Jan 22, 2017

Trump Is a Symptom of a Sickness That Is Raging All Across The World




Sitting on sidelines is not an option in these troubled times. We gotta MOVE and flip the script or else we are doomed. These folks in power - and the inconceivably sinister forces that lurk in the shadows- do not care about you or this planet. They're only concerned about wealth, power & the perpetuation of folks in their own elitist circles. Don't drink the Kool-Aid. Think for yourselves and find common ground with those who cherish justice, life and love.

Jan 16, 2017

Julian Casablancas Interviews Henry Giroux



Excellent interview!

Fascism vs Neoliberalism w/ Chris Hedges




Chris Hedges along with Henry GirouxNoam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Paul Street, Tim Wise,Glenn Greenwald,Greg Palast, Matt Taibbi, Richard D. Wolff, Amy Goodman, Ralph Nader, David Cay Johnston & Jill Stein are some of the courageous white brothers and sisters kicking down the rotting walls of empire & white supremacist thinking. They stand against the grain and should be loudly applauded & celebrated. They have reclaimed their humanity & integrity & discarded the blood-soaked coat of white skin privilege to the benefit of us all. They are the John Browns & Dorothy Days of our era and we need them just as much as we need the many people of color who are actively resisting the persistent presence of social evil in the world ....

We Were Warned About Barack Obama—by Obama Himself by Paul Street




In the fall of 2014, I attended a meeting of Iowa City progressives called to discuss the possibility of trying to enlist Bernie Sanders to enter the 2016 presidential race as a Democrat. When the 30 or so attendees went around the table introducing themselves, all but two (myself and a Green Party activist) expressed “disappointment” with Barack Obama—a president in whom they’d invested considerable betrayed hope for progressive- and left-leaning change. They looked at me as if I was from outer space when I said the Obama presidency had played out pretty much as conservatively as I’d expected. I did not want to spoil things further by adding that I’d tried to warn them in numerous talks, essays and one book predicting Obama’s right-wing performance as president if elected.
The liberals and progressives in the room had good reasons to feel dissatisfied about the Obama administration. (For my most comprehensive recent reflection on this topic, see my latest Truthdig essay “Obama’s Neoliberal Legacy: Rightward Drift and Donald Trump”.) Little could they have been expected to foresee that one outcome of Obama’s service to the rich and powerful would be the presidential ascendancy of the oligarchic super-predator Donald Trump.
‘What’s the Dollar Value of a Starry-Eyed Elitist?’ (November 2006)
But how reasonable was it for “lefties” to have been disappointed by Obama’s noxious service to the rich and powerful? Many smart writers and activists—and not just supposedly wild-eyed left radicals like me—had tried to tell the world about Obama’s allegiance to the nation’s interrelated, unelected, deep-state dictatorships of money, race, class and empire.
“It’s not always clear what Obama’s financial backers want,” the progressive journalist Ken Silverstein noted in a Harper’s Magazine report titled “Obama, Inc.” in the fall of 2006, “but it seems safe to conclude that his campaign contributors are not interested merely in clean government and political reform.”
“On condition of anonymity,” Silverstein said, “one Washington lobbyist I spoke with was willing to point out the obvious: that big donors would not be helping out Obama if they didn’t see him as a ‘player.’ The lobbyist added: ‘What’s the dollar value of a starry-eyed idealist?’”
As Silverstein knew and showed, the early Obama phenomenon (dating back to his campaign for an open U.S. Senate seat in Illinois in 2003-04) was intimately tied in with the United States’ corporate and financial ruling class. Obama was rising to power with remarkable backing from Wall Street and K Street election investors who were not in the business of promoting politicians who sought to challenge the nation’s dominant domestic and imperial hierarchies and doctrines.
‘Deeply Conservative’ (May 2007)
Obama’s allegiance to the American business elite was evident from the get-go. This was well understood by the K Street insiders Silverstein interviewed in the fall of 2006. It was grasped by the liberal journalist and New Yorker writer Larissa MacFarquhar in spring 2007. “In his view of history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly,” MacFarquhar wrote after extensive interviews with candidate Obama in May of 2007, “Obama is deeply conservative. There are moments when he sounds almost Burkean. … It’s not just that he thinks revolutions are unlikely: he values continuity and stability for their own sake, sometimes even more than he values change for the good.”
