20th Century Strategy for a 21st Century Nation: Whiteness as Mass Appeal

20^thCentury Strategy for a 21^st  Century Nation: Whiteness as Mass Appeal

by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan (in Exile)

The 2012 election, like every election before it, has been defined by race. This is America, and race always matters. Death, taxes, and race. While 2008-2012 has prompted more explicit racial assault on then candidate and ultimately President Obama, race, racism, and white supremacy defines the history of American politics. Sister Souljah, Willie Horton, anti-Muslim appeals, demonization of undocumented immigrants, "the welfare queen," the southern strategy, and countless other examples point to the ways that race defines American political campaigns. And these are just examples since the late 1960s from national presidential campaigns.

Yet the vitriol, the explicit racial appeals, and the ubiquitous racial rhetoric has been a noteworthy outcome of the 2012 election. Adele M. Stan, in "Romney Pushed Boundaries of 'Acceptable Racism' to Extremes" aptly describes the campaign as a long and winding campaign of racism, one that irrespective of the outcome has had its consequences:

If asked what one thing about the 2012 campaign most impacted everyday American life, one answer stands out above all others: racism. The wink-wink racial coding Romney uses, combined with the unabashed racism of such surrogates as former Bush administration chief of staff John Sununu, adds up to quite a wash of race-baited waters over the campaign. Then add to that the steady stream of racist rhetoric that characterized the Republican presidential primary campaign, and the wash looks more like a stew set on simmer for the better part of a year.

Since the early months of 2011, our politics have been marinating in the language of racial hatred, whether in former U.S. senator Rick Santorum's "blah people" moment, or former House speaker Newt Gingrich's tarring of Barack Obama as "the food stamp president."

The consequences and context of a campaign based in racism, based in a thirty-year racial assault on the civil rights movement is fully visible in AP's recent poll, which found that both explicit and implicit racial bias against African Americans and Latinos is on the rise. According to the AP, "51 percent of Americans now express explicit anti-black attitudes," which was a 3 percent rise since 2008. When examining implicit bias, "the number of Americans with anti-black sentiments jumped to 56 percent, up from 49 percent during the last presidential election." Should we be surprised?

The likes of John Sununu and Donald Trump, the sight of racist t-shirts and posters at GOP rallies and elsewhere, and the explicitly racist discourse point to the strategy of racist appeals and the consequences of such appeals. The impact of racism isn't simply voters picking Mitt Romney because of their anti-black racism, or even the ways that the accusations against President Obama as a "food stamp president," as "lazy" as a "socialist" and as "anti-White" resonate because of an entrenched white racial frame, but in the yearning and appeal of a white male leader. Race doesn't just matter in why whites are voting against President Obama but also why they are voting for Mitt Romney. Tom Scocca, in "Why Do White People Think Mitt Romney Should Be President?" argues that anti-black racism, dog "whistles" and prejudice isn't the only reason why white males are casting their vote for Romney-Ryan but because they are white and because white masculinity is associated with toughness, leadership, intelligence, and countless other racial stereotypes. "White people -- white men in particular -- are for Mitt Romney. White men are supporting Mitt Romney to the exclusion of logic or common sense. Without this narrow, tribal appeal, Romney's candidacy would simply not be viable. Most kinds of Americans see no reason to vote for him."

Chauncey DeVega describes the centrality of whiteness, of the sense of loss resulting from a black president, and therefore explicit appeal of a white president.

Despite their great advantages in wealth, income, power, social mobility, resources, and all other socioeconomic measures, many white people-- especially white male conservatives --are terrified and upset by the symbolic power of a black man who happens to be President of the United States. Ultimately, White Masculinity is imperiled by the idea of Barack Obama. White men rule this country; ironically, no group of people, especially on the Right are as insecure," he notes. "In the Age of Obama, White Masculinity imagines itself as at risk and obsolete. Because of their authoritarian streak, white conservative men must have control of women and the Other. White Conservative Masculinity's overreaction to the Age of Obama, and the social and political gains of people who are not white, male, and straight, are a function of this standing decision rule.

The cultural imagination of the white savior; the historic elevation of white men as shining knights, as war heroes, as protectors, as problem-solvers, and as leaders is on full display within this election. It is the same ideology that governed the founding principles of republicanism, which saw white men as the one and only capable of self-governance. It is the same ideology that under-girds American exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny, and "white man's burden." In 1899, Rudyard Kipling penned, the White Man's Burden:

Take up the White Man's burden-- Send forth the best ye breed-- Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captives' need; To wait in heavy harness, On fluttered folk and wild-- Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man's burden-- In patience to abide, To veil the threat of terror And check the show of pride; By open speech and simple, An hundred times made plain To seek another's profit, And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden-- The savage wars of peace-- Fill full the mouth of Famine And bid the sickness cease; And when your goal is nearest The end for others sought, Watch sloth and heathen Folly Bring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden-- No tawdry rule of kings, But toil of serf and sweeper-- The tale of common things. The ports ye shall not enter, The roads ye shall not tread, Go mark them with your living, And mark them with your dead.

