Cultural Criticism

By January 2016 I had made peace with the idea of a President Donald Trump.

It was a strange statement for a black woman, a sociologist, a professor. I would go on to consult for Bernie Sanders’ campaign in the primary. I had written an essay for a mainstream anthology about Hillary Rodham Clinton’s brand of feminism. It wasn’t a secret that I was unsettled by how the Democratic party wanted to approach this election.

Still, it was a strange notion to confess to in public, which is exactly how I did it:

but it's important, I think, that we know that we always have in us the impulse to elect a President Trump. Always. https://t.co/TIm7VoVvDi

— Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) January 28, 2016

Professionally smart people were still very dismissive of any idea that Trump could win the primary, much less the presidency.

Then Trump won the nomination.

Professionally smart people then told us about how polls work and about political theory. The United States of America couldn’t elect Trump. We weren’t that nation anymore.

I have been black a long time and I have been southern for about as long. I’m talking at least one lifetime if you don’t count the culture trapped in my bones, inherited from my people.

I am trained a social scientist. I know how polls work, much to the chagrin of the professionally smart men who sneered at me when I said this nation could absolutely elect Donald Trump.

To be professionally smart is to concede always to rational science, to polls and confidence intervals. These colleagues, the professionally smart, seemed dismayed that the black woman they’d been brave enough to think smart could believe a President Trump was possible.

They were dismayed but not surprised.  Women and black people always have a potential blind spot where race and gender are concerned. It is why we’re so emotional and irrational. We just cannot see past our unscientific claims of racism and sexism to be truly professionally smart. Our models, in the parlance of the professionally smart, are always just a bit skewed.

It’s a shame, too. Because the professionally smart really want evidence that their faith in affirmative action for smart minorities is well-placed. It is a shame with a black woman has as much potential as me and still can’t see past that racial blind spot.

My blind spot was, of course, perfect clarity about how whiteness and racism work.

It is a difficult thing to measure in polls. That’s why there is still great value in systematic collection and analysis of how people experience the world and not just how they tell you they experience the world.

People told pollsters that they were undecided or that they weren’t sure if they would vote. People told themselves that they were rational and not victims to blind spots or identity politics. People told themselves and told us that this is not the nation that could elect a liar and a cheater and a bully and an ingrate and a white nationalist President of the United States of America.

But people went to Donald Trump rallies.

I know because I went to one, too.

I didn’t just ask people why they were there. I paid attention to how they were there. Did they bring their children? How did they comport themselves? How were they dressed? What cars filled the parking lots? What were the side conversations in stairways and lines for the bathroom?

At the Donald Trump rally I heard white women swoon at the thought of catching his eye from the stage. Women in their fifties giggled like school girls over how sexy he is. Young but infirm white men and women on crutches and in hoverrounds and walkers with the little wheels on the back legs screamed about how Obamacare was ruining America.

And black men sat silently in corners, nodding almost imperceptibly when he talked about trade. South Asian and east Asian groups for Trump littered the hall with signs and t-shirts showing their support. Young people cheered when Trump said he would arrest Hillary and cage in the inner cities, wearing jerseys fresh from or to some sporting practice.

This was America and I knew it was because for me it always has been.

***

Johnathan Chait once chided Ta-Nehisi Coates for his hopelessness. If there is a more persistent demand of the marginalized and oppressed than that they perform hope for their benefactors, it is difficult to find it. We have, of course, a nomenclature problem. When white allies want us to be hopeful what they really mean is that they require absolution in exchange for their sympathies. And, when black people say that they are plenty hopeful we tend to mean that our hope is tempered by a deep awareness of how thin is the veneer of white civility. Our grudging acceptance that progress and diversity are fragile bits of spun glass looks like hopelessness because it doesn’t absolve. But, it is the most enduring kind of hope and it is the hope that President-elect Donald Trump will require of us all if we’re to organize and resist.

Professionally smart people who claim to know our collective heart really like straight lines. First, there was the enlightenment and then some unfortunate business about colonialism and black ocean bottoms. Then there was freedom and the Great Society and smartphones and the browning of America.

