratic Party, despite his contempt for that party. Apparently, Marxist “orthodoxy” was never considered an option.

Which brings us quite naturally to the other part of Finkelstein’s book, Part II (Academic Freedom). Like Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and a handful of other US commentators, Finkelstein is part of a dying breed-- the true, classic liberal who believes passionately and deeply in freedom of speech, a free press, free academic inquiry, and many other freedoms associated with enlightenment values. 

By the third decade of the twentieth century, history has shown these rights to be rights of convenience. The bourgeois state recognizes these rights when it is useful for propaganda purposes or when the state detects no threat, should they be exercised. Otherwise, when the state is made insecure by freedom of speech, assembly, movement, etc., these rights are squelched. 

In political theory, rights of convenience are actually privileges, where privileges are the warrants granted capriciously by those in power. With the end of the Cold War and its propaganda function, the pretense of universal rights, of absolute freedoms, is just that-- a pretense. The current tribalism around both red and blue allegiances demonstrates how shallow goes the popular commitment to the Bill of Rights.

Yet Finkelstein, like other true-believers—nineteenth-century liberals, their admirers, and a smattering of libertarians-- still clings to these beliefs and attempts to support them in a world grown cynical. 

He wrestles with the idea that a university or its educational counterparts should have freedom of inquiry and its necessary condition, freedom of speech. He relies almost exclusively on John Stuart Mill’s rule-utilitarian justification, citing the potential and actual good that comes from accepting these principles (rules). 

At the same time, Finkelstein concedes the obvious counterexamples (e.g., advocating paedophilia) that nullify the universality of Stuart Mill’s rule-utilitarianism. He and we are left with a principle neither absolute nor real-world operant. 

For Finkelstein and other enlightenment liberals, academia should be a marketplace of ideas, when, in fact, it is a class war. More broadly, the battle for ideas is waged between classes.

Nonetheless, we should embrace the idealism of Finkelstein and the other doctrinaire liberals, but without illusions. Absent a measure of free speech, the little chance we have of getting radical ideas past the gatekeepers drops sharply.

My reservations aside, Finkelstein and his book are treasures. At a time of mind-numbing conformity and groveling before power, a figure who defies conventions and takes us where the thought police do not want us to go should be cherished.

I’m reminded of my teenage epiphany when I found and read Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself. Today, I would disagree with nearly everything in the book, but at a time of stifling Cold War conformity, it broke those chains for me.

Finkelstein, too, is a chain-breaker.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Racial Equality or Racial Exorcism?

My local PBS radio station reserves an early hour on Sunday for On Being, a saccharine-sweet mixture of pop-philosophy, psychobabble, and pseudo-religiosity hosted by Krista Tippett. Tippett drips with overly earnest sincerity as she probes guests with questions posed as profound and with deep existential import. While serious thinkers occasionally rotate through her show, more than a few of her guests are con artists, conjurers, or charlatans. 

Inevitably, in this time of long overdue mass resistance to racial violence, Tippett would discover and promote the “work” of Robin DiAngelo, the author of White Fragility, a New York Times best seller and a book enjoying wide-spread influence and popularity as an anti-racist guide to book clubbers, NGOs, foundations, and corporations. 

A curious feature of the On Being interview of DiAngelo and Resmaa Menakem, a Minnesota-based therapist and coach and author of My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, is the absence of any reference to the core, structural elements of US racism. There is much discussion of racially sensitive etiquette and manners, of conflicted identities, of “...interpretations, perceptions, emotions, language…”, of discomforting conversations, and of racial “repair” (“And the framework that is causing white fragility is a refusal to repair, a refusal to see or feel...”). 

But there is little or no mention of the material condition of Black people, little or no mention of the substance of African American oppression, and little or no discussion of the prerequisites for achieving genuine racial equality.

DiAngelo shows no interest in exposing the material elements of the racial divide. Instead, she trades in perceptions and feelings between the races. There is, for example, no exposure of the ethnic cleansing (gentrification) that today plagues every US city and dislocates hundreds of thousands of African Americans from segregated cities to equally segregated neighborhoods in de-industrialized suburbs. 

Like the indigenous American peoples, African Americans are relocated from poverty-laced, low-income, segregated “reservations” to another poverty-laced, segregated “reservation” in abandoned, formerly white enclaves. The old, former “reservations” are now available at low purchase prices and minimal property taxes to a privileged urban gentry. 

Robin DiAngelo shows no interest in this development. Nor does she explore the “white privilege,” the profiteering, or the elite complicity that drives it. 

Neither does DiAngelo take note of the persistent wealth and income gap between whites and Blacks in the US. Consistently, since 1968, whites accumulate on average ten times the wealth of their African American counterparts. This means, of course, that every generation of Blacks cannot give the next generation an economic head start, which serves as a multiplier of African American disadvantage. Yet this in-your-face racism apparently escapes DiAngelo. 