It is that "burden"; it is that arrogance, it is that belief that only white mean can save civilization, can save America, can bring people together, can change the economy, that unifies the Romney campaign. It is the same racist and sexist logic that justified segregation in the military and positional segregation in sports. The appeal of Mitt Romney mirrors the appeal of white quarterbacks within the white imagination. The privileging of white male as quarterbacks and the exclusion of African Americans from this position "has implications off the football field. The discrimination dynamic that surrounds the issue of Black leadership on the turf reflects the greater racism that shapes our entire society," writes Dave Zirin. Racism, which questions black intelligence, which imagines leadership as incongruous to racial Otherness, to women, is foundational to American racial ideology. The 2012 election is just another piece of evidence of how far we haven't come. I don't know the outcome in terms of vote tallies and the next president, but I do know this: the 2012 campaign proved that like the twentieth, the nineteenth, the and the 18th centuries ... the "problem of the twenty-first century will be the color line" although it is a color line created, maintained, and for the sake of white men.

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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He is the author of the just released After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop (SUNY Press) as well as several other works. Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan, layupline, Feminist Wire, and Urban Cusp. He is frequent contributor to Ebony, Slam, and Racialicious as well as a past contributor to Loop21, The Nation and The Starting Five. He blogs @No Tsuris.

Higher Education in Mitt Romney’s America

Higher Education in Mitt Romney’s America

by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan (in Exile)

The media focus on student debt, on congressional battles over student loans, and the scarcity of jobs for college graduates obscures the racial and class dynamics that define America’s colleges and universities. With the public discourse surrounding the unfairness of affirmative action for Whites, the threat that Ethnic Studies represents to (White) America, and the absence of “White student unions” in college campuses, public discussions re-imagine Whiteness as precarious, and Whites as victim and at the frontlines of a changing educational landscape.   Despite the daily lamenting of the state and future of America’s White students, particularly those with middle and upper-middle incomes, college campuses are still White.  In fact, Whites, particularly those whose parents are part of the top 5% of the income distribution, continue to reap the benefits of privilege in (1) admittance, (2) scholarship, and (3) treatment.  Let's not get things twisted here; these colleges and universities are in America, so yes the rules of the game (racism, sexism, classism) do apply.

In 2005, less than one in eight youth from the poorest 25% of society would enroll at a 4-year college university within 2 years of high school graduation.  According to Peter Schmidt, author of The Color of Money, “a rich child has about 25 times as much a chance as a poor one of someday enrolling in a college rated as highly selective or better.”  Colleges’ overreliance on SAT scores, heightens cultural bias, and the unequal advantages resulting from SAT prep classes, which have proven to benefit Whites and the middle-class.  In addition, because admissions give credence to a school’s reputation (which cannot be seen apart from segregation, and racial and class inequality), the rules and the game of college are set up to advantage Mitt Romney’s America: the already privileged.  Worse yet, the hegemony of the narratives of meritocracy and the illusion of diversity—which Lani Guiner describes as “a leaf to camouflage privilege”—obscure  the endless privileges afforded to the members of middle and upper middle class White America, before they ever step foot on a college campus. 

This is evident as we look at the racial and class stratification of student loans and other forms of aid.  The Chronicle of Higher Education found that “colleges with more than $500 million in their endowments…served disproportionately few students from families with incomes low enough to qualify for federal Pell Grants.” In other words, the money that makes college a possibility is funneled to those whose families often have the requisite dollars to make college a reality.  Schmidt tells us that “[j]ust 40 percent of the financial aid money being distributed by public colleges is going to students with documented financial need,” adding that “[m]ost such money is being used to offer merit-based scholarships or tuition discounts to potential recruits who can enhance a college's reputation, or appear likely to cover the rest of their tuition tab and to donate down the road.”  Despite the widely circulated, albeit factually false ideas about students of color and scholarships, the vast majority of scholarship money finds its way into the pocket of White students.  Tim Wise makes this clear:

It is simply false that scholarships for people of color crowd out monies for White students. According to a national study by the General Accounting Office, less than four percent of scholarship money in the U.S. is represented by awards that consider race as a factor at all, while only 0.25 percent (one quarter of one percent) of all undergrad scholarship dollars come from awards that are restricted to persons of color alone (1). In other words, Whites are fully capable of competing for and receiving any of the other monies — roughly 99.75 percent of all scholarship funds out there for college. Although this GAO study was conducted in the mid-’90s, there is little reason to expect that the numbers have changed since then. If anything, increasing backlash to affirmative action and fear of lawsuits brought by conservatives against such efforts would likely have further limited such awards as a percentage of national scholarships.

Second, it is also false that large numbers of students of color receive the benefits of race-based scholarships. In truth, only 3.5 percent of college students of color receive any scholarship even partly based on race, suggesting that such programs remain a pathetically small piece of the financial aid picture (2). So when Mr. Bohannon walks around campus and sees students of color, he may believe them all to be wards of some race-based preference scheme; yet the evidence suggests that at least 96.5 percent of them received no race-based scholarship at all.

The money is there for White students, particularly those who already have class advantages. From access to prep classes to performative enhancing drugs, from legacies to the “donation path,” America’s colleges and universities are overpopulated by Whites, by the sons and daughter’s of the elite, not because of some level of intelligence, the requisite values, or some all-powerful work ethic, but because of the power of privilege and money.