The straight line requires a lot of erasers.

Sociologist Karen Fields and historian Barbara Fields have this wonderful analytical concept called racecraft. I like it a lot for many reasons. Chief among them is the clear articulation about how rational hopelessness is and how radically necessary it is to any kind of progress for a society so embedded in racial hierarchies as is ours.

Racecraft is the great story about what race is and what it can never be for race to persist as a powerful social category. Racecraft is the debate about whether Trump voters acted out of partisanship or economic anxiety, out of sexism or racism because plain old racism is simply too blunt a tool to explain such complex social behavior. Mind you, partisanship literally means just voting like lots of other people vote out of loyalty. Racism, in contrast, is a cohesive analytical framework that accounts for the complex ways that identities and ideologies shift over time. One of those concepts is as complex as the phenomenon in question but only one is dismissed outright as foolish. When racecraft is the prevailing responsibility of professional smart people and erasers and line drawers, these kind of inconsistencies don’t matter.

Racecraft necessitates that facts and truth, as Mark Zuckerberg intoned this week when Facebook was indicted for facilitating the spread of fake news stories, are always fundamentally unknowable. Philosophically, of course, there is a debate about whether there is any such thing as “truth” but politically there is no doubt that there is an agreed upon idea of what constitutes a fact. A social fact, even, as sociologists often call it. How ironic for the great narrative emerging from this election to be so fastidiously addicted to “fake news” that may or may not have swayed the election given how racecraft has shaped the political fabric of this nation, eating truth whenever convenient to make sure that fabric only ever secured white freedoms.

Racecraft tells us that any truth, any fact can be dispensed with when it doesn’t support the straight line. Racecraft has to allow for science that refutes the existence of races while also proving that there is such thing as races. Racecraft is a nation’s split personality that must have a measurement device for popular opinions while discounting one of the single greatest predictors of popular opinion. Racecraft is how the only folks who see things clearly can be the ones accused of having a blind spot.

That is why professionally smart people require all members to the club have irrational, exuberant hope. But, the black members have to have the most irrational and exuberant and performative hope. We cannot just scream “yes we can!” We have to scream it even when it is clear that we cannot and no, we will not and no, we are not. We have to pay this tax to the professionally smart because our blind spot is so discomfiting. We come with the baggage of lived experience of racism.

You hear it already, the calls for liberals and democrats to get back to hope as quickly and efficiently as possible. The call is loudest and most pointed when aimed at the black voters and the women voters, god help us, the black women voters. They cannot be bothered right now with our casual hopelessness that has always already lived with the dystopia promised by a President Trump. Everything from reversing Roe v. Wade and police surveillance to mob rule in public discourse and delegitimized claims to citizenship have been true for us for a long time.

The America many professionally smart people woke up to last week is the America many of us have already lived in for at least as long as this memory shut up in my bones.

The irony is that despite our hopelessness, black voters worked overtime to defeat Trump. We did this despite having more barriers to voting than almost any other part of the electorate: gerrymandering, voter ID laws, time constraints, and voter intimidation. Just like we have always showed up. We have showed up to free ourselves, to free the immigrant others who came after us, to perfect this union against its will, and to make democracy great one day.

My hopelessness isn’t nihilism just like my blind spot has always seen clearly the limits of American progress.

My hopelessness is faith in things yet seen and works yet done. Hopelessness is necessary for the hard work of resisting tyranny and fascism. It is the precondition for sustained social movements because history isn’t a straight line. It is a spinning top that eventually moves forward but also always goes round and round as it does. Those erasers applied post-mortem confuse us to this, blind us to the defeats that will come and ill prepare us for the reality that most of what we believe in will not come to pass in our lifetimes. A transactional hope is anathema to social progress.

I knew this America could elect a President Trump. It is precisely because I always knew it, bone deep, that I worked so hard to stop it.

It’s why the work never stopped.

For some of us it never has.

I have watched many cities burn over the past two years.

I cried over Ferguson.

I cried over Baltimore.

But there’s nothing like seeing your hometown on social media with a hashtag.