The wealth gap condemns and forces more and more Blacks into often substandard residence in low-income areas that become literal Bantustans, results of the formal (Jim Crow) and informal apartheid policies imposed by the US ruling class since the Civil War. Like South Africa’s former apartheid regime, it is these segregated areas that are maintained decisively by the brutality of police. 

These areas, euphemistically referred to by white elites as “The Black Community” instead of the old pejorative “Ghetto,” exist as food deserts, lacking the selection and quality of their white counterparts, but, often, at higher prices. Schools serving Blacks are notoriously inferior. The 1974 Milliken vs. Bradley Supreme Court decision institutionalized urban school segregation, legitimizing and encouraging white flight to the suburbs and exurbs. There is no mention of this structural racism of education, health care, human services or its effects on infant mortality, health outcomes, and life expectancy, in the On Being interview.

Nor does DiAngelo decry the criminalization and mass incarceration that has become a feature of African American oppression or any of the other features eviscerating the material quality of Black life.

Hers is the anti-racism that ignores actual racism.

Commodifying Anti-Racism

Everything can become a commodity in the capitalist mode of production. From ideas to the water that we drink, capitalism strives to incorporate them into the vast commercial marketplace. Commodification creeps into every aspect of human experience, as an answer to every whim. So it should not be surprising that even ideas like anti-racism should be appropriated, commodified, and sold in the marketplace.

In the sixties, anti-racist organizations like the Black Panther Party were laudably able to utilize the white liberal guilt of celebrities and elites to raise funds for socially useful projects like day care, breakfast programs, tutoring, etc.

But since that time, others have exploited liberal guilt and the perceived need of institutions to appear racially sensitive to establish a veritable diversity industry. Diversity training, the broad field DiAngelo’s product falls into, has a long history, but one of questionable results. While it may prove lucrative to consultants, lecturers, academics, and business types, it has done little, in fact, to desegregate institutions-- corporations, foundations, NGOs, etc. In fact, some studies suggest that some institutions have become less diverse after exposure to diversity training. 

DiAngelo’s fast-growing speaking and consulting business places her squarely in this tradition. It is strange-- to say the least-- that this enterprise has encouraged the media to place an academic white woman with no engagement with the long-standing mass anti-racist movement into the role of a leader of anti-racism.

Promoted by the national media, she is an “explainer” of racism in the same way that J.D. Vance and his book, Hillbilly Elegy, were an “explainer” of the Midwestern white working class. In both cases, someone who has “escaped,” who is enlightened, will show the way to understanding for East and West coast urban and suburban elites. Both have profitably opened a book of enlightenment for those uninitiated.

For DiAngelo, the product that she is peddling is “allyship,” a condition won through a rigorous ritual of self-examination and atonement. Supposedly, when white people pass through this ritual, they can then accompany African Americans in the anti-racist struggle.

But not everyone can be your guide: “And it takes years of experience and study and struggle and mistake-making and trust-building to hold a group around race and really hold that group and push them and help them go where they need to go, in ways that are constructive. It takes a lot of experience.” Better call Robin DiAngelo. 

It is profoundly revealing that DiAngelo’s anti-racism is not about Black people and their condition, but about white people and their condition, their conversations, their attitudes, their feelings, their willingness to confess: “And even the confession can be problematic. It can range from just a form of masochism to a form of, ‘Well, I feel bad enough that you can see that I’m actually good.’ And so that also becomes performative —”

DiAngelo’s anti-racism is rigidly individualistic, a kind of mentored self-help in becoming a better ally accepted by Black people-- not a fighter along with Black people against the forces of oppression, not a warrior against the wealth and power of those intent upon keeping the Black working class poor and powerless. This is anti-racism without equality at its core.

In its essence, it fails because it rejects the idea of class. It fails to distinguish between the social discomforts of the upper-middle classes-- both white and Black-- and the plight of the African American working class.

Only a few years have passed since the Obama Presidency brought a smug assurance that we were now in a post-racial era because a Black elite had grabbed the brass ring. The smartphone camera-exposed orgy of police violence largely against poor and working class African Americans challenges that notion. But the DiAngelos and their media promoters give us new hope! We can return to post-racialism if we just get our heads straight!

Meanwhile, the edifice of racism remains intact. Black workers work for lower wages, pay more for the same services, get fewer of the available services, remain segregated, and die sooner. The developers, landlords, petty capitalists, and CEOs continue to super-exploit African American workers.  

The ultimate answer to racism does not lie in exorcism, symbolic gestures, sensibilities, or feelings. If racial injustice is not merely about feelings, then certainly anti-racism is not only about attitudes, either.

The genuine anti-racist warriors-- Black and white--  are crafting answers that enrich and empower Black people. They are attacking the wealthy and powerful who benefit from racial oppression. They are holding the oppressive institutions, their leaders, and their beneficiaries accountable for the material consequences of racist practices. They center anti-racism around winning equality. DiAngelo’s exorcisms touch none of this.

Greg Godels 

zzsblogml@gmail.com