Sep 30, 2014

Human Activity Killing the Planet's Life-Supporting Systems




Human activity has brought the planet's life-supporting systems to the brink of tipping points, causing an "alarming" loss in biodiversity and critical threats to the services nature has provided humankind.

So finds the newest state of the planet report (pdf) from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which offers a damning look on the health of the Earth.

"We're gradually destroying our planet’s ability to support our way of life," stated Carter Roberts, president and CEO of WWF.

Among the report's findings is a dramatic loss in biodiversity. Its Living Planet Index, managed by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and based on over 10,000 populations of over 3,000 species, shows a 52 percent decline in global wildlife between 1970 and 2010. And that's a trend that "shows no sign of slowing down."

Among the causes of the decline are climate change, habitat loss and degradation, and exploitation.

Breaking these losses down further, the report states that populations of freshwater species have declined 76 percent, compared to losses of 39 percent each for marine species and terrestrial populations.

Region-wise, Latin America has suffered the biggest decline in biodiversity, with species populations plummeting 83 percent.

Global wildlife populations have declined over 50 percent between 1970 and 2010.The impacts of humankind's assault on the planet are not being felt equally, the report notes, as higher-income countries have an "ecological footprint" five times higher than those of lower-income countries. In fact, because of resource imports, high-income countries "may effectively be outsourcing biodiversity loss," stated Keya Chatterjee, WWF’s senior director of footprint.

Looking at humanity's overall "ecological footprint," the report states that we need 1.5 planets to provide for the current demands on nature.

Water footprints are noted as well, and the report states that in some ares "such as Australia, India and USA ...life-giving aquifers are being severely depleted." Agriculture is responsible for the lion's share of use, accounting for 92 percent of the global water footprint

Because of the human activity changes is causing on the planet, the report states, "we can no longer exclude the possibility of reaching critical tipping points that could abruptly and irreversibly change living conditions on Earth."

The WWF stresses that these sobering statistics were not unavoidable, and that the challenges we now confront to effect change are not insurmountable.

"The scale of biodiversity loss and damage to the very ecosystems that are essential to our existence is alarming. This damage is not inevitable but a consequence of the way we choose to live," stated Professor Ken Norris, Director of Science at the ZSL.

As WWF's Roberts stated, "we already have the knowledge and tools to avoid the worst predictions. We all live on a finite planet and it's time we started acting within those limits."

To hear more about some of the details of the report, watch this video from ZSL


Stay aware. Take action.

OneLove

:::MME:::

Sep 29, 2014

Human Extinction in our Lifetime?



Global warming is real - and possibly even worse than we've been told. Could it lead to the destruction of human civilization within just a few decades? This interview will unsettle you in so many ways...

OneLove 


:::MME:::

Musings

Polyarchy: A system where the participation of masses of people is limited to voting among one or another representatives of the elite in periodic elections. Between elections, the masses are expected to keep quiet, go back to life as usual while the elite make decisions and run the world until they can choose between one or another elite member another four years later. So polyarchy is a system of elite rule, and a system of elite rule that is little bit more soft-core than the elite rule that we would see under a military dictatorship; but what we see is that under a polyarchy, the basic socio-economic system does not change, it does not become democratized.




OneLove

:::MME:::

We Are Dead Stars




Every atom in our bodies was fused in an ancient star. NASA astronomer Dr. Michelle Thaller explains how the iron in our blood connects us to one of the most violent acts in the universe—a supernova explosion—and what the universe might look like when all the stars die out. Amazing to think about this....This life is, in a sense, magical. 

OneLove

 :::MME:::

Chris Hedges on Willful Blindness, Climate Corporatism & the Underground Revolt




...what a world! 

OneLove

 :::MME:::

Sep 24, 2014

Project Censored: The Movie




"Project Censored: The Movie" is a documentary film about the news media in the United States written and directed by Christopher Oscar and Doug Hecker. The film is based on the work by Project Censored, a media organization at Sonoma State University that publishes under-reported news stories. I have been posting Project Censored material for a few years on this blog. It is truly amazing how much bullshit passes as "news" on a daily basis. Entertainment/Sports news is front & center--junk food news. No wonder most people don't have a clue as to what is going on in the world. And all that banter in between the "news" items by the anchors themselves - what they hell is that? Who cares about their thoughts/opinions?  Instead of silly talk, give us information that matters! How are we to have a vibrant democracy without relevant news? Judging from the documentary, maybe the intention really is to dumb us down and dilute our collective power.........As I've said repeatedly, seek alternative media live DemocracyNow, RT, InTheseTimes, Alternet or The Guardian to get a better understanding of what's going on....







OneLove

:::MME:::

Sep 22, 2014

Musings

"The Prophet- On Talking"
by Kahlil Gibran
"You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts;
And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips,
and sound is a diversion and a pastime.
And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered.
For thought is a bird of space,
that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.


There are those among you who seek the talkative through fear of being alone.
The silence of aloneness reveals to their eyes their naked selves and they would escape.
And there are those who talk, and without knowledge or forethought
reveal a truth which they themselves do not understand.
And there are those who have the truth within them, but they tell it not in words.
In the bosom of such as these the spirit dwells in rhythmic silence.


When you meet your friend on the roadside or in the market place,
let the spirit in you move your lips and direct your tongue.
Let the voice within your voice speak to the ear of his ear;
For his soul will keep the truth of your heart as the taste of the wine is remembered
When the color is forgotten and the vessel is no more."
^^^^^^
OneLove
::::MME:::

Time Warps





I always had a fascination for black & white films. There is something so organic & elemental about them that allows one to focus on the story/script and make space for thought without the distraction of advanced production techniques. The Twilight Zone series used to be one of my favorite shows as it allowed for the entertainment of alternative perspectives, and being the daydreamer that I was, it fit right into my natural tendencies.This particular episode, "Walking Distance", resonated  with me back in the day as I held on to this strange,  quaint thought back then that I was trapped in a time warp. Sounds crazy now. Overactive imagination or reading too many Marvel comicx, perhaps, but I still feel that there is more to this life/universe than meets our senses & sensibilities...

OneLove

:::MME:::


Obama, the slide back to Iraq & the power of the “Deep State” by Andrew O'Hehir






It was certainly impolitic of filmmaker Michael Moore, and possibly unfair as well, to tell the Hollywood Reporter in a recent interview that Barack Obama would only be remembered, a century from now, as the first black president of the United States. I am tempted to respond that while Obama’s race will always be the headline, its real significance is more like a footnote. He will quite plausibly be remembered more for other things, and some of them (though not a lot of them) are laudable. He began the process of moving the country away from our profoundly unfair and overpriced catch-as-catch-can private health insurance system toward some kind of socialized medicine. (Yeah, I said it.) That’s no small achievement, considering how many previous administrations have impaled themselves on the same sword, although God alone knows how long it will take for that process to play out.