This points to a clear conclusion: because of access to money, prep classes, or mere connections, that is, because of privilege, America’s colleges and universities, particularly the elite schools, are overpopulated with White students lacking the requisite skills to succeed within these spaces.  It is no wonder that America’s colleges and universities are increasingly the educational weight stations for the ill prepared and ill qualified.  Returning to Peter Schmidt 

Researchers with access to closely guarded college admissions data have found that, on the whole, about 15 percent of freshmen enrolled at America's highly selective colleges are White teens who failed to meet their institutions' minimum admissions standards.

Five years ago, two researchers working for the Educational Testing Service, Anthony Carnevale and Stephen Rose, took the academic profiles of students admitted into 146 colleges in the top two tiers of Barron's college guide and matched them up against the institutions' advertised requirements in terms of high school grade point average, SAT or ACT scores, letters of recommendation, and records of involvement in extracurricular activities. White students who failed to make the grade on all counts were nearly twice as prevalent on such campuses as black and Hispanic students who received an admissions break based on their ethnicity or race.

Who are these mediocre White students getting into institutions such as Harvard, Wellesley, Notre Dame, Duke, and the University of Virginia? A sizable number are recruited athletes who, research has shown, will perform worse on average than other students with similar academic profiles, mainly as a result of the demands their coaches will place on them.

A larger share, however, are students who gained admission through their ties to people the institution wanted to keep happy, with alumni, donors, faculty members, administrators, and politicians topping the list.

Given this reality, should it be a surprise that high school and college students, are popping Adderall like they are tic tacks.  Is the pressure to succeed to not only fulfill the expectations of a White middle class sensibility, but to thrive amid challenging conditions? 

It is interesting that in popular culture and popular media, we hear so much about students of color, those who supposedly are the beneficiaries of affirmative action, who struggle yet, it is White students who often lack the require scores one supposedly needs to succeed in higher education.  Makes me wonder if that is leading to a proliferation of drug use among students trying to find ways to succeed.   Between 2002 and 2005, sales of Adderall increased by 3,100%; in 2011; 34.5% admitted to using this illegal drug.  Treated as little more than a performance enhancing drugs, colleges are rife for drug abuse.  According to Linda Carroll, the problem runs deep:

At colleges across America, students are becoming addicted to a popular prescription drug — not because they’re trying to get high, but because they hope to get smarter. The drug, Adderall, is normally prescribed for kids with attention deficit disorder. But some college kids are taking the medication because it helps them focus and pull all-nighters.

One ‘A’ student at one of the nation’s top tier colleges explained the appeal of the pills kids call “study buddies.”

“When I’m on Adderall and I’m looking at the textbook I can forget about everything else around me,” she told NBC News’ Amy Robach, in a report aired on TODAY. “I figured if everyone else is doing it, why shouldn’t I get the advantage?”         

Another student, “Mike,” who asked that his real name be withheld, elaborated. “It’s given me the boost to work non-stop for 10 hours a day,” he explained. “Baseball players take steroids to be the best and students take Adderall to be the best. It’s steroids for school.”

Like football games, partying, and cheating, drugs are part and parcel of today’s college experience.  It is an epidemic, which can be partially explained by changes in technology, also reflecting the larger conditions of today’s colleges and universities.  “Yes, cheating is rampant, and for teachers the game of catch-up never stops,” notes Mark Bauerlein. “Part of the problem stems from the high-stakes system, where a bad grade can jeopardize chances for medical school. For the ‘overachievers,’ cheating isn’t a vice. It’s a survival skill.”  The work of Peter Schmidt and others points to how the “overachievers” are often White.  Should it surprise us that cheating has become part and parcel with the college experience? 

According Susan D. Blum, in My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture, close to 70 percent of students admitted lifting material directly from the Internet without citation or other forms of attribution; 75 percent admitted to engage in cheating. Copying and pasting, purchasing papers online, and other forms of cheating have become the new normal.  Keeping tests on file at fraternity houses and other forms of academic dishonesty are commonplace.  Look at Harvard, where 125 out of 250 students enrolled in Introduction to Congress (Spring 2012) have been accused of cheating. Yet, the media, including  The New York Times, have framed cheating in college campuses around athlete culture and even blackness (with picture of African American basketball players as leads to the story, for instance; see Deadspin piece for further evidence).  The cheating scandal in Harvard is indicative of a culture that admits Whites—wealthy Whites—into  the Ivy doors irrespective of their readiness or deservedness.

What does all of this reveal?  What does the SAT scandal, where in New Jersey students hired someone to take the test for them, tells us about who is and isn’t prepared for higher education?  What does this tell us about race, class, and higher education?   Whether this represents the cause of the persistent inequality within higher education (greater access to prep course, performance enhancing drugs, money to pay for exam takers) or whether these destructive and harmful behaviors result from the unearned privileges of admission into America’s elite colleges and universities, remains in question.  What is clear is that race and class matters.

While the national press and politicians lament the status and predicament facing (White) college graduates, let us not forget the broader issues at work here. It is revealing that while the face of the aggrieved student is often White, and while the narrative of the student left behind is White, they are not the faces of those students who are getting admitted to universities without “deserving” to be there.  Whites are not the face of having easy access to financial aid; they are not the face of those who can afford to and are using drugs without being busted; they are not the face who pop performance enhancing pills; they are not the face of cheating scandals.  Yet, instead Whiteness remains the face of victimized student who deserves to be in college, who deserves to secure the American Dream.  If that is the case, I think we need to return to a basic lesson: a more accurate definition of "deserve."

