Why This Will Be the Worst Black History Month In Our Postracial History

It has been an exciting month here in the postracial United States. Rod Blagojevich proclaimed that he was blacker than Obama in Esquire magazine. Harry Reid lauded Obama as a viable presidential candidate, particularly because of his light skin and lack of “Negro dialect.” And just this Wednesday, Chris Matthews of Hardball proclaimed that he forgot Obama was black during the State of The Union address, suggesting that Obama is truly a postracial figure. The race discussion hasn’t just been limited to happenings in the United States, however. In the wake of the recent earthquake in Haiti, Rush Limbaugh suggested that the Obama administration’s fast response would help Obama gain credibility with both light-and dark-skinned African Americans. Pat Robertson recently suggested that Haiti was struck by the earthquake because of their "pact with the devil" in the slaves’ bid for independence from France in the 1700s.

Phew. It’s been a fun month.

It is customary in our politically correct culture to generally absolve “liberal” folks of these comments from any responsibility in these instances by calling them gaffes or minimizing their responsibility. These folks are never labeled as racist because we believe their intentions, their “hearts” are good. On the flip side, it is also customary for our culture to decry the horrible racism of those on the “conservative” side, and Limbaugh and Robertson are often lambasted for being racist and generally ignorant.

I’m proposing that both the liberal and conservative versions of these racial comments are racist because of the function they serve in the larger racial narrative—to code otherness, specifically blackness, into popular culture and media discourse. Codes work in similar ways for other “others.” Lou Dobbs constant labeling of undocumented workers as “illegal aliens” is a strong code for Latino immigrants that allow a particular racial image without actually having to say “Latino.” The same holds true for the word “terrorist” and the contexts within which the word is used—the word can easily become a code for Arab or Muslim.

The current dominant discourse in the United States is that we are somehow postracial—that we have indeed transcended and “gotten beyond” the issue of race as it plays itself out in our society. However, just as Michel Foucault in the History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 argues against the repressive hypothesis of sex by pointing out that his culture actually obsessively talked about sex in order to define the rules of sexuality, I argue that our culture, as opposed to being postracial, is obsessively talking about race in order to write new codes and rules for how we relate as racialized bodies.

The word “racist” is a shameful word in our current cultural language. Nobody wants to be called a racist because our current rules of race envision racism as a personal problem which only hate groups, White supremacists, and mean people embody. Or, we see racism as a large superstructure—a big “thing” out there in our society that comes as a result of historical slavery and structural inequalities. Importantly, structural racism is not really anyone’s fault; it just sort of happens, and we feel really bad for “minorities” because it happens directly to them.

While both of these aspects of racism certainly exist, I am most concerned about targeting the relations of power (Foucault, History of Sexuality) that come from everyday interactions which code and mark power through language. These relations happen at the level which we live our everyday lives: the choice to lock your car door when a black man walks by; flocking to adopt a Haitian child and expecting the child to learn English, instead of you learning French; telling your friend that you don’t have a race because you’re “just white”; joking that the “terrorists are coming” when Arab classmates get up to give a presentation; clutching your purse closer to your body when a black man gets on the elevator; dressing up as “ghetto-fabulous,” a pimp, or a rapper for Halloween; telling your articulate black friend that you “don’t think of them as black”; and asking your colleague from India if this is the first time they are eating salad. In this rendering of relations of power, we can better pinpoint actions that enact racist assumptions.

According to Beverly Tatum, racism can be visualized as:
“…a moving walkway at the airport. Active racist behavior is equivalent to walking fast on the conveyor belt. The person engaged in active racist behavior has identified with the ideology of White supremacy and is moving with it. Passive racist behavior is equivalent to standing still on the walkway. No overt effort is being made, but the conveyor belt moves the bystanders along to the same destination as those who are actively walking.” (Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?)

So, where do the discourses of those like Chris Matthews fit into this rendering? I see these discourses as the electricity and belts that move the walkway—the codes and rules for how racism moves in our particular culture. Hence, I am arguing that statements like the one by Chris Matthews and other “liberals” are in fact not accidental gaffes. These, like the statements of Pat Robertson or Rush Limbaugh, are constitutive elements of our codes of racial narrative—the electricity behind our racist moving walkway. These statements send important signals about the positionality of “black” in our culture.