Obama may also be remembered, somewhat less favorably, for embracing and even extending the notion of the “imperial executive” bequeathed to him by the Bush-Cheney regime; for promising the most transparent administration in history and delivering instead the most secretive and most paranoid; for running on the now-infamous promise of “hope and change” and presiding over an era of disillusion and stagnation. Now we get to witness the tragicomic denouement of Obama’s presidency, as he gets suckered into riding the slippery-slide of doom into another Iraq war, and so undoing the principal campaign promise that got him elected in 2008. (If you believed any syllable of the “no ground troops” pledge, for even a second, before the chair of the Joint Chiefs called backsies on it the other day, I’ll have to think of something much more impressive than the Brooklyn Bridge to sell you.) Has any previous president ever fulfilled a major campaign promise and then unraveled it again, all by himself? I’m guessing the answer is yes, but let’s leave that challenge to the history buffs.

Some of those things can be rationalized away, I guess, as byproducts of partisan political paralysis or international crisis. There’s no doubt that Obama has faced intractable opposition from a party that has bet its electoral future on villainizing him, and also that he has confronted a highly unstable geopolitical situation and a sluggish economic recovery. But those things cannot all be blamed on the Republicans or the terrorists. While the right-wing caricature of the president as an inept and disengaged executive who has been pinioned by circumstance and buffeted from crisis to crisis is a simplistic and self-serving fiction, it offers a convenient frame for comprehending the Obama enigma. American media and American politics always long to revert to familiar and comforting core narratives, to Great Man (and, someday soon, Great Woman) myths about “character” and “leadership,” rather than looking for deep-rooted systemic or structural explanations that are more likely to be true.

If the key to an effective presidency lies in some list of individual qualities out of a business-school self-help book, then the problem is simply that we misjudged the quality of the job applicants last time around. My diagnosis is that anybody who tells themselves, “Gosh, wouldn’t things be different if we had elected Hillary” – or McCain, or Romney, or Howard Dean, or whomever the hell you like – is missing the point, whatever their supposed ideology may be. The real secret of the Obama presidency lies in a set of facts that appear to be contradictory on the surface, but taken together serve to mask the true nature of the American state in the 21st century. On one hand, the president now resembles a species of elected king, with the power to wage secret war on multiple continents, spy on anyone and everyone, and conduct assassination campaigns against civilians (including U.S. citizens), all without any congressional oversight or public explanation. On the other hand, the range of real-world options available to this imperial executive, in practice, appears curiously and stringently limited.

Gosh, it almost looks as if the overheated bipartisan circus in Washington, which eats up so much media bandwidth and so much of the oxygen in public discourse, despite the fact that we all hate it and all understand how useless it is, functions as a grand distraction while the most fundamental questions of economic policy and foreign policy are never discussed or debated in public. I can’t be sure, for example, whether Obama came to the White House already determined to let the same pack of billion-dollar criminals who had brought the financial system to the brink of doom shuffle the deck a little and carry on, or whether it became clear to him that no other option was really available. Similarly, I don’t know whether Obama had already been swayed to the Dick Cheney “dark side” doctrine of permanent covert warfare before he became president, or whether he was immediately surrounded and hypnotized by the Orc-spooks of what former congressional staffer Mike Lofgren calls the “Deep State.” How we interpret Obama’s motives or mind-set doesn’t matter much in the end, and only serves to twist the focus back toward delusional questions about individual character.

If you haven’t read Lofgren’s essay, “Anatomy of the Deep State,” which was published on Bill Moyers’ website last February, it might be the most important document of American political journalism in this decade, let alone this year. It’s even more trenchant now than it was in the relatively innocent days of last winter. He discusses the contradiction I mention above in great detail: Even as the Republicans have succeeded in bringing the most routine parliamentary business of Washington to a grinding halt, the president is permitted to “liquidate American citizens without due processes, detain prisoners indefinitely without charge, conduct dragnet surveillance on the American people without judicial warrant and engage in … witch hunts against federal employees.” While Republicans indulge their constituents’ cuckoo-for-Cocoa Puffs fantasies about Obama the Kenyan-socialist dictator, almost no one in Congress ever mentions any of this stuff. (The notable exceptions are Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who appear to have actually read the Constitution and are treated as left-wing and right-wing kooks, respectively.)

Lofgren, who spent almost three decades on Capitol Hill as, in effect, an adjunct or employee of the Deep State, describes it as “a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently ruled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose.” Its principal institutions are mostly large and obvious: the immense professional bureaucracies at the State Department, the Defense Department, Treasury and Justice, along with the CIA and NSA and Homeland Security and a laundry list of smaller and more mysterious entities like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose every action is a highly classified state secret. As Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks have partially made clear, the Deep State is tied by many subterranean threads to both Wall Street and Silicon Valley, so much so that it is not always clear who is the servant and who the master. While the functionaries of the Deep State profess to be non-ideological and above politics, they actually represent the “Washington Consensus,” a self-reinforcing combination of neoliberal, free-market economic policies and an aggressive, militaristic foreign policy that defines the zone of American interests as the entire globe.

Lofgren makes clear that he is not claiming the existence of a secret conspiratorial cabal, but you could almost say he’s protesting too much. What he really means is that the operatives of the Deep State do not see themselves in that light. They are the grown-ups who actually run things, irrespective of which party the bozo in the Oval Office belongs to, while the rest of us fight over marriage legislation and history textbooks and football players who beat their wives and other cultural effluvia that (to them) don’t much matter. One of Lofgren’s most interesting hypotheses comes in a footnote, the idea that the Deep State operates via stage-managed crises that force the hands of political leaders toward desired outcomes. (He doesn’t mean that 9/11 was an inside job or whatever; he means that al-Qaida in 2001, and ISIS in 2014, are framed as problems that can only have military solutions.) In other words, to an outsider the Deep State sure as hell looks and functions like a conspiratorial cabal, one that operates according to its own principles and views democracy with undisguised contempt. In practice, it is not much different from the entrenched bureaucratic elites that ran the Soviet Union or the Ottoman Empire or whatever other top-heavy, sclerotic and self-deluding state apparatus you can come up with.

Writing many months before the rise of ISIS became headline news and the prospect of an American reentry into Iraq emerged, Lofgren notes that “the Deep State is populated with those whose instinctive reaction to the failure of their policies is to double down on those policies in the future.” Stalemate in Iraq (or worse) led to stalemate in Afghanistan (or worse), which led to the chaos in Libya that produced Benghazi and the confused effort to overthrow Assad in Syria. That whole concatenation of events – all of which, arguably, flow from the American invasion of Iraq in the first place — has now produced a new threat that the wise men of the Deep State have declared worse than all the old threats put together.