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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis.  Leonard’s latest book After Artest: Race and the Assault on Blackness was just published by SUNY Press.

Got Solutions? Beyond Denial and Toward Transformation (Part 2)

Got Solutions? Beyond Denial and Toward Transformation (Part 2)

by David J. Leonard | HuffPost BlackVoices

As I noted in part 1, white denial about racism and demands for solutions (for the racial injustices often dismissed) go hand in hand. As Mark Anthony Neal brilliantly reminded people in a Facebook status update: "The very essence of 'privilege' is when you enter into a space and are fundamentally unaware that not only have you changed the conversation, but have made the conversation about you." 

Beyond attempting to turn the conversation into what they want, what these demands fail to recognize is white denial about racism, male denial about sexism, and heterosexual denial about homophobia is problematic and is instrumental in the perpetuation of violence, inequality, and privilege. While I remain wary of the demands for solutions, especially in absence of a willingness to work toward social change and accountability, there are many individual and systemic changes that will not only foster greater equality and justice but will address historically produced inequalities. There is much that can and must be done as part of a movement of racial reconciliation and change.

Universal Health Care: A consequence of America's history of racism, violence, segregation, wealth disparity, and inequality represents stark differences between life and death. Whether looking at life expectancy, infant mortality, and countless illness, we see that racial inequality has consequences. In other words, racism kills. To combat the health consequences of American Apartheid, we must adopt a single-payer national health system. The grave impact of a Jim Crow system of "health care" is seen each and every day. According to a recent study from Harvard University, "Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year -- one every 12 minutes -- in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care." Race matters here. Tim Wise notes that each year 100,000 African Americans die "who wouldn't if black mortality rates were equal to that of whites." Universal health care would not solve these disparities but it would certainly dramatically intercede against racism's assault on the basic human right of life. Lesley M Russell makes this clear:

Racial and ethnic minorities make up more than half of America's uninsured and they suffer higher rates of chronic illness than the general population. They are more likely to experience risk factors that predispose them to chronic illnesses such as obesity, and are much less likely to receive preventive screenings, regular care, and to fill needed prescriptions that could prevent or ameliorate their conditions. Because being uninsured often means postponing needed heath care services, people of color are diagnosed at more advanced disease stages, and once diagnosed, they receive poorer care. Inevitably, they are sicker and die sooner.

A single payer system may not be a complete solution but it is a way to save lives, improve lives, and challenge the ongoing history of racism. Who is on board? It would seem that providing health care and dismantling America's prison nation is the ultimate fulfillment of family values. You want a solution, how

about respecting and valuing every person's family; now that's some values I can get on board with.

While we are nationalizing things, how about we abandon the inequitable local funding formulas employed by school districts and ensure that equity and equality is maintained in each and every school district. Since I know everyone is interested in change, how about a higher education that is open and accessible to everyone.

Solutions are a-plenty. Abolish the Electoral Collegeand move toward publicly funded elections.

There are of course many solutions, from the Dream Act to dramatically changing the tax code and increasing minimum wage would take us on a path toward equality, justice, and racial reconciliation. If you want solutions, join me in fighting for them: if people get to deduct mortgage payments from their taxes, how about rental tax deductions; if children are deductible what about no children? Free childcare for all; what about public transformation in every community - interested? An end to the war on drugs and the military industrial complex! Are these the solutions you had in mind?

I could go on for pages, but I am wondering if these are the solutions you had in mind. Yet, what I have in mind is an end to the war on drugs, the war on women, and the war on the poor; or maybe a program that actually works to address poverty and homelessness. How about a societal commitment to end rape culture; ready to help by showing zero tolerance for the criminalization, shaming and demonization of rape victims? Are those the solutions you are so interested in hearing about? You ready to commit to protecting the vote for every citizen with equal zeal as many fight for the right to bear arms? I don't know about you, but to me surely making voting easier than it is to get an assault weapon in some locales would be both a step in the right direction and solutions in itself.

Solutions abound; policy initiatives, personal transformation, and a willingness to listen, dialogue, and look inward are solutions. And while I don't think the requests for solutions are always genuine, every proposal, suggestion, and potential solution is one that is possible. Yet, we don't have to look any further than our history books to find solutions, to find pathways toward freedom and justice. "On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway," notes Martin Luther King. "True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring." Or we can simply fulfill the demands of the Black Panther Party: "We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace and people's community control of modern technology."

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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He is the author of the just released After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop (SUNY Press) as well as several other works. Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan, layupline, Feminist Wire, and Urban Cusp. He is frequent contributor to Ebony, Slam, and Racialicious as well as a past contributor to Loop21, The Nation and The Starting Five. He blogs @No Tsuris.

The Politics of Sex, The Principle of Pleasure

The Politics of Sex, The Principle of Pleasure

by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan (in Exile)

In a society that routinely demonizes women, particularly women of color, because of sexuality, that rationalizes sexual violence through tropes and narratives of hyper sexuality, that sanctions and ignores sexual harassment, and that polices the clothing, the bodies, and sexualities of women, any discussion of sexuality is immensely political.  In a country defined by a history of sexual violence, one where white masters routinely raped African American women and justified their violence with references to black female sexuality, the politics of pleasure are never simply a frivolous exercise. 