I don’t want to talk about my family and friends. Worrying about them keeps me up at night. I don’t want to talk about.

I am only giving myself permission to think about Charlotte in public, not feel. Feeling is for private.

The first night of protesting I remarked that we don’t do this in Charlotte. I didn’t mean that we don’t do the kind of inequality that defined Ferguson. We do. I didn’t mean that we don’t do the kind of urban warfare between citizens and police that defined Baltimore. I didn’t mean that we don’t do extra-judicial murder. I have written about Johnathan Ferrell. I know that we do.

I meant that Charlotte does not have the deep, varied social organizing culture to quickly mobilize mass actions. We are not Chicago.

We certainly have a robust civic community. But, that isn’t the same thing.

In many ways, our lack of organizational infrastructure has been a point of pride. We didn’t have it because, the story went, we didn’t need it.

I was a volunteer when Charlotte began branding itself as the “first county to declare independence from Great Britain”. That was about ten years ago now. The city boosters held these events trying to sell us this new story of Mecklenburg County. They had historical actors and fancy movies and sausage dogs on platters with $5 beers. It was a big to-do.

Being culturally sensitive sophisticates, the presentation I saw had a section about black Mecklenburg citizens. It described how Charlotte had peacefully integrated when white business owners realized that racism was bad for business.

That was the story that Charlotte sold.

I grew up attending evidence of Charlotte’s great integrationist past: West Charlotte Senior High School. My historically black high school was one of the most well respected, best funded and competitive in the state when I attended. You knew that was true because white people fought to get their children enrolled. I went to school with white boys named Trip and Helms. We were fancy.

We were part of the story that Charlotte sold.

How does the new south city that was too busy to hate and too polite to brag about it (unlike Atlanta) turn into what we’ve seen the last two nights?

How is my city now in the annals of hashtag history that will largely define this era of racist violence, social movements, and hopefully, change?

A few ideas on that:

As David A. Graham writes in The Atlantic, Charlotte’s structural reality has moved faster than its cultural ideology.

For my money, three things happened that created a perfect storm for what feels like a rapid and cataclysmic restructuring of a city’s entire history, identity, and reality.

It is almost impossible to overstate the effect of “neighborhood schools” or the reversal of busing that created the West Charlotte High School that I graduated from. Graham and others point this out.

It also matters when that happened. At the tail end of the 1990s, Charlotte was starting to wake up to the telecom driven financial bubble bursting. As a banking town and a town that had invested heavily in attracting telecom companies (e.g. Sprint), the city felt the hit. But we didn’t all feel it the same way.

As I point out in my book Lower Ed, believe it or not (Charlotte is a field site), black folks were hit hard by that bubble bursting. Good-paying jobs that didn’t require the level of credit and security clearance that bank jobs did declined rapidly.

Incomes took a hit and all of those folks who had entered the mortgage market relied heavily on homes to stay afloat.

Then things leveled out but the next bubble was forming.

Again, we’re a banking town.

The mortgage bubble was coming.

People who were still recovering from the telecom bubble bursting were drawn into mortgage related jobs and into the mortgage market.

This is happening as schools are resegregating.

Cheap mortgages and stagnating black wages but rebounding white wages would accelerate residential segregation.

And that seems to be what happened.

That’s the second event.

The third event is what follows: rapid transit that contours the existing patterns of racial and class residential segregation. In fill development follows that.

In twenty years, the fragile economic conditions that had allowed us the hubris to rewrite our history as a racial accommodation fairytale went up in smoke.

That stretch of Old Concord Road where the police killed Keith Lamont Scott is not the hood, as we imagine it in popular culture. It is residential, almost country by city standards. It is also nowhere near the new light rail blazing through that part of town a couple miles west. Soon it is easy to imagine the area’s dozen or so housing developments feeling like it is a million miles away from the rest of Charlotte.

I was surprised to see my city burning but I shouldn’t have been.

It is always burning where my people are.

There is a meme floating around. I won’t share an image of it. Somewhere along the way, I pieced together too many followers to casually link to people’s memes and social media content. I don’t want it to seem like I’m refuting any single person so much as an idea floating out there in the ether.