Now, I’m not claiming I know exactly what to do about ISIS, which seems to be a thoroughly hateful organization, and for that and many other reasons I’m grateful that I will never be president. As this helpful article from Psychology Today explains, it isn’t true that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. It’s really the definition of “perseveration,” meaning the pathological repetition of an act that is meant to solve problems but is likely to leave the sufferer frustrated and unsatisfied. America’s foreign policy brain trust — supposedly the most grown-up and hard-headed of all Deep State denizens — has been stuck in a pattern of perseveration since at least 9/11, if not since Vietnam. That would be bad enough on its own even without the fact that it has killed innocent people in enormous numbers and shredded what remained of our constitutional liberties.

Michael Moore’s problem, and the problem of old-school Democratic liberals in general, is simply that they dared to hope for something different, and that “change we can believe in” turned out to be an especially cruel hoax, even by the standards of campaign rhetoric. But as I said earlier, if they blame the Republicans for doing exactly what they said they would do, or blame Obama for his perceived personal failings, they are missing the point. When we look at what became of the Obama presidency, and the inexorable slide toward another Middle East war that anyone who’s immune to the Ivy League pixie-dust of the Deep State can see is a terrible idea, it may be helpful to resist the most conspiratorial interpretation. I don’t think we’re looking at an especially mendacious or ineffective politician, just one who has been given a historically unusual combination of immense power and very limited freedom to use it.

I would not claim, for instance, that Barack Obama was a human poison pill all along, a Manchurian candidate designed to apply a final coat of ideological cement to the marriage between the liberal-cosmopolitan social policies of the Democratic Party and the perma-war, pro-corporate agenda of the Deep State. At least, I wouldn’t exactly claim that; I only claim that was the effect. Let’s remember that Obama ran for president in the first place promising to govern as a rational, bipartisan architect of compromise, a centrist who would break through idiotic political divisions and get things done. Yeah, he defeated Hillary Clinton by positioning himself slightly to her left on national-security issues, and he possessed a unique ability to energize African-American voters, who are (somewhat misleadingly) considered a “liberal” demographic. But he was essentially the friendly face of the Deep State from the get-go. Why should we be surprised that it devoured him?


                                                                                ************


OneLove

:::MME:::


Archbishop Desmond Tutu Calls For 'End Of Fossil Fuels Era'







Twenty-five years ago people could be excused for not knowing much, or doing much, about climate change. Today we have no excuse. No more can it be dismissed as science fiction; we are already feeling the effects.
This is why, no matter where you live, it is appalling that the US is debating whether to approve a massive pipeline transporting 830,000 barrels of the world's dirtiest oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Producing and transporting this quantity of oil, via the Keystone XL pipeline, could increase Canada's carbon emissions by over 30%.
If the negative impacts of the pipeline would affect only Canada and the US, we could say good luck to them. But it will affect the whole world, our shared world, the only world we have. We don't have much time.
This week in Berlin, scientists and public representatives have been weighing up radical options for curbing emissions contained in the third report of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The bottom line is that we have 15 years to take the necessary steps. The horse may not have bolted, but it's well on its way through the stable door.
Who can stop it? Well, we can, you and I. And it is not just that we can stop it, we have a responsibility to do so. It is a responsibility that begins with God commanding the first human inhabitants of the garden of Eden "to till it and keep it". To keep it; not to abuse it, not to destroy it.
The taste of "success" in our world gone mad is measured in dollars and francs and rupees and yen. Our desire to consume any and everything of perceivable value – to extract every precious stone, every ounce of metal, every drop of oil, every tuna in the ocean, every rhinoceros in the bush – knows no bounds. We live in a world dominated by greed. We have allowed the interests of capital to outweigh the interests of human beings and our Earth.
Throughout my life I have believed that the only just response to injustice is what Mahatma Gandhi termed "passive resistance". During the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, using boycotts, divestment and sanctions, and supported by our friends overseas, we were not only able to apply economic pressure on the unjust state, but also serious moral pressure.
It is clear that those countries and companies primarily responsible for emitting carbon and accelerating climate change are not simply going to give up; they stand to make too much money. They need a whole lot of gentle persuasion from the likes of us. And it need not necessarily involve trading in our cars and buying bicycles!
There are many ways that all of us can fight against climate change: by not wasting energy, for instance. But these individual measures will not make a big enough difference in the available time.
People of conscience need to break their ties with corporations financing the injustice of climate change. We can, for instance, boycott events, sports teams and media programming sponsored by fossil-fuel energy companies. We can demand that the advertisements of energy companies carry health warnings. We can encourage more of our universities and municipalities and cultural institutions to cut their ties to the fossil-fuel industry. We can organise car-free days and build broader societal awareness. We can ask our religious communities to speak out.
We can actively encourage energy companies to spend more of their resources on the development of sustainable energy products, and we can reward those companies that do so by using their products. We can press our governments to invest in renewable energy and stop subsidising fossil fuels. Where possible, we can install our own solar panels and water heaters.
We cannot necessarily bankrupt the fossil fuel industry. But we can take steps to reduce its political clout, and hold those who rake in the profits accountable for cleaning up the mess.
And the good news is that we don't have to start from scratch. Young people across the world have already begun to do something about it. The fossil fuel divestment campaign is the fastest growing corporate campaign of its kind in history.
Last month, the General Synod of the Church of England voted overwhelmingly to review its investment policy in respect of fossil fuel companies, with one bishop referring to climate change as "the great demon of our day". Already some colleges and pension funds have declared they want their investments to be congruent with their beliefs.
It makes no sense to invest in companies that undermine our future. To serve as custodians of creation is not an empty title; it requires that we act, and with all the urgency this dire situation demands. 
- Desmond Tutu

Sep 18, 2014

As I Am




Chris Dean’s heart stopped when he was two. He died but he came back. When Chris was five, his father was murdered, riddled by more than 20 bullets in a gang shootout. At age 18, Chris gained national attention when he introduced President Barack Obama at his high school graduation. 

Chris is an observer and philosopher who has always had a few things to say about life from his vantage point in South Memphis. He and Emmy-Award winning filmmaker Alan Spearman walked the neighborhood for eight weeks observing and recording what became the script of As I Am. This film floats through this remarkable young man's landscape, revealing the lives that have shaped his world. Poetic and powerful imagery, captured by Spearman and cinematographer Mark Adams, combines with the young philosopher’s trenchant observations about life.(Source)

OneLove

:::MME:::

Poet's Nook: "Birthday" by Andrea Gibson







At 12 years old I started bleeding with the moon
and beating up boys who dreamed of becoming astronauts.
I fought with my knuckles white as stars,
and left bruises the shape of Salem.
There are things we know by heart,
and things we don't. 