We live in a society where men and women get messages about whose pleasure matters, who has ownership over another’s body, where women, particularly women of color, are reduced to some of one’s parts; the questions around sexuality and pleasure are immensely political. 

How else do we explain the pornographic standard of male orgasms?  How else do we explain popular culture emphasis on male-gaze, one that places women as objects to be consumed along a pathway to pleasure?  How else do we explain what Heidi R. Lewis’ highlights in her brilliant article (“Li’l Wayne and the New Politics of Cunnilingus in Hip Hop”), where she documents the relationship between hip-hop and cunnilingus (which led to countless conversations).  How else might we explain the narratives about giving a woman oral pleasures (“cranial maneuvers”) as “gross,” “dirty” “nasty” and otherwise “unnormal”?

Emily Heist Moss, with “Why Is ‘Going Down’ Often a One-Way Street?” makes this clear:

No partner should be compelled to perform any sex act because the media says we shouldlike doing it. Obligatory action may get the job done, but do we really want our partners suffering through something they don’t enjoy? The list of ways to be sexual is ridiculously exhaustive, and ruling one thing off the menu shouldn’t ruin anyone’s experience.

That being said, fellatio has become a mainstay of pop culture portrayals of sex and an expected part of most heterosexual encounters. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but there is something wrong when the reciprocal act is deemed “gross,” “unclean,” or “icky.” If putting your face in someone else’s lap gives you the heebie-jeebies (for whatever reason), then don’t do it. But, if you’re expecting someone else to put his or her face in your lap, then you really need to reassess your sense of fairness. And if you’re one of the heebie-jeebie types, it’s probably worth asking yourself where those icky feelings are coming from. This is the body you’re going to have for the rest of your life, so you might as well learn to have some fun with it.

The question of pleasure and whose sexual gratification is tantamount is telling,  in a society where women, particularly women of color, are required to put their needs aside, to delay their own gratification for the good of the family, community, and even nation. “Black women are expected to take care of others' needs before their own (others= family, partners, employers, colleagues, everyone else, non-black and black),” notes Juliana Chang, adding “Claiming that they deserve care and love IS political. Who "deserves" care and love is a political issue. Sex is an issue of care, not just pleasure.”

The politics embedded within and revealed by the resistance to see sex and sexuality as immensely political has grave consequences.  Just ask Eve:

Eve, who asked that her real name and age remain confidential, spent two years in prison. During her time behind bars she was raped and contracted HIV. Upon release, she was forced to register in the state’s sex offender database. The words “sex offender” now appear on her driver’s license. “I have tried desperately to change my life,” she says, but her status on the database stands in the way of housing and other programs. “When I present my ID for anything,” she says, “the assumption is that you’re a child molester or a rapist. The discrimination is just ongoing and ongoing.”

Eve was penalized under Louisiana’s 205-year-old Crime Against Nature statute, a blatantly discriminatory law that legislators have maneuvered to keep on the state’s books for the purpose of turning sex workers into felons. As enforced, the law specifically singles out oral and anal sex for greater punishment for those arrested for prostitution, including requiring those convicted to register as sex offenders in a public database. Advocates say the law has further isolated and targeted poor women of color, transgender women, and especially those who are forced to trade sex for food or a place to sleep at night.

In 2003, the Supreme Court outlawed sodomy laws with its decision in Lawrence v. Texas. That ruling should have invalidated Louisiana’s law entirely. Instead, the state has chosen to only enforce the portion of the law that concerns “solicitation” of a crime against nature. The decision on whether to charge accused sex workers with a felony instead of Louisiana’s misdemeanor prostitution law is left entirely in the hands of police and prosecutors.

“This leaves the door wide open to discriminatory enforcement targeting poor black women, transgender women, and gay men for a charge that carries much harsher penalties,” says police misconduct attorney and organizer Andrea J. Ritchie, a co-counsel in a new federal lawsuit challenging the statute.

Let's also quit the nonsense about how women use sexuality as a source of power: There is NO "balance of power." Given the ways that sexuality is defined, given the prevalence of sexual violence, the sexualization of women, sexual harassment, micro aggressions, and whose pleasure is seen as primary, the power differentials are clear. The politics are evident in the fact that men are celebrated as "studs" whereas women are demonized and denigrated, denounced and ridiculed as “that girl.”

When all is said and done, men rarely have to worry if a sexual interaction ends in orgasm; women can't say the same--and for me, that has political meaning.  And of course, the politics don’t need to be wrapped up in misogynistic and patriarchal sensibilities, but mutual pleasure, enjoyment and satisfaction.  As Brittney Cooper noted on twitter, “But don't men recognize that sex is better if your partner is giving pleasure that is not altruistic, but mutually beneficial?”

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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He is the author of the just released After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop(SUNY Press) as well as several other works. Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan, layupline, Feminist Wire, and Urban Cusp. He is frequent contributor to Ebony, Slam, and Racialicious as well as a past contributor to Loop21, The Nation and The Starting Five. He blogs @No Tsuris.

