On the New Racist Discourse in America
November 4, 2014 § 78 Comments
[Note: Comments have become out of control on this blog post, including some downright racist terminology that I have not allowed to be posted, as well as a few that include veiled, and occasionally direct, threats against me.]
So Ben Stein thinks that Obama is the most racist president in the history of this great republic. He thinks so because allegedly Obama “is purposely trying to use race to divide Americans,” and is using the ‘race card’ to convince all African Americans to vote for the Democratic Party. Ben Stein is wrong.
Obama is not the racist one, but Stein is tapping into a new discourse of racist ideology arising from the right in this country. In this discourse, anyone who mentions race as an issue in contemporary American life risks being called a racist. Anyone who points out racial inequality is at risk of being branded racist. In the mindset of those who trumpet this new discourse, we’re all equal, no matter our ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, or racial background. And any attempt to point out inequality is therefore racist/sexist/homophobic, etc, by definition.
But what this discursive technique does is to deny the experiences of women and minorities in our society. It says to those who have experiences different than white men that their experiences are invalid. In short, this new racist discourse is meant to work as shorthand for racist viewpoints. Thus, by claiming Obama is racist, Stein is both diverting attention from his own racism, and engaging in that very racism he blames on Obama.
More often than not, this discursive technique comes hand-in-hand with declarations of what is in the best interests of African Americans. And in this sense, we return to the paternal racism of slave owners in the pre-Civil War era. I’m not saying that Ben Stein = slave plantation owner. I’m saying the tricks of technique here are very similar. Last spring, we saw the Carolina Chocolate Drops up in Vermont. Towards the end of the show, Rhiannon Giddens, the frontwoman of the band, told us of her own explorations of American history, and a book she read on slave narratives in the post-Civil War era. One story in particular struck her, and she wrote the song “Julie” about it.
In the story, the mistress of the plantation is shocked at the fact that Julie, the former slave woman would have a will of her own. She thought that she knew best for Julie, as did slave owners in general in a paternalist racist system.
And every time a white man or woman purports to know what’s best for African Americans, or any other minority, they’re engaging in this kind of paternalistic racism, which appears to be part and parcel of this new racist discourse from certain sectors of the political right in the United States.
Historians Being Mean: A Glossary
October 4, 2014 § 4 Comments
[Note: This is not mine, my wife, Margo Shea, came up with this last week in prepping for the Historiography course she’s teaching. But, I think it’s brilliant, and kind funny, too, and worth sharing. I took this, with her permission, of course, directly from her blog. All credit goes to her, not me. I’m just married to a woman who’s smarter than me.]
Historians Being Mean : A Glossary
OK, I think back to graduate seminars and wonder if they may be sites of some of the most grievous crimes against reality when it comes to language usage. Pompousness galore! While aspirational erudition can be really annoying (see – told you!), there are instances in which the correct word matters, not the OK word or the more or less descriptive word. This, of course, is coming from the woman who, as a four year old, asked her mom if she could postpone her nap because she wasn’t currently tired. I used the perfectly appropriate word and got out of my nap. Life lesson learned. Check.
In no particular order, then, here are a few of the most commonly used words historians sling at each other and what they mean. Followed by what they really mean
Unsubstantiated. Obvious and unequivocal, this means you just don’t have the evidence to make the claim. You rarely see the “unsubstantiated argument” in print as a response to an entire article or text, because it’s the baseline for the profession and most research that can’t pass muster on the whole ‘evidence’ thing doesn’t get published. If seen, it is usually applied to one aspect of the research, sometimes because the reviewer can’t think of anything else to criticize. More likely to be heard at conferences, occasionally seen in print records of scholarly roundtables. In which case it means, “I just don’t like you at all and I don’t care who knows it” or “You are getting way too close to my research topic.” Implied insult: You didn’t do your homework. (Alternate reading: Your sweeping, elegiac study kind of blows my mind, so instead of feeling unworthy of you, I’ll just hang out over here and quibble over details in this one subsection of this one chapter, OK?).