The meme cites James Baldwin and/or W.E.B. DuBois on why the negro should not vote.

I respect both philosophers a great deal. I teach DuBois as the start of modern sociology. I think my respect is well-documentated.

However, there is another political philosophy about the African American vote that I find interesting. I will call it the Bash Mister’s Head Open And Think About Heaven Later philosophy.

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If you don’t recognize the reference there is an excellent chance that you are not a black American of a certain age. It is from The Color Purple:

(copyright Warner Brothers)

I have tried for a long time to articulate how I understand black southern working class women’s philosophy in the U.S.

Many smart people are doing this work formally. You should read Anita Allen, Paula Giddings, Tina Botts, and Brittney Cooper to get started.

I am thinking about philosophy more like a sociologist might: philosophy of knowledge and the political economy of knowledge production. And, I am thinking about philosophy more like a black southern Gen-Xer raised in Black Panther Party politics but also in the NAACP respectability machine might think about it. That is, it is complicated.

That’s the gist of my argument about Hillary Clinton’s campaign in “False Choice: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton” A recent book review called the feminists in that volume, including me, as peripheral to mainstream feminism. I was like, you ain’t never lied but also thank you.

Being on the periphery is exactly what black women like me have always been. Our philosophy reflects that.

_______________

Bash Mister’s Head Open And Think About Heaven Later philosophy reflects the peripheral knowledge production that black women have done as they fight in their house: with Mister, with Mister’s oppressors, and with political machinations that ignore both.

In that space where our fight has been systematically and deliberately erased, it is useful to think about DuBois and Baldwin’s arguments against voting as a powerful statements of resistance. And they are. But they are not absolutely statements about how black working class (who have been historically situated in the U.S. south physically or ideologically) women have to fight in a political regime.

Miss Sophia offers a way to understood black suffragists like Ida B. Wells. Wells, who knew as much about state sanctioned white rage and violence as anyone, still organized for black women’s franchise.

Later, black women socialists wrote the philosophy of revolution but also, some of them quietly, organizing the vote.

These philosophers of action and rhetoric seemed capable of both incrementalism and revolution, something we’re told are incompatible. The result was revolution of a sort. It was revolutionary for blacks to force one of the mightiest nations in history to prosecute whites for hanging blacks, for example. And, it was also incremental in that state violence clearly continues to target black people. But to say the revolution is incomplete isn’t the same as saying revolutions don’t happen. They simply may not happen the way we dream of them.

Philosophical rhetoric is important but black women philosophers have argued and lived the truth that it is not the only thing that is important.

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Here’s where I am: I try to vote the interests of poor black women and girls. I do that because, as a winner in this crap knowledge economy, the election outcome won’t much affect my life no matter who wins or loses. But poor black women and girls don’t have a lobby. So, I supported Bernie Sanders because, despite his (non)rhetoric on race, I truly believed that an anti-poverty policy would represent poor black women and girls’ political interests. Truly. I still believe that.

I don’t care if Bernie didn’t ever learn the words to Lift E’ry Voice and Sing. I thought that with a Democratic party machine behind him to hopefully elect locals and state officers plus a federal agency to legitimize an anti-poverty and jobs program, maybe we could get some long overdue economic and political investment in poor black women and girls. Now I will vote for Hillary for the same reason, even as I know that being oppressed in the U.S. still makes us all complicit in the U.S.’ global oppression of other poor people, brown people and women. 

I went to a Trump rally last week in Richmond, VA. Here are some comments and thoughts from my live tweeting/ field notes:

• Trump appeals to many of the “beautiful people” even though the narrative is that he is a consequence of poor whites losing ground in the new economy.

• Trump is not that great at the things we give him credit for. He doesn’t whip up the crowd so much as the crowd comes seeking an outlet to vent. Trump doesn’t shape that anger into a collective experience. That’s why there are a lot of blank spaces — or “dead air” as I call it on Twitter — in the rally. He’s not a good fascist and only a passable demagogue. He would never make a JV cheer squad, is what I’m saying. His main selling point is that he is shameless. And, he let’s himself be used for venting.