White Denial and Black Middle-Class Realities (Pt. 1)

White Denial and Black Middle-Class Realities (Part 1)

by David J. Leonard | HuffPost Black Voices

The denial of racism is an obsession of white America. In what has become a holy trinity of sorts - accusing others of playing the "race card;" noting the election of Barack Obama; and citing the success of the black middle class and/or the black elite - the denial of racism and the demonization of those who demand that America fulfill its creed of equality plagues contemporary racial discussions. It is a rarity to witness a conversation about race, whereupon this holy trinity isn't deployed, derailing the conversation before it even begins. Whether highlighting segregation or inequality in access to education, health care, or countless institutions, whether noting the realities of stop-and-frisk or daily confrontations with American racism, the response is often the same: denial, denial, denial.

In an effort to have an honest conversation and to push the conversation beyond this myopic fantasy, I thought I would give the denial crowd some facts. This is for those who like to cite the black middle class as evidence of a post-racial America; this is for those who cite the black middle class (likely never having a meaningful conversation with a person of color of any class status) as evidence that poverty rates, incarceration rates, educational inequality or health disparities is the result of faulty values or a poor work ethic. This is my response to those who dismiss the injustice and inequality endured by poor communities of color – the working poor – by noting the purported American Dream experienced by the black middle-class. For all of them, here is a little dose of reality.

Wealth

Despite the continued invoking of the black middle-class, the realities of inequality and persistent wealth disparities within the middle-class reveal a different reality. In other words, the wealth on the ground reveals a reality rather entirely different from this white fantasy. According to a 2011 study from Pew Research Center, whites possess 20 times more wealth than African Americans and 18 times that of Latinos. More succinctly, whereas the average white family had $113,149 dollars of wealth, "the typical black household had just $5,677 in wealth (assets minus debts) in 2009, and the typical Hispanic household had $6,325 in wealth." As of 1999, whites and blacks similarly situated within the "educational middle class" live in distinct wealth words. Whereas whites possessed $111,000 in median net worth, black families had only $33,5000 dollars; in terms of assets the disparity with $56,000 to $15,000 (Shapiro, 2004, p. 90-91). If we look at "the occupational middle-class" an equally pronounced gap is visible: whites had only $123,000 in median net worth and $60,000 in median net financial assets compare to $26,500 and $11,200 for African Americans. Across the various categories that comprise the middle class, white families possess "between three and five times as much wealth as equally achieving black middle class families." (Shapiro 2004, p. 90-91)

While persistent wealth disparities stratified along racial lines are nothing new, the Great Recession has worsened this divide. According to Algernon Austin, director of the Economic Policy Institute's Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy, "In 2009, for every dollar of wealth the average white household had, black households only had two cents." Wealth is not only transferable from generation to generation, but wealth is what allows people to generate more wealth, to invest, to borrow money for education, to pay for gymnastics or swimming lessons at some elite school, or to otherwise invest in the future. And the ongoing history of discrimination is systematically destroying the black middle-class. "History is going to say that the black middle class was decimated" during the first half of the twenty-first century, notes Maya Wiley, director of the Center for Social Inclusion. "But we're not done writing history." One reason we are not done writing this history is because for too many Americans, this history and this reality is both denied and obscured.

According to Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro, "Blacks' claim to middle-class status is based on income not assets. . . . "Without wealth reserves, especially liquid assets, the black middle class depends on income for its standard of living" (p. 97). A job loss, a health crisis, depleting housing values, a desire to go back to school or worse a global recession undermine the value in this position, since there are few/no wealth assets or wealth reserves to "fall back on."

Employment

While monthly newscasts spotlight the nation's unemployment rate, the gross disparities across racial lines are often obscured from national conversation. In June 2012, black unemployment reached 14.6%; only 62% of African Americans have a job or actively searching for paid work. When we look at specific cities, we see a dire situation: in 2010, black unemployment in Los Angeles (19.7%), in Las Vegas was 21.4%, and in Detroit 24.7%. The situation for the often- cited black middle-class is equally dire. Whereas whites possessing a college degree face unemployment rates in the 4% range, African Americans graduates face 7% unemployment. Attributable to segregation, the practice of locking African Americans out of networks, a diploma isn't a pathway to the middle-class, challenging the adage that education is the great equalizer.

In 2003, Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, both professors of economics at the MIT, found that applicants with "white sounding names" were 50% more likely to receive a callback after submitting a resume than were those with "black sounding names." In stark terms, whiteness was worth 8 years of work experience, revealing how it is determinant of one's job future; race impacts the prospect of being unemployed, a member of the "working class" or the "middle-class."  In their study, "Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination," the authors argue: "While one may have expected that improved credentials may alleviate employers' fear that African-American applicants are deficient in some unobservable skills, this is not the case in our data.

Discrimination therefore appears to bite twice, making it harder not only for African-Americans to find a job but also to improve their employability" ("Employers' Replies to Racial Names" 2003). In "Names Make a Difference," researchers at the Discrimination Research Center identified racial discrimination as a significant obstacle within the contemporary labor force. Researchers sent out 6,200 resumes to temporary employment agencies throughout California. Each applicant possessed similar qualifications. Applicants with Latino and white "sounding names" received callbacks more frequently than those presumed to be African American or South Asian/Arab American, who were called back the least frequently (Miller 2004).