Overdetermined. In layman’s terms, this means that an argument about cause or motivation attributes way too much significance to one criterion or set of criteria amongst a much larger pool of possible causes or motivations. The interpretation doesn’t leave enough room for alternate readings. This critique can be lodged in a few different circumstances and can be related either to the argument itself or to the person presenting the argument. Sometimes it is just a fancy way of saying, “Hey there, you’re right on the verge of manipulating your sources to your own dastardly ends.” Also, scholars opposed to the ideologies espoused explicitly by an author or implied in the context of the historical work may use overdetermination as a stand-in for “interested.” (See below.) Implied insult: Your interpretation is about as subtle as two dogs sniffing each other’s nether regions.
Lost in the Structure/Agency Corn Maze. Anyone writing about what people did and why people did what they did, especially if they happen to occupy subaltern status vis á vis a dominant power structure, has to grapple with the whole agency thing. To what extent do individual actors and groups exert personal and collective choice propelling them to act or not act, to speak, to be silent, etc? And to what extent do the forces that structure their society influence and shape the boundaries of what is possible? (Marx’s superstructure, Bourdieu’s field, etc.) It is easy to get lost in this maze and critics are unfortunately somewhere looking down watching you bounce off dried husks. Implied Insult: Seriously, who really cares about what ordinary people did or why?
*Special thanks to Lara Kelland, who cares deeply about ordinary people who create social change, for this one.
Methods-Fetishistic. This basically red-flags an obsessive fascination with methods or methodology, a blind or perhaps naïve faith in methodology as the key to unveiling hitherto opaque historical truths. Historians who rely on quantitative, computational, data-mining methodologies fall under this scrutiny on the grounds that statistics don’t speak for themselves. Implied insult: Got analysis?
Essentialist/Essentializing. Basically, an essentialist argument applies an indispensable set of characteristics to any group of people, set of events or places or things. Over generalization but more than that – it often but not always involves negative judgment. All Irish people are alcoholic-soaked pugilists. All middle class women whose primary work is in the home in the 1950s were sexually repressed. It projects the characteristics of a few onto an entire group. Making data/evidence about a small number of historical actors apply to the whole. Treating as representative the actions, performance, rhetoric of a few. Implying connections between actions and subject positions without a lot of evidence. Implied insult: The trees aren’t the forest, sweetie. And btw, there are a LOT of shades of green.
Teleological. A teleological argument ignores contingencies that make historical change happen and basically suggest a certain inevitability of events. It is the classic “all roads led to here” argument. Basically, a teleological argument looks at the present scenario and structures evidence about the past in such a way as to explain smoothly and coherently how A led to Z. And occasionally you might get really lucky and be get told that you are “reifying a teleology.” Historical scholarship as means to end. Implied insult: Go back to grad school, Marxist.
Interested/Present-minded. These are teleological’s pesky little brothers. It is a somewhat less harsh way of saying much the same thing. You are hereby convicted of reading the past through a set of political, social or cultural interests and commitments or are looking at present circumstances and making assumptions about how historical actors might have responded to the same kinds of circumstances or how historical processes might have operated, etc. Plus, you aren’t even badass enough for me to throw teleology at you. Implied insult: Go to American Studies or Performance Studies or somewhere, you contemporary person, you. You don’t belong here.
Whiggish. Present-Minded + Pollyanna. Herbert Butterfield published The Whig Interpretation of History in 1931. “The Whig interpretation of history,” he said, was “the tendency in many historians to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasize certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present.” Things are always getting better. Progress is inevitable. History is a straight line towards awesome. Implied insult: If you love the system so much, maybe you should have just gone to business school.
The Subersiveness of “it’s”
September 26, 2014 § 6 Comments
Spelling errors and stupid mistakes really bug me. They bug me in student papers, but they bug me more in venues where the author/designer should know better. When I lived in Montreal all those years, English translations of official documents (like from the Gouvernement du Québec and the Ville de Montréal) were riddled with typos, grammatical errors, and spelling mistakes. The same could be said of advertising around the city. Lately, I’ve noticed faulty grammar, typos, and dodgy spelling on the websites of the likes of TSN and ESPN. Fine, you say, what else can you expect from dumb jocks. But the same errors are popping up on the websites of The Globe & Mail, the Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Guardian, and so on. In particular, “it’s.” “It’s” is the contraction of “it is.” It is NOT the possessive of “it.” The possessive of “it” is “its.” No apostrophe. I know, English is hard. Especially for native English speakers.