Within this framework it is possible to see how individual people and our society collectively enact racist practices on the level of discourse (media) and everyday relationships. With this rendering, to say someone is racist is not a judgment on the “goodness” of their heart. It is an incisive marking of the practices that individuals enact that code our relations of power in ways that keep our racial hierarchies intact. It is, in a sense, a way to “make visible” the invisible codes at work in relations of power.

What all of the comments from the beginning of my blog had in common is that they all found ways to make black seem a less-than-desirable place to inhabit. These discourses are a deeply embedded, problematic, and common way that our society structures racial understanding. These codes belie the rules of how we relate to difference. Chris Matthews' statements are just as racist as those of Rush Limbaugh. Likewise, “having a friend” from Lebanon or Mexico, or one that is black (or many for that matter) does not have any bearing on the power relations you may enact which marginalizes them.

We are surrounded by these racial codes in behavior and in media discourse. We are not postracial; rather, we are entrenched in a racialized society and we are constantly enacting, writing, and re-writing the rules. Oddly enough, in all of this “rule writing,” the same groups of people keep getting written into the bottom of hierarchy. More importantly, one single group is always written at the top. The direction of our walkway still hasn’t changed.

This blog is cross-posted at www.gnovisjournal.org

Schools Don't Need Teachers Like You. So Don't Stay.

As I close my time at Chavez, a teacher who left this past year wrote an opinion piece, published in the Washington Post, that I consider a quintessential "white myth" about working in inner-city schools.

The author, Ms. Fine, wrote a heartfelt and nostalgic piece about her four years at Chavez--4 years characterized by her triumphs and defeats, but most of all by what she believed to be her unappreciated dedication to "urban" schools, and her unrequited desire to "give back" as someone who has been given so much privilege.

Ms. Fine racially codes her article by informing readers that she 1) worked in an "urban" school and 2) was from suburban "Ivy League" upbringing herself. She has through these simple clues informed the readers that she is a "trespasser," of sorts; indeed, she has deigned to come all the way from privilege to the inner city to help what is assumed to be poor black children, a fact which is confirmed by Fine's reference to the "slam wall" in her classroom. As an Ivy-League educated female, coming from a family of suburban privilege, Ms. Fine declares that something about working in urban schools was "seductively gritty."

It is this statement and some other coded language that belies Ms. Fine's orientation--and is the basis for my argument that we do not need more teachers like her in inner-city schools.

Throughout her article, Ms. Fine makes it clear that her decision to work at schools like Chavez seems to arise from some moral heroism. She wants to "give back" after living a life of privilege. She identifies herself as a member of the millennial generation, characterized by engagement and achievement orientation (Howe and Strauss). Ms. Fine was working at Chavez, apparently, because it was the "right" thing to do.

She discusses at length, in almost martyr-like fashion, the social status she has left behind to pursue teaching as a career. She laments that others like her, with Ivy League education in tow, do not have to face the same questions about their career choices. And she gives an anecdotal example of the challenges she faces in the classroom with an urban student who, while Ms. Fine is working oh-so-hard to teach the student to read, cusses Ms. Fine out under her breath.

Perhaps Shawna detected in Ms. Fine the same paternalistic, condescending way of being that I discovered in this writing. Frankly, if Ms. Fine were my teacher, I'd probably cuss her out too.

Ms. Fine's article, and Ms. Fine herself, are a quintessential example of race relations in our country today. Now, some of you may be saying, "I read the article, and it wasn't about race!!" But indeed, it was about race. It was about coded racial language, and the racial myth-telling that reinforces the supremacy of white skin as all things good, positive, and beautiful. Indeed, Ms. Fine's article is a great example of what I will call a "whiteness myth"--a story that is shaped to bring to light the general goodness of white people, while subtly implying negative stereotypes about people of color.

Racism is a cornerstone upon which this country was built. Over the years, racism has taken whatever form necessary to survive. In the early years of the country, it was overt, brutal and based mainly around the need for free labor. Today, it is covert, still brutal, and still tied tightly to our economic structure. But racism has also embedded itself deeply into our social fabric, and without it we would not know how to relate to one another. I believe there is a very deep need for white identity people to feel that their effect on the world in general, and on our country in specific, has been primarily positive and good--despite much evidence to the contrary.

White identity people have disrupted and displaced entire communities and groups of people. Slavery, the displacement of indigenous peoples, the colonization of African and Caribbean countries, the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII and the re-gentrification of our inner cities are just a few examples of the effects of white supremacy on the lives of people of color throughout history. Indeed, the entire concept of whiteness itself was created mainly as a definition of power--to make those who have privilege easily recognizable.