At 13 my friend Jen tried to teach me how to blow rings of smoke.
I'd watch the nicotine rising from her lips like halos,
but I could never make dying beautiful.
The sky didn't fill with colors the night I convinced myself
veins are kite strings you can only cut free.
I suppose I love this life,

in spite of my clenched fist.

I open my palm and my lifelines look like branches from an Aspen tree,
and there are songbirds perched on the tips of my fingers,
and I wonder if Beethoven held his breath
the first time his fingers touched the keys
the same way a soldier holds his breath
the first time his finger clicks the trigger.
We all have different reasons for forgetting to breathe.

But my lungs remember
the day my mother took my hand and placed it on her belly
and told me the symphony beneath was my baby sister's heartbeat.
And I knew life would tremble
like the first tear on a prison guard's hardened cheek,
like a prayer on a dying man's lips,
like a vet holding a full bottle of whisky like an empty gun in a war zone…
just take me      just take me

Sometimes the scales themselves weigh far too much,
the heaviness of forever balancing blue sky with red blood.
We were all born on days when too many people died in terrible ways,
but you still have to call it a birthday.
You still have to fall for the prettiest girl on the playground at recess
and hope she knows you can hit a baseball
further than any boy in the whole third grade

and I've been running for home
through the windpipe of a man who sings
while his hands playing washboard with a spoon
on a street corner in New Orleans
where every boarded up window is still painted with the words
We're Coming Back
like a promise to the ocean
that we will always keep moving towards the music,
the way Basquait slept in a cardboard box to be closer to the rain.

Beauty, catch me on your tongue. 
Thunder, clap us open.
The pupils in our eyes were not born to hide beneath their desks.
Tonight lay us down to rest in the Arizona dessert,
then wake us washing the feet of pregnant women
who climbed across the border with their bellies aimed towards the sun.
I know a thousand things louder than a soldier's gun.
I know the heartbeat of his mother.

Don't cover your ears, Love.
Don't cover your ears, Life.
There is a boy writing poems in Central Park
and as he writes he moves
and his bones become the bars of Mandela's jail cell stretching apart,
and there are men playing chess in the December cold
who can't tell if the breath rising from the board
is their opponents or their own,
and there's a woman on the stairwell of the subway
swearing she can hear Niagara Falls from her rooftop in Brooklyn,
and I'm remembering how Niagara Falls is a city overrun
with strip malls and traffic and vendors
and one incredibly brave river that makes it all worth it. 

Ya'll, I know this world is far from perfect.
I am not the type to mistake a streetlight for the moon.
I know our wounds are deep as the Atlantic.
But every ocean has a shoreline
and every shoreline has a tide
that is constantly returning
to wake the songbirds in our hands, 
to wake the music in our bones,
to place one fearless kiss on the mouth of that brave river
that has to run through the center of our hearts
to find its way home.


OneLove

:::MME:::

The Racial Parenting Divide by Brittney Cooper







In college, I once found myself on the D.C. metro with one of my favorite professors. As we were riding, a young white child began to climb on the seats and hang from the bars of the train. His mother never moved to restrain him. But I began to see the very familiar, strained looks of disdain and dismay on the countenances of the mostly black passengers. They exchanged eye contact with one another, dispositions tight with annoyance at the audacity of this white child, but mostly at the refusal of his mother to act as a disciplinarian. I, too, was appalled. I thought, if that were my child, I would snatch him down and tell him to sit his little behind in a seat immediately. My professor took the opportunity to teach: “Do you see how this child feels the prerogative to roam freely in this train, unhindered by rules or regulations or propriety?”

“Yes,” I nodded. “What kinds of messages do you think are being communicated to him right now about how he should move through the world?”

And I began to understand, quite starkly, in that moment, the freedom that white children have to see the world as a place that they can explore, a place in which they can sit, or stand, or climb at will. The world, they are learning, is theirs for the taking.

Then I thought about what it means to parent a black child, any black child, in similar circumstances. I think of the swiftness with which a black mother would have ushered her child into a seat, with firm looks and not a little a scolding, the implied if unspoken threat of either a grounding or a whupping, if her request were not immediately met with compliance. So much is wrapped up in that moment: a desire to demonstrate that one’s black child is well-behaved, non-threatening, well-trained. Disciplined. I think of the centuries of imminent fear that have shaped and contoured African-American working-class cultures of discipline, the sternness of our mothers’ and grandmothers’ looks, the firmness of the belts and switches applied to our hind parts, the rhythmic, loving, painful scoldings accompanying spankings as if the messages could be imprinted on our bodies with a sure and swift and repetitive show of force.

I think with fond memories of the big tree that grew in my grandmother’s yard, with branches that were the perfect size for switches. I hear her booming and shrill voice now, commanding, “Go and pick a switch.” I laugh when I remember that she cut that tree down once we were all past the age of switches.

And then I turn to Adrian Peterson. Not even a year ago, Peterson’s 2-year-old son, whom he did not know, was murdered by his son’s mother’s boyfriend. More recently, Adrian Peterson has been charged with negligent injury to a child, for hitting his 4-year-old son with a switch, in a disciplinary episode that left the child with bruises and open cuts on his hands, legs, buttocks and scrotum.

In the text messages that Peterson sent to the boy’s mother, he acknowledged having gone too far, letting her know that he accidentally “got him in the nuts,” and that because the child didn’t cry, he didn’t realize the switch was hurting him. It would be easy to demonize Peterson as an abuser, but the forthrightness with which he talked about using belts and switches but not extension cords, because he “remembers how it feels to get whooped with an extension cord,” as part of his modes of discipline suggests he is merely riffing on scripts handed down to him as an African-American man.

These cultures of violent punishment are ingrained within African-American communities. In fact, they are often considered marks of good parenting. In my childhood, parents who “thought their children were too good to be spanked” were looked upon with derision. I have heard everyone from preachers to comedians lament the passing of days when a child would do something wrong at a neighbor’s house, get spanked by that neighbor, and then come home and get spanked again for daring to misbehave at someone else’s house. For many that is a vision of a strong black community, in which children are so loved and cared for that everyone has a stake in making sure that those children turn out well, and “know how to act.” In other words, it is clear to me that Peterson views his willingness to engage in strong discipline as a mark of being a good father.

Perhaps it is time to acknowledge that the loving intent and sincerity behind these violent modes of discipline makes them no less violent, no more acceptable. Some of our ideas about discipline are unproductive, dangerous and wrong. It’s time we had courage to say that.
I am not interested in haggling any more with black people about the difference between spankings and abuse, because when emotions and stakes are both as high as they are, lines are far too easily crossed.