But lately, I am finding myself succumbing to the seductive siren call of “it’s.” Whenever I’m reading something with the incorrect usage of “it’s” in it, the little voice in my brain that reads the words always translates it is “it is.” So, I read sentences like “The American government is emboldened by it’s early successes in it’s fight with ISIS,” and I read “The American government is emboldened by it is early successes in it is fight with ISIS.”
And when I write something, I want to throw all caution to the wind, undo my years of education, my abhorrence of poor spelling, grammar, and typos and just succumb to the craze. I want to enjoy the joy of writing “it’s” when I mean “it is.” I want to feel that rush of adrenaline caused by breaking the rules!
Writing Deindustrialisation
September 19, 2014 § 3 Comments
I’m always surprised by how deindustrialisation and the economic and social dislocation it caused in the northern United States and Canada gets written about. Take, for example, an otherwise interesting and informative article in The Boston Globe last weekend. In an article about Sahro Hussan, a young Somali-American, and Muslim, woman who has created a business of avant-garde fashions for Muslim women, in Lewiston, ME, Linda Matchan, The Globe‘s reporter, writes:
Lewiston was one of the largest textile producers in New England, rolling out millions of yards in cotton fabrics every year. In time, though, the industry struggled to compete with Southern states where production costs were lower. Lewiston went into decline.
While there is nothing factually wrong with Matchan’s description of what happened in Lewiston (or any other industrial town across the northern portion of North America), note how any responsibility for what happened is removed from the equation. Matchan makes it sound like this was just an entirely natural process.
Deindustrialisation wasn’t a natural process, it didn’t just happen. The reason why the mills in Lewiston (or Lowell, Laurence, Lynn, or anywhere else) struggled wasn’t some random event. It happened because the corporations that owned those mills decided that they were not producing enough value for share-owners. So these corporations pulled out of places like Lewiston and moved down South. Why? Because production costs were too great in the North, the workers made too much (they were often unionised), and there was too much regulation of the workplace for the corporations’ preferences. So, they were induced to pull out and move down South where workplace regulation was minimal, where workers weren’t unionised, and the corporations could make great profits. The governments down South actively worked with these corporations to bring them South, mostly through these unregulated workplaces and tax incentives. As a friend of mine notes, this is how the South won the Civil War. But the South’s victory was shortlived, as soon, the corporations realised they could make even more money for their shareholders by moving overseas.
So. Long and short, deindustrialisation wasn’t just some random process, it was a cold, calculated manoeuvre by the corporations that owned these mills, in conjunction with cynical state and local governments in the South.
On Being Called a “Frog”
May 23, 2014 § 30 Comments
I got called a ‘frog’ today. Every time this happens, it stuns me. Like stops me in my tracks stuns me. It’s happened a handful of times in my life, a few times in Ontario and British Columbia and now twice in Massachusetts. The last time it happened was at the bar of a restaurant in a small town in Western Massachusetts. I was having an amiable conversation with a guy about hockey. He was a New York Rangers’ fan and I, of course, cheer for the Habs. When I told him I was from Montreal, he said, “Oh, I guess that makes you a frog.” I don’t think he really understood what the word meant. But it was a conversation stopper, I visibly recoiled from him.
I have asked most of my French Canadian friends about this. They, of course, have been called ‘frog’ many times in their lives, in Canada, the US, and Britain. None of my friends is particularly fond of this particular epithet, of course, but most of them are also rather sanguine about it. Perhaps due to being called a ‘frog’ repeatedly, according to one friend. One of my tweeps is married to a French guy, as in from France, and she calls him ‘the Frog.’ Clearly, for most people who actually are French or French Canadian, the term isn’t a big deal. Me, on the other hand, it is a big deal for me. Maybe because I’m an Anglo.