What does all of this have to do with Ms. Fine's little article? Ms. Fine's article is a small but important contribution to the storytelling tapestry of the whiteness myth. Her story is part of what helps white folks sleep at night. Instead of looking at her presence at Chavez with a critical, introspective eye, Ms. Fine chose to tell a story of her heroism. She chose to paint herself as the dedicated but overwhelmed white teacher who could not overcome the terrible odds of working in an urban school with kids who don't want to read and administrators who are tyrants. Ms. Fine's article contributes to the "telling" of an important trend in our modern day society--the "benign" invasion of the inner city by white folks with privilege.

White race people of privilege and money come to the city in many ways, but most recently it has been through high powered jobs and "revitalization." Most frighteningly, it is also through programs such as Teach For America, where young privileged college students are recruited as teachers for the inner-city schools who "need them most." As yuppies and hipsters move into the inner-city, they have displaced many communities of color. And as white identity, young, privileged college graduates move into our inner-city schools, they are ill-equipped to deal with what stares them in face: injustice.

I'm sure that it was a difficult and eye-opening experience for Ms. Fine her first year, as she encountered students who couldn't read for the first time. She probably encountered students who also didn't always have enough to eat, and students who had been affected by poverty in profound ways. There was probably very little dialogue that allowed her to reconcile her students' experiences with her own of privilege and plenty. Ms. Fine entered a world everyday in her classroom that was foreign to her own life experience, and failed to find a good answer for why these students struggled while her own life had been so privileged. The answer to her question is in part, racism. Indeed, Ms. Fine's privilege in life is primarily unearned, as is the difficulty in the lives of her students. But as there were probably very few people who were willing and able to have those honest discussions about race, class and power, Ms. Fine had to construct a myth about her time at Chavez that would assuage her guilt while placing the blame for her leaving somewhere outside of herself.

Ms. Fine's version of racism is too sophisticated to blame the students for her choice to leave, although her racism is not yet sophisticated enough to avoid painting her students as ungrateful. Indeed, among young privileged do-gooders these days, it is standard to note that they do not blame inner-city kids for their own predicament. So Ms. Fine chose the administration as her scapegoat, as well as the lack of appreciation for the profession of teaching within our society as a whole. But these are only small distractions from the moral of Ms. Fine's story: that she was a person of privilege who chose to go into the inner-city to make a difference, only to be derailed by the difficulty.

Her story paints a picture of hopelessness for our inner-city schools. She suggests at the end of her article that armies of students like herself are waiting to swoop in to urban schools and save education, but that since tyrannical administrators don't recognize and appreciate it, those armies will only be around for a couple years and then leave. But she never once asks a critical question: could it be that racism is a large part of why our inner-city schools are underachieving? If so, then her presence, and the presence of those like her, only contribute to the continuing downward spiral. In fact, I would argue that regardless of the circumstances, people such as Ms. Fine (Ivy League educated, privileged and white) wouldn't stick around in inner-city schools for much more than a couple years because it doesn't serve their life goals, and doesn't move them up in the society's status game. Most don't stick around because they don't have to. The students, on the other hand, don't have the luxury of jumping up and leaving when it gets too hard. This is their reality. I know no better demonstration of race and class privilege than this. While Ms. Fine's students will continue in the same urban school this year, Ms. Fine will be taking time to write and travel.

And she wants us to pat her on the back for the four years she gave to urban kids....

Frankly, I'm terrified to think that brand new Ivy League college graduates are waiting in the wings, eager to "get their hands dirty" in the inner city. Most of these folks will only pass through for a couple of years. They will receive awards and recognition for their time "in the trenches." They will put Teach for America and other programs on their resume and wear it as a badge of honor, a rite of passage. Then, they will move on to pursue their "real lives," as doctors, lawyers, and politicians. The decisions they make will affect the educational chances of inner-city children. And people will believe that they know what they are talking about, because "they worked in an inner-city school for a few years after they graduated."

To these privileged masses I say--it doesn't take a trip into the inner-city to come to terms with what ills our society. It is a society built on oppressions--sexism, racism, homophobia, classim--and a society obsessed with status. As members of the "ruling class," forays into the inner-city only serve as a reminder of what you have at your disposal, and add a layer of denial about your own complicity in the system.