Stakes are high because parenting black children in a culture of white supremacy forces us to place too high a price on making sure our children are disciplined and well-behaved. I know that I personally place an extremely high value on children being respectful, well-behaved and submissive to authority figures. I’m fairly sure this isn’t a good thing.

If black folks are honest, many of us will admit to both internally and vocally balking at the very “free” ways that we have heard white children address their parents in public. Many a black person has seen a white child yelling at his or her parents, while the parents calmly respond, gently scold, ignore, attempt to soothe, or failing all else, look embarrassed.

I can never recount one time, ever seeing a black child yell at his or her mother in public. Never. It is almost unfathomable.

As a kid in the 1980s and 1990s I loved family sitcoms. “Full House,” “Who’s the Boss?,” “Growing Pains.” You name it. But even before my own racial consciousness was fully formed, I remember knowing that I was watching white families very different from my own, in part, because of how children interacted with their families. Invariably on an episode, a child would get mad, yell at a parent, and then run up the stairs (white people’s sitcom houses always had stairs) and slam the door.

What I know for sure is that yelling, running away or slamming anything in the house that my single mama worked hard to pay for would be grounds for some serious disciplinary reprisal. Even now, when I think about what kind of behavior I would permit as a parent, I am clear that slamming doors in my home is unacceptable.

Still, I also know that my anger was not an emotion that found a free and healthy range of expression in my household. My mother is my own personal hero, but just as she did many things differently than her own mother did when it came to raising daughters, I know I will think very intentionally about making space for my children to experience a full range of emotions – anger included — in the safety of home. They can’t slam the door, but they can close it.

As for Adrian Peterson, he will have to deal with the legal consequences of his actions. It has long been time for us to forgo violence as a disciplinary strategy. But as Charles Barkley notes, if we lock up Adrian Peterson, we could lock up every other black parent in the South for the same behavior. Instead, I hope Peterson is a cautionary tale, not about the state intruding on our “right” to discipline our children but rather a wakeup call about how much (fear of) state violence informs the way we discipline our children.

If the murder of Michael Brown has taught us nothing else, we should know by now that the U.S. nation-state often uses deadly violence both here and abroad as a primary mode of disciplining people with black and brown bodies. Darren Wilson used deadly force against Michael Brown as a mode of discipline (and a terroristic act) for Brown’s failure to comply with the request to walk on the sidewalk.

The loving intent and sincerity of our disciplinary strategies does not preclude them from being imbricated in these larger state-based ideas about how to compel black bodies to act in ways that are seen as non-menacing, unobtrusive and basically invisible. Many hope that by enacting these micro-level violences on black bodies, we can protect our children from macro and deadly forms of violence later.

Perhaps it is audacious of me to encourage black parents to focus less on producing well-behaved children in a world that clearly hates them. Black boys and girls are suspended or expelled from school more than all other demographics of boys and girls, often for similar behaviors, simply because their engagement in those behaviors is perceived as more aggressive.

White children in general are raised to be Columbus, to “discover” the world anew and then to manipulate and order the universe to their own liking. If we take away the colonizing impulse in living this way, I think it would be amazing to have the luxury of raising black children who also view the world as a space of their own making, a space to be explored, a space to build anew. A space where occasionally, simply because you live there, you can opt to walk in the middle of the street instead of being confined to the sidewalk, much as you might sling your leg across the arm of a chair in your own home, because it is home.

But for so many black children, these kinds of frivolous choices will get you killed or locked up. For black children, finding disciplinary methods that instill a healthy sense of fear in a world that is exceptionally violent toward them is a hard balance to find.

The thing is, though: Beating, whupping or spanking your children will not protect them from state violence.  It won’t keep them out of prison. Ruling homes and children with an iron fist will not restore the dignity and respect that the outside world fails to confer on adult black people.
What these actions might do is curtail creativity, inculcate a narrative about “acceptable” forms of violence enacted against black bodies, and breed fear and resentment between parents and children that far outlasts childhood.

Violence in any form is not love. Let us make sure first to learn that lesson. And then if we do nothing else, let us teach it to our children.


Brittney Cooper Brittney Cooper teaches Women's and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers. Follow her on Twitter at @professorcrunk

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OneLove

:::MME:::

Sep 17, 2014

Plunder: The Crime of Our Time




Yea, they are greedy dogs which can never have enough, and they are shepherds that cannot understand: they all look to their own way, every one for his gain, from his quarter. 

OneLove

:::MME:::

Sep 16, 2014

Musings


OneLove 

:::MME:::

The Poverty of Culture

 

 

Despite all evidence to the contrary, blaming black culture for racial inequality remains politically dominant. And not only on the Right.



The only thing more predictable than riots in the United States’ dilapidated cities is the outpouring of moralizing pseudo-explanations that accompany them. In this, as in so much else, Ferguson has been no exception. Between riffs on the venerable trope of “outside agitators,” commentators groping for an explanation of the uprising have seized on another, equally well-established mythology: the idea of a culture of poverty among black Americans.

Racists began blowing on this particular dog-whistle as soon as the murder of Michael Brown began to attract national attention. No doubt in the coming months it will only get louder. As the sheer scale and brutality of racial inequality in the US comes, however hazily, into popular focus, conservatives across the country will, much like Zionists suddenly concerned with the fate of the Syrian uprising, suddenly evince an intense preoccupation with the lives of black Americans. We will hear how welfare has made blacks dependent on the government, has broken up the black family, and has encouraged a culture of criminality and violence (as evidenced by all that rap music).

Variations on that basic narrative have, of course, become the norm in the language favored by the Right whenever it’s confronted with questions of racism. But the influence of the culture of poverty thesis extends far beyond the ranks of Republican officials, Tea Party activists, and Fox News talking heads — apparent, for instance, in the near-universal tendency to turn any discussion of the pervasive inequalities and discrimination suffered by African Americans into a moralizing sermon about the cultural pathologies of black people.

The New York Times led the way in this regard, sagely informing its readers that Brown was “no angel” and detailing accusations that he had committed petty theft and fought with his family. The article went on to say that Brown “lived in a community that had rough patches, and he dabbled in drugs and alcohol. He had taken to rapping in recent months, producing lyrics that were by turns contemplative and vulgar. He got into at least one scuffle with a neighbor.”

Even in those venues where this kind of attack on the character of a murdered young black man is recognized for the victim blaming it is, there is a reticence to directly confront the larger claims the culture of poverty theory makes about African-American culture. One can find any number of articles responding to the latest coded racism from the loud Republican of the moment, which point out how conservatives ignore the history of racial oppression and blame the black poor for their own suffering. Far more rare, however, is a direct confrontation with the description of black culture entailed by the culture of poverty narrative.