MacFarquhar cited as an example of this reactionary sentiment Obama’s reluctance to embrace single-payer health insurance on the Canadian model, Obama told MacFarquhar that “we’ve got all these legacy systems in place, and managing the transition, as well as adjusting the culture to a different system, would be difficult to pull off. So we may need a system that’s not so disruptive that people feel like suddenly what they’ve known for most of their lives is thrown by the wayside.” So what if large popular majorities in the United States had long favored the single-payer model? So what if single payer would let people keep the doctors of their choice, throwing away only the protection payoff to the private insurance mafia? So what if “the legacy systems” Obama defended included corporate insurance and pharmaceutical oligopolies that regularly threw millions of American lives by the wayside of market calculation, causing enormous disruptive harm and death for the populace?
Saying Populist Stuff He Didn’t Mean (2003 and 2008)
It is true that Illinois State Senator Obama publicly embraced single-payer health care insurance,speaking before the Illinois AFL-CIO in late June 2003. But he didn’t really mean it. Single-payer disappeared from his campaign rhetoric and material as he climbed closer to national power in Washington D.C. Also deleted was his not-so “antiwar” speech against George W. Bush’s planned invasion of Iraq, an oration delivered in downtown Chicago in October of 2002. Obama’s goal of becoming a U.S. senator—and, after that, president (a longstanding ambition of his)—meant jettisoning excessively left-sounding statement in pursuit of the establishment backing required for such an ascendancy.
Five years later, candidate Obama’s top economic advisor, the neoliberal University of Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee would tell Canada’s U.S. ambassador to disregard Obama’s criticisms of the corporatist North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The criticisms were just campaign oratory geared toward winning working-class votes in the Midwest Rustbelt. Obama, Goolsbee explained, was just saying the populist-sounding kind of stuff Democratic presidential candidates had to mouth to get nominated and elected. Obama’s anti-NAFTA language was not to be taken seriously, the economist said.
Vacuous to Repressive Neoliberal Politics (1996)
This was the slick and unnamed Obama—granted undue progressive credibility thanks in part to the simple color of his skin—that the left and black political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. warned people about in The Village Voice at the beginning of the future president’s political career (in the Illinois State Senate) in January 1996:
In Chicago, for instance, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program—the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance.
I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics, as in Haiti and wherever else the International Monetary Fund has sway.
Little could Reed have been expected to know that Obama would represent the wave of the future in U.S. presidential politics 12 years later.
Beyond ‘Tired Ideologies’ (April 2006)
Just more than a decade after Reed published this prescient assessment, one of the many clues on the coming neoliberal, Wall Street-vetted nature of Obama’s presidency came when he affiliated himself from the start with The Hamilton Project (THP), a key neoliberal Washington, D.C., think tank. THP was founded with Goldman Sachs funding inside the venerable centrist and Democratic-leaning Brookings Institution in spring 2006. Its creator was no less august a ruling class personage than Robert Rubin, the former Goldman Sachs CEO who served as Bill Clinton’s top senior economic policy adviser and treasury secretary. A legendary Democratic Party “kingmaker” who is often half-jokingly called “the wizard behind the curtain” of Democratic economic policy, Rubin was the veritable godfather of late 20th century and early 21st century U.S. neoliberalism. In accord with the “Rubinomics” trilogy of balanced budgets, free trade and financial deregulation, Clinton joined with corporate Democrats and Republicans to enact the great job-killing and anti-labor North American Free Trade Agreement, slash government spending, eliminate restrictions on interstate banking, repeal the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act (which had separated commercial from investment banking), and prevent the regulation of toxic “over-the-counter” financial derivatives (with the so-called Commodity Futures Modernization Act).
Beneath standard boilerplate on the need for “broad-based economic growth” and “an effective role for government in making needed investments,” THP has remained devoted—in the words of left political-economist Jamie Peck—“to fiscal discipline and free trade, to market-oriented approaches, and to strategies for attacking inequality that are attached from new [social-democratic] entitlement commitments.”