• Trump butchers numbers and facts but it doesn’t matter because quantification is not the point. We have to stop thinking that Trump lying will somehow turn off his base. “Mathwashing” (see my note on the storify about the neologism) serves a deeper, emotional need to simply a confusing and complex world. He is very good at that.

This rally was held two days before the tragic, horrific, still-makes-me-cry mass shooting in Orlando. These two events are not distinct. We saw what happens when ideologies about who is human and not; who belongs and who doesn’t; who is an equal participant in our social contract and who is an threat to it spills over through the minds and actions and weapons of people who believe rhetoric is reality. We cannot afford to be blase about this violence. And I can’t thank people enough for keeping eyes on me while I tried to get to know my country at a Donald Trump rally.

I spent a lot of years wanting to feel the holy spirit. I tried all the religions in North Carolina and never happened upon it until a Prince concert in Greensboro, NC.

Genius was as close as I ever came to god.

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There is the kind of genius that works hard. You see Michael Jackson’s sweat and tears. Beyonce wears her hard work like a badge. They tell you that with hard work you could be great, too. You put them on your playlist to suit for the game.

Then there’s genius that makes the impossible seem inevitable. It is effortless. You can never attain it. You can’t earn it or deserve it. You can only float in it for a time. That was Prince Rogers Nelson.

Even when he was sweating he wasn’t working; he was channeling. Spirit, magic, wonder, awe, grace, the holy spirit — he was both a master and a vessel. You could work hard all of your life and never be his kind of genius.

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Today, there doesn’t seem to be any of Prince’s kind of genius left in the world. The wonder is gone. All that’s left is the hustle. I don’t knock the hustle but it is a very particular strain of creative genius. It is neoliberal, if you’re into that. It’s Reagonomics and Thatcherism and moderates and centrists and incrementalism with a beat. It’s the genius of our time.

Prince’s genius was another time, when it still seemed possible for greatness to use the system without bowing to it. Neoliberalism was still just one fork in a road when Prince made his first album. We weren’t jaded yet. I didn’t know what weaves were. I don’t think there was any photoshop. We didn’t know the ins-and-outs of music economics or have celebrity social media.

Genius could incubate, like schools could teach music and hip hop could still maybe revolutionize the hood. Borrowing from Lester Spence, Prince knocked the hustle that’s taken over our cultural imagination:

The ideas represented in the “I’m a business, man” lyric strike Spence as an instance of popular culture reproducing a political idea and story: Successful people work hard and get ahead by investing in their human capital, and people who aren’t successful simply aren’t working hard enough to do that. Recall President Barack Obama on the 2014 midterm elections campaign stump, lamenting that “if Uncle Jethro would get off the couch and stop watching SportsCenterand go register some folks and go to the polls, we might have a different kind of politics.” In other words: The problem with black people is not that the economic and political infrastructure has anything wrong with it, but that they’re not doing enough for themselves.

From: http://hub.jhu.edu/magazine/2015/winter/lester-spence-african-americans-neoliberalism

I am distraught at the loss of genius. Prince isn’t just gone, his death is an ending. I am sure every generation feels this way and it is only just my turn up at bat. In thirty years today’s young people will eulogize Fetty Wap and Beyonce the same way. They’ll say it is an end of an era.

I’m sure they’ll be right. Still, the end of Prince’s transcendent genius feels like we have taken the fork in the road. There are no more unknowable geniuses. I know what stars eat for lunch and what they want me to believe that they shop. Celebrity may donate to social movements and causes, but it doesn’t sacrifice its peak earning years by branding themselves slaves to free others. Performers honor street culture and put their new artists on, but they don’t build an infrastructure for creativity where new genius can incubate. Prince did these things as an act of radical love. Love. It’s the only thing that can knock the hustle.

We took the road most traveled and there are no detours for the foreseeable future. That kind of genius died today and with it went my faith.

Love come quick/Love come in a hurry/There are thieves in the temple tonight -Prince