This is ironic, because every aspect of that narrative has been subjected to withering criticism by social scientists over the last thirty years. It is not simply that the aspects of black culture that the narrative identifies have been shaped by structural forces like racism; for the most part, they either don’t exist at all, or else are reflective of norms and values that are commonplace in the United States — and are not, therefore, unique features of the “black community.” Every component of the culture of poverty narrative is a phantasm, a projection of racial fantasies on to the culture of African Americans, which has for several centuries now served as the screen on which the national unconscious plays out.

Put more bluntly, they are lies.

Take, for example, the claim that black youth inhabit a culture that venerates criminality, in which having been incarcerated is a matter of pride. This particular trope has seen heavy circulation in the last few years, trotted out to rationalize every death of a young black man at the hands of the police or vigilantes. Constructed out of a conglomeration of supposedly “thuggish” photos, snatches of rap lyrics, or social media ephemera, it works to make respectable the narrative that, in every case, it was the black teenager who threw himself in a fury at the men with guns. Confronted with such deep-seated criminality, the pundits innocently ask, what else were the police supposed to do?

Ethnographies of returned prisoners and their families reveal a very different world, one that coincides more with the commonsense notion that people who already face discrimination in the labor market would hardly celebrate events, like incarceration, that will make their lives even harder. Donald Braman spent four years conducting interviews with prisoners, ex-prisoners, and their families in the Washington DC area, and found that black families regarded incarceration with anything but pride.

Instead, he found a pervasive sense of shame. Families of those in prison hid the truth from even their extended family, and went to great lengths to conceal the fact from their social circles. In interviewing close to fifty families, Braman reported that not one was “out” as having a member in prison to their entire extended family. Reading the stories he collects, one gets a sense of a suffocating stigma, a desperation not to be associated with the prison system in any way.

In light of Braman’s work, the claim that young black men are happy to be locked up is perverse. There is no culture of criminality in black communities. Convenient as it may be to ascribe one to the victims of state violence, all of the evidence suggests that black families work incredibly hard to keep their members out of prison, and feel a profound sense of failure when they are unable to. In fact, compared with white families, black families place an even greater emphasis on following the rules and obeying authority. Given the disproportionate consequences black youth face for their transgressions, this differential is hardly surprising. Yet the disseminators of this lie persist, attempting to convince the nation that African Americans are (“culturally, not biologically!” they hasten to add) simply unable to assess even the most brutally obvious consequences of their actions on their lives.

The disconnect between claims of a culture of criminality and the evidence presented by reality is not at all unusual when it comes to the various elements that make up the culture of poverty narrative. Its other facets are equally guilty of inverting the world in which we live. Consider three prominent claims made by the would-be augurs of black culture: that black students devalue education out of a conception of school as a white thing, that black parents place a low value on marriage and a stable family life, and that the black poor are simply uninterested in finding work. All of these have been given voice across the political spectrum, from liberals to reactionaries, and all of them are patently false.

The notion of a black disdain for school as a “white thing” has been given voice recently by Barack Obama himself. Giving an address for his neoliberal “My Brother’s Keeper” program, Obama took the opportunity to opine that in black communities “there’s been the notion of ‘acting white,’ ” where high-achieving black students are stigmatized by their peers. Obama was relatively restrained in his invocation of “acting white theory,” as it’s called, confining himself to the assertion that it exists and is wrong, insofar as doing well in school does not compromise one’s racial authenticity.

The very fact, however, that the president felt the phenomenon was important enough to comment on suggests that he thought black attitudes on this question were skewed enough to warrant correction. Other commentators have been even bolder in their use of the theory, trotting it out to explain that black attitudes, and not white racism, are the cause of black-white educational disparities.

Despite its ubiquity in popular discussions, however, acting white theory has come under sustained criticism from education scholars. As social scientists have attempted to test the theory, they have found over and over that black and white students’ attitudes on education do not differ substantively. Black students, just like their white counterparts, express a desire to do well in school, and report higher self-esteem when they succeed.

In fact, recent research by Ivory Toldson suggests that it is white male students who express the most ambivalence about the impact of good grades on their social standing. By contrast, 95% of black female students reported that, if they did really well in school, they would be proud and tell all of their friends about it. Similarly, black students were most likely to report that their friends would be happier if they went to college than if they didn’t. Most white students said their friends wouldn’t care either way.

In light of this body of research, the attempt to pin responsibility for educational inequality on black students themselves is beyond perverse. Black students, understandably, place a higher premium on education than white students, because they know they will pay a higher price for lacking it than white students will. Yet the aspirations of black students, however well-documented, fail to make any impact on discussions of race and education in national media. White talking heads (and black conservatives, it must be said) feel no qualms whatsoever about loudly condemning the youth of an entire race for lacking ambition, while remaining criminally silent themselves on the structures that actually frustrate black students’ real and dearly-held ambitions.

The story is, if anything, even nastier when it comes to marriage and the family. Lamentations over the decline of the black family, in particular, are something of a national ritual in the United States, and have been for decades. In the inner city, we are told, there is a culture of single parenting, and having children with multiple partners. From here, descriptions of that culture frequently veer into the luridly racist, with “broodmares” being one epithet of choice for black mothers. This culture is then held to be at the root of any number of problems, as absent fathers are blamed for black children doing poorly in school or getting in trouble, and mothers dependent on welfare programs inducing a “culture of dependency” in their children.

Once again, this narrative is profoundly mistaken. Historically, as Herbert Gutman pointed out decades ago, black Americans have placed a tremendous value on maintaining family structures, and have actually had a lower divorce rate than white Americans. Since the 1960s, it’s true that single-parent households have become far more common in black communities (though not only there), and this is the era commentators typically focus on, blaming the loss of a mythological united community under Jim Crow in more liberal versions of the story, or welfare programs in more reactionary ones. Both, however, see a transformation in black attitudes as central.

But social scientists working on family structures, however, have found that variables like the ratio of employed men to women are far stronger predictors of what families look like than attitudes are. When the supply of employed, non-incarcerated men is controlled for, black and white marriage rates look more similar than different.

Attitudes towards marriage also display no great divergence between black and white Americans. Most black Americans value marriage highly, though, as is the case with whites, men tend to value it more highly than women. This last datum is particularly ironic, given the pervasive scapegoating of black men for supposedly abandoning their children after conception. In fact, as numerous studies have found, black fathers maintain high levels of contact with their children even when not co-habitating with the child’s mother, and express a strong desire to be even more present in their children’s lives. Even more significantly, as Kathryn Edin has noted, “African Americans’ higher valuation of marriage relative to that of whites narrows the racial gap in marriage.” Black culture is responsible for the gap in marriage rates being smaller than it otherwise would be, not larger.