U.S. Senator Barack Obama was the keynote speaker at THP’s opening event in April 2006. Beginning with a special nod of thanks to “the wizard” (Rubin, who sat two chairs to his right), Obama praised Rubin and other Clinton administration veterans in the room. He lauded them for having “taken on entrenched interests” to “put us on the pathway to a prosperity we are still enjoying.” Obama called the new body a “breath of fresh air,” a welcome nonpartisan and non-ideological agent of economic “modernization.” He hailed THP for seeking “21st century solutions” and a practical handle on “what actually works” in a national capital plagued by “tired ideologies” of right and left. It was a classic triangulating “Third Way” neoliberal speech. Obama’s carefully clipped words functioned to “preemptively pacify Wall Street before declaring his presidential ambitions,” according to Peck—ambitions Obama had been harboring from the start of his U.S. Senate career and indeed, long before that.
America’s ‘Greatest Asset’ (November 2006)
Later the same year, Obama would publish a deeply conservative, nationalistic, American-exceptionalist, Ronald Reagan-praising and 1960s-dissing book titled “The Audacity of Hope.” The title was stolen from a sermon given by his former black pastor Jeremiah Wright, whom candidate Obama would later toss under the bus in a speech declaring that angry black anti-racism was no longer appropriate in “post-racial” America (a curious thing to argue in a nation still deeply scarred by living societal and institutional racism along with widespread racial prejudice). In “Audacity,” Obama rooted the supposed greatness of America in its “free market” capitalist system and “business culture.” He wrote that the United States’ “greatest asset has been our system of social organization, a system that for generations has encouraged constant innovation, individual initiative and efficient allocation of resources.”
Obama left it to alienated carpers, “cranks” and “moral absolutists” of the “unreasonable” left (Obama’s basic understanding of radicals) to observe the terrible outcomes of the United States’ distinctively anti-social (and incidentally, heavily state-protected) “market system”: the “efficient,” climate-warming contributions of a nation that constituted 5 percent of the world’s population but contributed more than a quarter of the planet’s carbon emissions; the “innovative” generation of poverty for millions of U.S. children while executives atop leading U.S. “defense” firms raked in untold taxpayer millions for helping Uncle Sam and his Israeli and British friends kill and maim hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians; the top 1 percent’s possession of as much wealth as that held by the bottom two-thirds of the population—stuff like that.
“Unreasonable” Marxists, left-anarchists and “conspiracy theorists” were left to note that business-ruled workplaces and labor markets stole “individual initiative” from millions of American workers subjected to the monotonous repetition of imbecilic operations conducted for such unbearably long stretches of time that ordinary Americans were increasingly unable to participate meaningfully in the grand “deliberative democracy” that Obama naively trumpeted as the founders’ great gift to subsequent generations.
In one of many revealingly right-wing passages in “Audacity,” Obama mused rhapsodically on “just how good” even “our [the United States’] poor … have it” compared to their more destitute counterparts in Africa and Latin America. Obama took this comparison to be evidence for his argument in “Audacity” that U.S. capitalism—“the logic of the marketplace” and “private property at the very heart of our system[s] of liberty [and] social organization”—had brought Americans “a prosperity that’s unmatched in human history.” Obama omitted considerably more appropriate contrasts between the U.S. and its fellow rich First World nations in Western Europe and Asia (Japan), where capitalism comes with considerably more social equality, provision and security than can be found in more hierarchical nations like Haiti, Nigeria, South Africa, Honduras, Saudi Arabia and, well, the United States.
This was a very different approach from that of Obama’s purported hero, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., In the summer of 1966, King noted the greater poverty that existed in the United States compared to other First World states like Sweden. “Maybe something is wrong with our [capitalist] economic system,” King told an interviewer, observing that there was little poverty, slums and unemployment in “democratic socialist” countries like Sweden.
The “beacon to the world” and “city on a hill” had something to “learn from other countries” King was suggesting. The learning process, King felt, meant “question[ing] the capitalistic economy” since “an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
The Last Interregnum