The term ‘frog’ was actually first applied to the Dutch by the British, who saw the Dutch as marsh-dwellers. Get it? Frogs live in marshes, too. But then, in the mid-18th century, the French became the main enemies of the British, so the term got applied to the French due to their propensity towards eating frogs’ legs. Eventually, the term ended up getting applied to French Canadians, just, I suppose, due to Anglo laziness. Then again, Anglo Canadians have come up with other names for French Canadians, such as ‘pea soupers’ and ‘Pepsis,’ due to their alleged fondness for pea soup and Pepsi. One Anglo Montrealer once told me that the Pepsi epithet also worked because French Canadians were said to be ’empty from the neck up.’ And French-speaking Quebecers also have a whole long string of nasty names for Anglos, including my favourite, tête-carré.
But. I’m not French Canadian. I’m an Anglo from Quebec. So when I get called a ‘frog’, it stuns me. Today I was called a ‘frog’ because I was wearing my Montreal Canadiens ball cap around. I’m used to the abuse the hat brings me in and around Boston. I welcome most of it, especially since the Canadiens knocked out the Bruins in the last round of the playoffs. But usually it doesn’t go beyond “Habs suck” and variations thereof. I don’t get told to go back to Canada (though I was once told to “Get out of my country” by a guy in Vancouver once), I don’t get called names or anything like that and 98% of the banter is friendly. Since the Canadiens knocked out the Bruins, most people have even been respectful.
What makes today’s name-calling all the more puzzling is that I’m wearing a t-shirt that makes fun of Irish stereotypes and I have a huge Celtic cross tattooed on my right calf. So clearly I’m not French Canadian. And when this guy called me ‘frog’ and dissed the Habs, I actually stopped cold in my tracks. I was stunned. I just looked at him, he seemed to realise he’d gone too far and scooted off.
But I do find it interesting how much I detest the term. And how much it offends me. Any thoughts on the matter are welcome.
On the Recent Phenomemon of White Guys Using the N-Word
January 18, 2014 § Leave a comment
A few days ago, I went to the barber. Had to look natty before the start of the new semester. It was busy in my barbershop, but it’s always busy, the key is to go early. So I did. Didn’t work, there was still a healthy lineup to get to Jose, my barber. I was one of two white guys in the shop, everyone else was African American. ESPN was, as always, on, and those of us waiting were watching basketball highlights. After one particularly “sick” play, the other white guy, who was about twenty, declared about the player who made the sick play, “Yo, that’s my n—-!” The guy next to me was also the only other guy over the age of 40 in there. He looked like he wanted to tear this kid’s head off. And so I was put in that uncomfortable position; I called the kid on the term. He was flummoxed that it was racist. And embarrassed.
The easy thing to do is to question his mental competency. But I think it’s more complicated than that. He was around 20 years old and, at least so he claimed, had no idea that the N-word is racist. I began telling him the history of the word, how it derives from the Spanish, “negro,” which simply means “black,” which then got perverted by the English, as both colonisers and slave traders, and came to have a derogatory meaning by the 19th century. He claimed he had no idea.
I’ve had this conversation with some of my students, particularly back in Montréal, in the affluent West Island suburbs of the city. Some of these kids, all of them white, thought it completely acceptable to call each other by that word. I was stunned then, I remain stunned today.
It is also worth pointing out that they are not actually using the word in a pejorative sense, they are not using it to put someone down, or calling someone a name. They are simply referring to each other. In the case of the kid in the barbership, he was using the term in the sense that someone else might say, “Yo, that’s my man!”. And the kids back in Montréal were using the term in the way others would say, “Yo, my man!”. But that doesn’t make their usage of the word any less offensive or disturbing.
I recently read an explanation for this phenomenon, which said it’s the result of hip hop culture, because rappers throw the word around amongst themselves, blah blah blah. I don’t buy it. I grew up listening to hip hop, I bought my first rap album in 1984 (It was Run-DMC’s début album, Run-DMC, if you’re wondering). To this day, hip hop remains one of my favourite, if not my favourite, music form. And yet, I know that word is wrong. So what is it that leads young white men (I have never heard a young white woman use the term) think it’s acceptable to drop the N-word? I honestly don’t know.
Matthew Barlow 