With this in mind, the recurrent political fantasy of addressing inequality in the US through marriage promotion programs aimed at the black poor in particular is a sick joke. If people like Sam Brownback, who wrote one of the most recent such proposals, actually cared about the marriage rate among poor black Americans, he would address himself to ending things like mass incarceration and the endemic joblessness in American cities, which all the evidence suggests play a massive role in disrupting black attempts to form stable nuclear families. The irony, of course, is that his preferred alternative is predicated on attempting to sell something to African Americans that they have been trying for literally centuries to buy at a price higher than he could possibly imagine.

One final component of the culture of poverty, and in some ways the most central, is the myth that the black unemployed simply don’t want to find work. This was given particularly vulgar voice recently by Samuel “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher, whose relentless self-promotion is indeed a monument to what hard-working white ethnics, with the help of a complicit media, can achieve. Commenting on the protesters in Ferguson, he suggested that the best way to disperse the demonstrators would be to hold a job fair, at the sight of which they would “scatter like leaves.” Though the sheer contempt for the black poor may be more visible in Wurzelbacher’s quip than in other instances, in substance it doesn’t differ in the least from Republican wunderkind Paul Ryan’s pronunciation that inner city men simply don’t appreciate the value of work.

This conceit has suffered perhaps more thorough rebuttal than any other component of the culture of poverty. Since the 1960s, social scientists have produced study after study demonstrating that poor and unemployed black Americans have basically the same attitudes towards work as the rest of country. In fact, a recent study found that black job seekers are even more resilient than their white counterparts, staying in the job market longer despite persistent frustrations of their search for employment. One waits in vain for such results to generate a moral panic over the decline of a work ethic in white communities.

When it comes to the notion of welfare dependency, the verdict is much the same. One study looking at black single mothers in Milwaukee found that these women’s families were a major contributor to the high value they placed on education and finding a career. Far from being the transmission belt of a “culture of dependency,” black families act as a support network encouraging their members to achieve as much as possible. The same study found that women on welfare, almost to a person, “hated it” and wished they could leave the program. However, the demands of childcare, combined with a lack of job opportunities, ensured that leaving was difficult for most.

Other studies have found similar results, with welfare being largely stigmatized in black communities. In fact, a number of studies have found that people on welfare, black Americans included, feel that people take advantage of the system and receive benefits when they should not. Here, the constant demonization of people on welfare has had an effect on welfare recipients themselves. While attributing their own use to structural factors such as discrimination and joblessness, they attribute others’ use of the system to laziness (importantly, however, this suspicion does not carry over into political support for attacks on welfare state, which are consistently opposed by people receiving benefits). The distance from the popular portrayal of black communities content to remain on the dole could not be clearer.

All of this is to suggest that the constant projections onto some kind of collective black psyche obscures the fact that African Americans and white Americans are motivated by much the same things. Still, the absence of evidence for their existence hasn’t prevented these tropes of black cultural pathologies from entering into nearly every discussion of “race relations” in recent years. Indeed, belief in a black culture of poverty has become so entrenched that it is accepted without question for the most part. The prevalence of those assumptions are inseparable from the dominance of a politics that rejects structural solutions for the social disparities and entrenched discrimination facing African Americans, in favor of an emphasis on community self-help and personal responsibility.

Thus, we find ourselves in a situation in which public discussion of problems related to high rates of joblessness, child poverty, infant mortality, and many negative social indicators among African Americans is largely restricted to exhortations for a transformation of behavioral norms and attitudes. Instead of a political agenda to deal with pervasive disparities in wealth, educational opportunities, access to employment, and the like, we’re told that upward mobility for African Americans depends on the inculcation of values that promote success; black communities, this approach suggests, must learn to celebrate family, encourage hard work, and embrace education.

Not full employment but individual initiative and a commitment to advancement through low-wage work and job training will boost chronically low employment levels. Not a substantial program of redistributive reforms but incentives to encourage entrepreneurship will boost the resources of the black community. Not strengthened anti-discrimination measures or equal access to health care but altered lifestyle choices, better parenting, and the influence of positive role models will reduce health disparities and improve social outcomes for black kids.

Implicit in all this is the idea that if African Americans have failed to overcome the racial stratification of American society, the reason is to be found – at least in large part – in the cultural and psychological character of the black community. The result has been the diffusion of a language around “race” that mirrors the “color-blind” racism associated with the post-Civil Rights era – a language that simultaneously downplays the significance of actual discrimination while stigmatizing African Americans for behaviors that go unremarked upon in the case of white Americans.

It is, for instance, not uncommon for conversations that are ostensibly addressing issues like mass incarceration and police violence to devolve into criticism of the dressing habits of young black men or the hedonism and violence in rap lyrics. The double standard at work here should be obvious: no one, for instance, questions whether the predilection of white teenagers for personal attire that can range from the bizarre to the obscene shouldn’t make them the objects of scrutiny by police or potential employers. Bill Cosby’s rant attacking black Americans for everything from the linguistic habits of black teenagers to the names given to black children was treated by everyone from Barack Obama to Bill O’Reilly as a serious call for self-reflection by the “black community.” Yet it would be impossible to imagine a situation in which the personal appearance and lifestyle choices of attendees at the annual Burning Man festival would ever inspire such anxiety.

The upshot is that even sympathetic observers tend to interpret concerns about deprivation and social disorganization through the prism of cultural or psychological damage. That dynamic is particularly evident in our proclivity to attribute problems like crime or violence in black neighborhoods to ill-defined features of black men’s emotional existence. As a consequence, responsibility for these issues is commonly attributed to such causes as a lack of self-regard among African-American males, their purportedly nihilistic and myopic worldview, or their orientation on short-term, narrowly self-interested gain over long-term ambition and social uplift.

That tendency to speculate about the emotional or psychological state of young black men is emblematic of the way that “race” functions in America. In translating discussions of questions like crime and violence into explorations of group psychology, we effectively shift the focus from the social context for street violence in lower-income, predominantly black urban areas to the character of black people. That not only reinforces a blame-the-victim politics that refuses to acknowledge racism — embodied in the cynical use of the category “black on black crime” to dismiss concerns about police violence during the Ferguson protests — it also leads to a distorted view of the sources of elevated violence and chronic insecurity in black neighborhoods.

Part of the reason that the trope of “black on black crime” has garnered such traction is because it feeds on very genuine concerns about issues like the high levels of violence crime suffered by some black communities. While homicide rates have declined precipitously across the US over the past two decades, the devastating number of shooting deaths suffered by black residents in cities like Chicago has received national attention in recent years. Confronted with the destructive effects of gun violence, many observers have interpreted it as a reflection of deep-seated social pathologies – the inverse of the racism of the US criminal justice system.