I guess it is difficult to build a middle-class when its prospective members are not employable; when middle-class status doesn't preclude discrimination in employment. The same applies when searching for housing (as I will discuss below). I guess qualifications and experiences mean something different when as revealed by Devah Praeger whites with felony convictions are more likely to be hired than African Americans without any criminal background. You can wish away these facts, and erase these experiences, but denial and silence will not lead to change. In part 2, I will return to this discussion in looking at housing and segregation.

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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He is the author of the just released After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop (SUNY Press) as well as several other works. Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan, layupline, Feminist Wire, and Urban Cusp. He is frequent contributor to Ebony, Slam, and Racialicious as well as a past contributor to Loop21, The Nation and The Starting Five. He blogs @No Tsuris.

Blaming Hip-Hop for Hate Rock?

Blaming Hip-Hop for Hate Rock?

David J. Leonard & C. Richard King | NewBlackMan (in Exile)

              

Little says more about the state of racism and the centrality of the white racial frame in the USA today than the rapidity with which pundits transformed a conversation about white power, racialized violence, and hate rock into a critique of hip-hop.   Indeed, a number of discussions of the spree killing at the Sikh temple outside of Milwaukee, echoing broader political currents, reference the evils of hip-hop as both a defense and a scapegoat. 

Perhaps not surprisingly, in The New Republic, John McWhorter rehearsed this well worn conversation to turn the killings into another referendum on hip-hop.  “It has been fashionable,” he asserts, “to speculate on whether the White Power music he [Wade Michael Page] listened to helped stoke him into the senseless murders he committed...such speculations,” he suggests are both “incoherent” and “pointless—and they are marked, above all, by a cloying air of self-congratulation.”  To “prove” his point, he invoked the tried and tested “hip-hop” comparison as if it represented mainstream rap,  failing to note, of course, that he is specifically talking about a small  subset of hip-hop music):

A comparison with another musical genre helps put the debate into relief. Indeed, in assessing White Power music’s influence on Page, it helps to acknowledge that rap music—savored by people of all colors, ranging in age from “youth” to middle-aged—has its own tendency to celebrate the indefensible. Some practitioners casually boast about hurting women—whether attacking a partner during intercourse (Cam’ron, “Boy, Boy”), or kicking a woman in the stomach to make her abort (Joe Budden, “Confessions II”) and, of course, all varieties of maiming and murder.

However, nasty as all of this is, and whatever one might say about its implications for the street culture that produced it, it’s all symptom rather than cause. Those who listen to rap—including myself—are not passively consuming its message, but actively seeking it as a release. Indeed, last I heard, the enlightened take on rap lyrics is that their violence must be taken not as counsel but as poetry, poses of strength from disenfranchised people—“Black Noise” as Brown’s Tricia Rose calls it. Other academics, priding themselves on their connection with the music, crown the makers of violent rap as “Prophets of the Hood” (Imani Perry, Princeton) or “Hoodlums” (William Van Deburg, University of Wisconsin), the latter meant as an arch compliment to men celebrated for speaking truth to power.

And there is more than a little bit of truth to this treatment of rap’s violent strain. It is, indeed, an attitude that functions as a response to the frustrations of everyday life. In that light, rapademics have been fond of noting that old-time “toasts” among black people had their violent strains as well. Despite the prevalent anxieties in the 1990s about the social consequences of rap music, evidence that the music causes actual violence never actually surfaced.

These arguments are as tired as they are simplistic; the failure to see any difference between rap music and hate rock is absurd on every level. Yet, they keep getting published. Yet another failure to account for white supremacy. Importantly, invoking the purported ills associated hip hop simultaneously recycles dangerous stereotypes about blacks and lets whites off the hook.  Indeed, it encourages white readers to misrecognize the force of white racism and dissociate themselves from deeper structural arrangements, while essentially giving a pass to the violence, antipathy, and dehumanization at the core of white power music specifically, and white powerthinking more generally.  It is as if McWhorter would like to conclude: there are haters everywhere, stop picking on isolated whites who do bad things and pay attention to the ubiquitous threat of black pathology.

Responding to the work of Robert Futrell and Pete Simi, whose analysis of “spaces of hate” offers an important context for understanding Wade Michael Page, Cord Jefferson writes an apologia for hate rock.  His “In Defense of Neo-Nazi Music,” a title which summarizes the security and vulgarity of white supremacy today, dismisses any focus on his relationship to music as akin to those who blame video games or rock music for violence:

People like Futrell and Simi try to avoid sounding like the neo-Tipper Gores that they are by not condemning the neo-Nazi music itself and instead saying that it's the culture around the music that's dangerous. It's the "spaces of hate" they're after, they say, not the art. But then they expose their anti-free speech leanings by finger-wagging and threatening that we shouldn't be surprised if another white-power maniac kills people thanks to this hateful music scene. That—and I'm so glad I work at Gawker now so I can say this—is a total crock of shit.

To follow Futrell and Simi's logic, let's fight drug culture by cancelling the Electric Daisy Carnival, a massive electronic music festival that's become as synonymous with MDMA as it has dubstep. Let's also cut down on drunk driving by banning football games, at which tailgaters young and old get blotto all day before getting in their SUVs and driving home. And, of course, let's eliminate violence in the inner city by totally banishing hip-hop from our nation, which, as Tipper and her ilk argued for years, is the real reason young black men kill each other at heartbreaking rates.