I have in this essay focused (for reasons of time and space) mainly on how candidate Obama showed that he would accommodate U.S. business-class power. It was much the same story with candidate Obama on American racism and American empire. As I showed in detail in Chapters 3 (“How Black is Obama? Color, Class, Generation, and the Perverse Racial Politics of the Post-Civil Rights Era”) and 4 (“How Antiwar? Obama, Iraq, and the Audacity of Empire”) of my June 2008 book “Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (BOATFAP),” U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Obama gave numerous indications to the powers that be that he would do nothing beyond continuing to be technically black and graced with a Muslim-sounding name to challenge the nation’s dominant racial hierarches or its murderous imperial policies and doctrines. Nobody who paid serious attention to the future president’s actual writings and speeches (especially the ones prepared and delivered for ruling-class organizations like The Hamilton Project, the Business Roundtable, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the Council on Foreign Relations) should have expected anything different.
This—and its implications for the presidency to come—is something I was booked to discuss (with “BOATFAP” in hand) on Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now!” in early December of 2008. After flying to New York City (partly at my publisher’s expense), I was cancelled by cell phone (with no hint of rescheduling) as I walked toward that show’s studio in Lower Manhattan. It was very strange and last-minute.
Would it have made any difference for me to issue my warnings on “Democracy Now!” No. An appearance on “Sixty Minutes” wouldn’t have mattered in the liberal world. Obama-mania was in full fever in the period between “the One’s” election and his inauguration. Fantasies of a new New Deal were rife across portside America. They were soon to be dashed as Obama and Timothy Geithner picked up the ball from George W. Bush and Hank Paulsen in giving the American people what William Greider called in March of 2009 (in a Washington Post columntitled “Obama Told Us to Speak But Is He Listening?”) “a blunt lesson about power, who has it and who doesn’t.” Americans “watched Washington rush to rescue the very financial interests that caused the catastrophe. They learned,” Greider wrote, “that government has plenty of money to spend when the right people want it.” And nothing for the rest of us, left to ask, “Where’s our bailout?”
But during the hopey-changey Interregnum, predicting such depressing outcomes was considered excessively negative and impolite in respectable liberal-left circles. Back in Iowa City, as across campus-town America, bamboozled liberals and progressives clung to their image of a left-leaning savior Obama like Melanesian islanders caught up in cargo cultsduring and after World War II. No amount of historical evidence was going to pry them away from their faith in the future president. Even now, progressives I know insist on fantasizing that “their” president was a left-leaning character stymied by corporate and imperial interests and the Republicans. The coming awfulness of Trump will perpetuate the fairytale.
Part of it had to do with the powerful symbolic hold of Obama’s skin color and a certain bourgeois kind of racial identity politics. Few white liberal-lefties wanted to deal fully and honestly with how little it really means to put few “black faces in high places” (even in the symbolically highest place of all) when material and social conditions are what they are for millions of ordinary Americans in the neoliberal era. The lesson was somewhat available even under Dubya. With Colin Powell as his first secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice as his first national security adviser and his secretary of state, and Alberto Gonzales as his second attorney general, George W. Bush’s cabinet was the most racially diverse on record. Bush’s presidency was also the most reactionary White House since James Buchanan’s.
Why Study History?
And now we have the dawning age of the thin-skinned megalomaniac and quasi-fascist Trump, who tapped popular resentment fueled by Obama’s predicted betrayals. In the meantime, Obama’s farewell address last Tuesday was crafted to keep the fake-progressive deception alive into his post-White House years. Obama is a master at using words to blind supporters to his deeds.
But serious progressives need to fearlessly peer beneath the deceptive words and the Obama myth and look at the actual record. The real history of Obama is something we should learn from before we let the coming anti-Trump resistance be coopted into a great big get-out-the-vote campaign for some new great purportedly progressive Democratic hope like, say, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Kristen Gillibrand, Tammy Duckworth, Andrew Cuomo, Chris Murphy or Michelle Obama in 2019-20. It’s a cliché to quote Santayana on how those who do not know history’s mistakes are doomed to repeat them, but the warning applies quite well here.