To Ms. Fine I say, keep your favors. Out here in the inner-city, with the "urban" kids, what we need most is self-determination and freedom from the racial injustice that feeds into our economic and physical reality. These are two things that no one--not even you--can give to us. These are two things that we have to bring to fruition ourselves.

U Street Packaged

I hate going to U Street these days.

As I walked through the U Street district toward my favorite local haunt (Busboys and Poets) yesterday, I felt a tremendous sadness--followed by a deep frustration. In the past three years, I have watched the U Street District become a curious microcosm of race and class relations. I felt sad because of the loss of history and the loss of "our space" as African Americans living in Washington, DC. I felt frustrated by the narrative I see being written into more and more urban spaces in the United States. This narrative is subtle, but it is important evidence that we are not, in fact, in a "post racial" era. Racism and classism, deeply intertwined, are still an integral (if subtle) part of our social fabric. They still inform our society at foundational levels.

After the Civil War, the U Street Corridor had the highest number of African Americans dwelling in an urban location (http://www.ustreetcorridor.com/u-street-history/). It was here that great thinkers like W.E.B. DuBois would come for an evening out, and where many Black artists and performers made names for themselves. Dubbed "Black Broadway," the U Street corridor was where black people could entertain and be entertained in the height of Jim Crow segregation.

Within the past 15 years, the U Street Corridor has become a location of high-rise condominiums, popular ethnic food restaurants, and lots and lots of young white professionals. The story the developers will tell you (and part of it may be true) is that the U Street Corridor before their massive development effort was a neighborhood in disrepair, and a neighborhood of crime and drugs. What they won't openly tell you (and is certainly true) is that it was a predominantly black neighborhood with a rich history--one that probably looked more frightening from the outside than from within.

As I type this blog, I am sitting in a mid-rise apartment in the Kenilworth neighborhood. Outside of my window I can see the same things that happened to U Street in the 90's. First, lots of construction to address the dilapidated infrastructure that was not important enough to fix earlier despite the thousands of residents (primarily black and poor) that have lived there for many years. Next, the large buildings begin to pop up, looking very strange in the landscape of condemned and dilapidated buildings around them. Finally, business that would have never considered this neighborhood as palatable begin to purchase the spaces in between large buildings (Starbucks, Cosi, Pottery Barn). Locals will begin to see ads and hear about the Kenilworth neighborhood as the newest, hottest place to live. Those who have lived there for years will be forced out--either through the purchase of their homes at prices higher than they paid (but lower than market value), or through the proclamation of an historic district, which forces home owners to pay for costly preservation or face losing their homes. The remnant of native residents will be squeezed out through rising rent costs, making way for even more condominiums and businesses.

They will call it, as they did with U Street, revitalization. But the story that will not be told is how low income black folks in urban spaces are increasingly being moved in order to accommodate a richer, lighter demographic. We won't hear the story of how disposable these native populations have become, and what it means to literally move into a community's space with little or no intention of allowing the humans who lived there previously to remain. There will be little discussion of the systemic racism and classism that is inherent in only paying attention to a community when developers show an interest in it.

What we will hear, however, is that the new hip area is an historic district. Somebody will find a brilliant way to package the diversity that once lived there into a nice ad, a nice new coffee shop, a fabulous new scarf. But the stoop stories of the native population will be displaced with those who still have the memories to tell them.

How does racism manifest itself in these spatial landscapes? Why are black bodies and black homes still considered so disposable? And why do developers (and later the yuppies who move into their buildings) find it so important to "honor" the spirit of a place by emphasizing its historic nature and "ethnic flavor," all while dishonoring the actual native inhabitants? Is it possible that our society has created a "black," an "ethnic," and an "historic" that has a separate life from the actual human beings that inhabit those identities?

As I wander through U Street I still see some of the native population frequenting their old corners and spots. And I hear the complaining of the new residents, who wish that someone would "do something" about "all of this." I assume "this" is the presence of those who lived there before, the humans who do not fit the "ethnic" and "historic" flavor of the U Street Corridor. It's ironic that the very people who gave U Street its urban feel are disdained for showing their actual faces in a place. It's painful to see their existence despised, while what they are supposed to represent is celebrated. And it's frightening (and a little surreal) to walk down the streets of a black historic district and see only white faces.

And this is why I hate going to U Street these days.