In such analysis, history and context do not matter; ideology has no connection to action.  In Jefferson’s world, we are all the same, all equal, all individuals who have free will to act of our own accord without reference to social location, dominant frames, or the burdens of the past.  Such free agents animate the new racism of 21st century America, mobilizing white privilege under the cover of abstract liberalism and individual liberty.

Responding to some comments from readers, Jefferson invoked hip-hop as part of the defense of his defense of hate music.

I can see where you're coming from to a degree, but I worry that it's splitting hairs. I'm almost positive that there are people in this world who have listened to NWA's "Fuck the Police" or Ice-T's "Cop Killer" and later attacked cops, and those are only the songs that really go in on police. Dozens—perhaps hundreds—of other rap songs either lightheartedly disparage cops or outright fantasize about cops getting killed. If we're talking about fictional distance, you run into a problem when it comes to hip-hop and the police force. The same goes for hip-hop and misogyny. 

In other words, it's as if rap music isn’t blamed for violence against the police, which it has been, and one familiar with Tipper Gore (to take one example he himself invokes) should know this.  And more, if many people can listen to it without engaging in violence, then the music is irrelevant, which again runs selectively counter to the demonization of blackness and hip hop.

Revealing a lack of understanding of the role of hate rock and other forms of white nationalist popular culture in terms of recruitment, identity formation, and in the formation of an imagined community, Jefferson replicates the narrative that hate rock is just music; forgetting or not knowing that centrality of white racism to the development of popular music over the past century, to the cultivation of taste, to the creation of styles and audiences, to the production of objects of adoration, consumption, and identification.   Clearly hip-hop music or action films don’t foster identity, community, and a sense of belonging based on violence, a sense of superiority, and a culture/ideology based in hate.

There is much to be critical about in terms of some rap music, some action films, some video games, but none of them compare to the soundtrack to white supremacy.  Different game . . . different planet . . . different reality.   Do these genres of popular culture function as propaganda?  Do they produce revenue for organizations committed to white nationalism, retrograde racial politics, and even the coming race war?  Do they play a leading and self-conscious role in the recruitment of youth to advance these projects?  Efforts to reimagine hate rock as simply popular culture, applying the debates commonplace to the culture wars and ubiquitous in regards to the first amendment, fails to see how this music (as with other forms of white-nationalist produced popular culture) operates as propaganda, as an assault on truth. 

              

Maybe Cord Jefferson and others needs to crack open history books to truly understand the music.  In Nazi Germany, Joseph Goebbels, who was the Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, initiated “synchronization of culture, by which the arts were brought in line with Nazi goals.”  Was this just popular culture; was opposition to their propaganda akin to Tipper Gore?  Was the Nazi’s party use of newspapers and film simply a cultural production (see here for examples)?   I wonder if those who dismiss any discussion of the music, of the video games produced by white supremacist, of the various videos, would be so quick to dismiss the posters of Nazi Germany or the ways that Al Qaeda has used video games?  Would the discussion be “did these posters or video games” cause terrorism?  Why are we not examining the ways that white supremacists use the music to recruit, to disseminate a worldview based in violence, hate, and white supremacy?  

Yet, Jefferson and McWhorter trot out the same old tired arguments about free speech, about the number of individuals who have listened to the music without committing violence, and how there is no casual proof.   He might as well have argued that guns don’t kill people, music doesn’t kill people, bad people kill people:

Because the truth is that thousands and thousands of people just like Wade Page have for decades been listening to the same kind of hatecore he enjoyed, and yet very few of them have done what he did. In the same vein, neither will most Marilyn Manson fans go on a shooting rampage like that of his late fans Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who executed a host of their classmates at Columbine High School.

Over the past few days, Wade Page's friends and family have shed some light on his recent history: Page was an alcoholic who was discharged from the military in 2001 for showing up to a formation drunk. He was then fired from a trucking job in 2010 because got arrested for a DUI. After that, he found work hard to come by, and the bank foreclosed on his house in January of this year. By then he was 40 and living with money, no job, no family, and few ways to escape his alcoholic haze. It would certainly be tidy to say that the music made Page do it, but that neglects to acknowledge that hate, rage, and the eagerness to implode are also emotions every broke alcoholic probably feels, neo-Nazi or no. Interestingly, End Apathy put out one record before Page died. It was called Self Destruct.

The failure of people to look at the ideology, at grammar, and the message within hate rock is revealing. The discussion cannot and shouldn't just be about does "hate music" lead to violence? White supremacy leads to the violence; it leads to the music; it leads to  video games from white nationalists that encourage players to take pleasure in killing people of color. The discussion needs to be about how the music contributes to a worldview, how to represents an epistemological challenge to truth, how the music reifies a belief that whites are victims, that civilization is under attack. It is propaganda and therefore it is important to examine how it compels action, how it dehumanizes people of color, how it solidifies bonds within white nationalist communities through construction of the Other, and how it other spreads a narrative of white victimhood, dangerous criminals of color, threatening Jews, and a society that is increasingly inhospitable to white America. 

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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis.  Leonard’s latest book After Artest: Race and the Assault on Blackness was just published by SUNY Press in May of 2012.

C. Richard King is Professor of  Ethnic Studies at Washington State University at Pullman and the author/editor of several books, including Team Spirits: The Native American Mascot Controversy and Postcolonial America.