Jan 7, 2017

Frank Ocean Saw It Coming.....




Darker times
They’re telling boulder-heavy lies
Looks like all we’ve got is each other
The truth is obsolete
Remember when all I had was my mother
She didn’t compromise
She could recognize

Voodoo

Our daughters and our sons
Are just candles in the sun

Voodoo

Don’t let him see divide
Don’t you let her see divide

Voodoo
She's got the whole wide world in her juicy fruit
Hes got the whole wide world in his pants
He wrapped the whole wide world in a wedding band
Then put the whole wide world on her hands
Shes got the whole wide world in her hands
Hes got the whole wide world in his hands.


We are truly living in dark times and the Trump era will make it even darkerr so we have to hold on to each other, people. The truth is indeed obsolete and we are divided as a people/nation. The only way through this cold darkness is by increasing our love, togetherness and courage.
Stay strong...

Jan 3, 2017

“I DON’T THINK WE’RE FREE IN AMERICA” – AN INTERVIEW WITH BRYAN STEVENSON




ALTHOUGH THE UNITED STATES has just elected a new president whose promise to make America great “again” evoked an unspecified, presumably more glorious past, Americans’ appreciation of their own history, and particularly its most damning chapters, is limited at best.
The country’s long history of racial violence can hardly be denied, but that history is regularly erased from public commemoration. Some civil rights victories are celebrated, but the violence that preceded them is seldom acknowledged.
Aiming to confront and reclaim that history, the Equal Justice Initiative, led by civil rights attorney and author Bryan Stevenson, launched its “Lynching in America” initiative, a yearslong effort to compile the most comprehensive record of racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950. The project includes a detailed report of more than 4,000 lynchings in 12 states in the South, including 800 that were previously unreported, as well as plans for a museum in Montgomery, and an effort to erect markers in the places where lynchings took place.
That the effort has so often met the resistance of local officials is, to Stevenson, just another sign of how urgently this public conversation is needed, as is an honest assessment of the ways in which the racism of the past endures today. Earlier this year, vandals once again shot up a sign marking the site in Mississippi where in 1955 Emmett Till’s brutalized body was found. In December, President Obama signed a reauthorization of the Emmett Till Act, which directs the DOJ and FBI to continue the investigation of cold civil rights-era hate crimes.
To Stevenson and those fighting to promote greater awareness of the nation’s racial history, this is hardly about history alone. Since the November election, the Southern Poverty Law Center has documented 1,094 hate incidents across the country. But as manifestations of the country’s persistent racism have multiplied, so have attempts to discount it. Shortly after the election, The Intercept spoke with Stevenson about America’s failure to come to terms with its racist past — and therefore its present.
“Lynching in America” was a response to the lack of public memorials commemorating the thousands of African Americans lynched in the country. Your argument is that we can’t move forward if we don’t take stock of this history. Yet this violence is not forgotten — certainly not by its victims and their descendants, but also by today’s racists. Just in the last few months we have seen people show up at football games dressed as President Obama with a noose around his neck, or black freshmen at the University of Pennsylvania being added to a social media account that included a “daily lynching” calendar invitation and photos of people hanging from trees.     
There’s no question that there’s a consciousness and an awareness about our history of slavery, and terrorism, and segregation. But that doesn’t mean there’s an appreciation of the significance of that history, and people will invoke elements of that history in a way that is oppressive and bigoted and problematic because there is no appreciation of the significance of that history. Part of our work is aimed at trying to re-engage this country with an awareness and understanding of how our history of racial inequality continues to haunt us. I don’t think we’re free in America — I think we’re all burdened by this history of racial injustice, which has created a narrative of racial difference, which has infected us, corrupted us, and allowed us to see the world through this lens. So it becomes necessary to talk about that history if we want to get free.
Our project is trying to do that. We want there to be some acknowledgement that we’re a post-genocide society, that when white settlers came to this continent, there were millions of native people here whom we’ve killed through famine and war and disease, and that we forced off their land sometimes in cruel and barbaric ways. And instead of acknowledging that genocide we said, “No, those people are different, they’re not really people, they’re savages,” and we used this narrative of racial difference to justify this horrific behavior. That same narrative of racial difference was employed to justify centuries of slavery.