Research suggests that violent crime rates are driven by a variety of social factors which tend to make American cities particularly prone to gun violence against black residents. Among the most of these factors are very high levels of neighborhood segregation, concentrated un- and underemployment, poverty and a dearth of adequate social services or institutional resources. Fundamentally, gun violence has to be treated like other kinds of public health problems — not as the basis for continuous, empty calls for an introspective discussion about “black on black violence.” And like other kinds of public health disparities, tackling high rates of inter-personal violence requires confronting the social context in which it occurs.

And yet, the culture-of-poverty narrative leads us away from that perspective, and exacerbates the widespread tendency to view social inequality through the lens of personal responsibility and cultural predispositions.

Given that the culture of poverty argument today is most strongly associated with the Right, it is surprising to learn that its provenance actually comes from the other end of the spectrum. The phrase itself achieved notoriety with Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous report on the black family (“The Negro Family: The Case for National Action”), though he had himself drawn it from anthropologist Oscar Lewis’ work. In the decades since then, as “the Moynihan report” has, quite properly, come to serve as shorthand on the Left for a pathologization of the black family and a victim-blaming rhetoric, it has been easy to forget that Moynihan himself was no Strom Thurmond, but a Great Society liberal with impeccable credentials. The concept itself comes not from the Right, which was then still mired in explicitly biological racism, but from liberals cognizant of the injustice of inequality, but too attached to ideas of black deficiency to jettison them entirely.

As American liberalism has moved steadily rightward since the 1970s, versions of the culture-of-poverty thesis have gained increasingly traction. In Moynihan’s time, these sorts of ideas were counterbalanced by a liberalism that genuinely sought the expansion of the American welfare state. Hubert Humphrey, running for president in 1968, promised to hire a teacher for every policeman Richard Nixon wanted to hire, and build a house for every jail George Wallace wanted to build. By the 1990s, this sort of commitment had nearly disappeared from American liberalism, leaving culture of poverty arguments hegemonic. The importance of the culture-of-poverty approach is that it allows for recognition of the accumulated history of racism and inequality, but posits the ongoing effects of these as mediated through black cultural pathologies. It therefore permits American liberals to identify with opposition to racism while pushing them towards policy solutions geared towards the transformation of black people, and not American society.

Today, these ideas are given voice by all manner of actors residing left of center on the political spectrum. Barack Obama’s few engagements with the subject of racial inequality all draw on the idea of a culture of poverty, even if never explicitly named as such, from his condescending hectoring of black fathers to his gross suggestion that too many black parents feed their children fried chicken for breakfast. Jonathan Chait has also recently revealed himself to be an adherent, criticizing Ta-Nahesi Coates’ recent writing for being insufficiently attentive to the deficiencies of black culture.

The Reverend Al Sharpton gave a particularly abhorrent reminder that conservatives have no monopoly on the culture of poverty at Michael Brown’s funeral. In his eulogy, Sharpton lectured the assembled audience on the need for greater personal responsibility in the black community: “We have got to be outraged by our disrespect for each other, our disregard for each other, our killing and shooting and running around gun-toting each other,” he said, “so that they’re justified in trying to come at us because some of us act like the definition of blackness is how low you can go….” In contrast to earlier generations of African Americans, who were presumably more worthy of equal rights, black people today exhibit a proclivity for bad behavior and bad manners, Sharpton said, concluding “Now, you want to be a n—– and call your woman a ‘ho.’ You’ve lost where you’re coming from.”

For many on the Left, it’s easy to recognize how backwards and self-defeating this kind of rhetoric can be. In shifting the locus of responsibility for the deep-seated inequities of American capitalism to the very people who are the victims of its greatest injustices, Sharpton is playing into the hands of the white conservatives who so often attack him for playing the “race card.”

And yet the notion that the entrenched racial disparities of US society are, at least in part, the product of black cultural pathologies, retains enormous traction. Sharpton and Cosby are hardly alone among black Americans in identifying with versions of this narrative. A recent survey, for example, revealed that black men both tend to value education and work highly, yet thought that other black men spent too much time thinking about sports and sex. So pervasive is this ideology that people who know it to be false of themselves are willing to believe it of others. The argument can also take a more nationalist register, as in the contention that slavery damaged black American culture so profoundly that the resulting cultural deficiencies, often identified as a lack of community or self-respect, explain aspects of black inequality today, from educational disparities to economic impoverishment.

Forty years ago, both black nationalism and American liberalism existed in forms that looked squarely at the basic structure of American society for an explanation of racial inequality. The shift of both these ideologies away from that orientation in subsequent decades is in line with the larger retreat of the Left away from structural solutions and into more local and personalized projects. Effectively, the Left’s horizons have shrunk in tandem with its social power.

When it comes to race, however, this retreat has had particularly pernicious effects. The shrinking of ambition to the personal level here has resulted in a convergence with the kinds of victim-blaming narratives peddled in official “colorblind” ideology. When liberals or black nationalists agree that black crime contains some larger meaning about the state of the black community, they make the work of racist ideologues easier. They reinforce the basic point that black crime must be agonized over as a barometer of the cultural values of the race, while white crime may be treated as a normal aspect of a complex society.

In doing so, they give succor to those who seek to block any attempt at addressing the real causes of racial inequality, while rendering half-hearted and tenuous those attempts still being launched from within American liberalism itself. And all on the basis of ideas that, for all liberals’ supposed commitment to reason and moderation, are no more connected with reality than birther fantasies.

Like so many other “zombie ideas” in our current moment, the culture of poverty narrative persists not because of its success in explaining reality, but in spite of it. What it does succeed in doing is providing an explanation of reality that salves the consciences of the powerful and their supporters. Unfortunately, in an era when collective action by the oppressed is still far too sporadic and ephemeral, these kinds of explanations have sunk deep roots, into both layers of left-liberal opinion and oppressed groups themselves.

Yet what the social science literature demonstrates is that however secure the culture of poverty seems as a hegemonic explanation for racial inequality, it ultimately rests on what are, at the end of the day, nothing more than lies. As the uprising in Ferguson has highlighted the connection between American imperialism and militarism on the home front, it is worth remembering that cultural explanations of structural processes have never been a purely domestic affair.

Commenting on the horrific death toll of the Vietnamese during the American war on Vietnam, William Westmoreland infamously explained to an interviewer that “the Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.” For a long time, this remark epitomized the racism of the war. We should view cultural explanations of inequality with the same contempt.


                    __ from https://www.jacobinmag.com


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OneLove

:::MME:::

The New Corporation

  The New Corporation ​is a 2020 documentary directed by Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan, law professor at the University of British Columb...