For me, the great evil of American slavery wasn’t involuntary servitude and forced labor, it was this narrative of racial difference.  In my view, slavery didn’t end in 1865, it just evolved. It turned into decades of terrorism and violence directed at people of color and this terrorism has profound implications for a range of contemporary issues: the urban North and West, the ghettoes, the relocation of millions of black people into these spaces. Black people in Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and Oakland did not go to those communities as immigrants seeking economic opportunities, they went to those communities as refugees and exiles from terror in the American South. That legacy has to be revisited if we’re going to appropriately understand the iconography of lynching, or even the language around the Civil War and the resistance to enfranchisement and emancipation.
Even in the context of civil rights, we focus on the heroism of civil rights leaders without focusing on the intense resistance to integration by white political leaders. And that’s what we’re trying to do: trying to engage this country into a more honest accounting of what it means to be a slave society, what it means to be a place where terrorism and mass atrocities took place, what it means to have been an apartheid country for decades. If we have that appreciation, things will change. We won’t be able to celebrate Jefferson Davis’s birthday as a state holiday — as we do in Alabama — or celebrate Confederate Memorial Day or celebrate Robert E. Lee day without being seen as offending the notion that slavery is wrong. It would be unconscionable for Adolf Hitler’s birthday to be celebrated in Germany.
Your efforts to set up markers of lynchings and other sites of racial violence, for instance by commemorating a major slave market in Montgomery, were sometimes met with fierce resistance by local leaders. Are they actually denying that this history is real?
They are denying it. They are saying, “Slavery was wonderful for black people. The Civil War was about state rights. Black people were treated well during enslavement. Lynching was just tough justice; they were all criminals who deserved lethal punishment. Black people were better off in segregated schools; we just all wanted to be in our own place.” This process of truth telling will push some people to try to deny it. And if there’s not complete denial, there’s certainly no shame. You’d be hard pressed to find anything that looks like a public expression of shame about slavery, or lynching, or segregation.
When we present the history, people have a hard time saying it didn’t happen, they just say we shouldn’t talk about it. When we tried to put up markers in downtown Montgomery, local historical officials said it would be “too controversial” to put up markers that talk about slavery. They didn’t say that didn’t happen, they just said it would be controversial, it would be unsettling, it would be uncomfortable for people to be reminded of slavery even though we have 59 markers and monuments to the Confederacy in the same space.
You argue that understanding this history is essential to understanding not only acts of overt racism and hate happening today, but also the ways in which racism has become engrained in virtually every aspect of our society. Has that narrative of racial difference become institutionalized? 
I don’t think there’s any question that our failure to deal honestly with this history has made us vulnerable to tolerating bias and discrimination in virtually every sector. It’s not just the overt acts of hate that we see on campuses — although I think those are a direct manifestation of this. It’s also the way in which you can have the Bureau of Justice Statistics saying that one in three black male babies is expected to go to jail or prison during his lifetime and nobody cares. That’s not a policy or a political issue that our leaders are talking about. There is a presumption of dangerousness and guilt that gets assigned to black or brown people and people just see that as well, that’s America. We tolerate bias and discrimination and bigotry in ways that we wouldn’t tolerate them if we had a higher shame index about our history.
That certainly is evident in the way we’ve seen some of this rhetoric and demonization of people based on their ethnicity or religion or any of these other things; that’s clearly an example of that. But it manifests in other ways too. That the two largest high schools in Montgomery are Robert E. Lee High and Jefferson Davis High is a manifestation of this failure to confront history. That people are actually trying to eliminate the Voting Rights Act is a manifestation of this history.  That people resent when we talk about bias and discrimination because they think that’s all we talk about is a manifestation of this history. I think it’s hard to find things that are not implicated by our failure to deal with this history more honestly. I really can’t identify many parts of our popular life, our cultural life, our social or political life, that are not haunted by this history of racial inequality.
The openly hateful rhetoric of the election, and then the election’s result itself, have shocked many who might have liked to think this country was “not as racist” anymore. What you seem to say is that this is all very much part of a continuous history that was never truly interrupted?
I think we’re seeing an affirmative use of people’s racial resentment and ethnic resentment to gain power in a way that we haven’t seen before at the national level. I live in Alabama and there’s nothing exceptional about the last election. When you live in places like Alabama, this is the political culture that we’ve seen since the civil rights movement. But at the national level, it’s interesting to see an affirmative use of this kind of racial intolerance, racial resentment, this shameless advocation of America’s great past as a tool for gaining political power. We’ll see how that plays out and what that means.
Are you saying you’re less terrified, because you’re used to it?
I am most worried about the poor and vulnerable people who have had to endure lifetimes of bigotry and discrimination, and who are now going to have to continue meeting those challenges without the possibility of a Justice Department that will protect them, or a federal government that will be attentive to their complaints, or health care, or support systems. There’s a whole host of things that have made enduring the challenges of bias and discrimination in this country a little easier, because of federal programs and because of efforts to try to be responsive. Those programs are now under attack and that will make dealing with the burden even harder. So in that sense, yes, I am worried about the current political future of this nation. But I’m also worried about it in this other sense: I think our identity is shaped not by how we treat the rich, the powerful, and the privileged — we are shaped by how we treat the poor, the incarcerated, the disfavored. And if we say, we only want to be an America for people who have lived here for five generations, we only want to be an America for people who are Christian, and a particular kind of Christian, we only want to be an America for straight people, or white people, then we become a country that is at war with its ideals, with its values, with its principles, with its very Constitution.
Do you agree with the interpretation that this election was a “whitelash” — a white backlash against a changing country and against its first black president?
I think there are a lot of complex factors — I don’t think it can be reduced to any one thing. I certainly think it is a troubling moment in American history when someone can employ this rhetoric of hate and division and bigotry and become elected to the presidency of the United States. I think it is a crisis for America and its identity, its relationships around the world and its relationship with ethnic minorities. Many of us see this as an enormous step backwards, and we’re going to have to figure out how to recover when the nation has done when it has apparently done.
One of the “takes” on the election we have heard repeated in countless ways since November is the idea that, somehow, we talked about racism “too much,” and failed to reach out to growingly resentful white voters. A project like yours is predicated on public discussion. How do you even do that when any attempt to discuss racism is preempted by this aversion to any discussion that’s not about the ways in which whites have perceived a decline in their status and power?
There’s nothing that anybody can point to about the global economy, about trade, about jobs, about declining opportunities that have affected the white working class that hasn’t impacted black people and poor people ten times as hard. It’s not sufficient to talk about the unique challenges of white working class people. Whatever their problems are, they are the same problems that black working class people have, and brown working class people have, and black and brown people are also burdened with a presumption of dangerousness and guilt and a network of other issues. When you have 90 percent of the power and status and it drops to 85 percent, you can use your 85 percent of power and status to complain a lot about the 5 percent you lost, but when you have 5 percent of the status and power and you lose three percent you only have two percent to complain. So there is a disproportionate ability to make your loss, your problems, your struggles seem like the most important struggle, because you have so much more power and status. I am skeptical about this idea that somehow we have done too much to address the challenges of people of color, address the challenges of immigrants, and the challenges of the poor. I just don’t find much evidence of that.
There is a lack of knowledge, and I think knowledge prompts conversation. If you know you live in a city or a county or a space where a dozen people were killed in acts of mass violence, it changes your relationship to that space. If you don’t know it, then it’s never even something you need to think about. The first act is education, bringing to mind and consciousness this history. That’s why we’re trying to do what we’re doing.

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...