Dog Whistles from the Left (updated)

I've written before about how uncomfortable I am with the idea that Democrats need to figure out how to appeal to working class white voters. It's not that I object to building a bigger coalition. My concern is the often unspoken message that appealing to the unique concerns of people of color is the wrong message.

In an op-ed in the NYT today, Noam Scheiber makes that often unspoken argument overtly. He's writing about Mayor Bill DeBlasio's drop in the polls. But I don't want to get distracted with analyzing DeBlasio's performance. Instead, let's pay attention to the overall message.

From the get-go, Mr. de Blasio’s campaign fused two distinct strands of progressivism. The first was economic populism, not least his criticism that Michael R. Bloomberg had placed the interests of Wall Street and the wealthy above those of average New Yorkers.

The second was what some have called “identity group” liberalism, which appealed to black and Latino voters as blacks and Latinos, not on the basis of economic interests they shared with whites. The centerpiece of Mr. de Blasio’s identity-group agenda was his promise to win better treatment for minorities at the hands of the police.

The problem for Mr. de Blasio is that only the first approach has widespread appeal...

If you were to rank issues by their potential to unite whites and minority voters, the most promising would be populist economic issues like raising taxes on the rich. Somewhere in the middle would be an issue like health care, which has large economic benefits for both whites and nonwhites, even if opponents can portray it as a sop to the latter. At the very bottom would be issues with little economic content, but which different racial groups view in radically different ways.

What Scheiber is basically saying is that if you want to unite whites and minority voters, you have to focus on the issues that are a priority to whites. That's pretty much white supremacy in a nutshell. His big "tell" comes in what he leaves out of that last sentence. The reason racial groups view the issues he places at the bottom differently is because they affect racial groups differently. White people never had to be concerned about "stop-and-frisk" because it almost never happened to a white person. White mothers/fathers, wives, siblings don't spend much time worrying that their son, husband, brother will be harassed/beaten/killed because some police officer jumped to the conclusion that he was a "dangerous black/brown man." But that is exactly how police actions become a priority for voters of color. The fear of what can happen becomes a life-and-death issue for them - as we've seen lately.

White people were just as oblivious to the priorities of African Americans during the Jim Crow era. One of the reasons Dr. Martin Luther King was so revolutionary and successful is that he believed white people would reject the treatment of African Americans if they could see it...really see it. Here's how Ta-Nehisi Coates talked about that.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. may have led African Americans out of segregation, and he may have cured incalculable numbers of white racists, but more than all that, he believed that the lion's share of the population of this country would not support the rights of thugs to pummel people who just wanted to cross a bridge. King believed in white people, and when I was a younger, more callow man, that belief made me suck my teeth. I saw it as weakness and cowardice, a lack of faith in his own. But it was the opposite. King's belief in white people was the ultimate show of strength: He was willing to give his life on a bet that they were no different from the people who lived next door.

For Scheiber, understanding and validating those priorities in today's America is a losing strategy for Democrats.

The real lesson is that Mr. de Blasio’s brand of liberalism isn’t a basis for Democratic dominance, as his boosters once enthused. Politically, economic populism trumps identity-group appeals.

I'll simply remind you that Scheiber himself described DeBlasio's brand of liberalism as a fusion of economic populism with things like a promise to end "stop-and-frisk." So it is that fusion politics championed by people like Rev. William Barber and the Moral Mondays Movement that Scheiber is rejecting - Democrats shouldn't embrace both. To rephrase what he said: "Politically, white people's priorities trump people of color's priorities." If it makes you uncomfortable to hear it said that way, you are tuned in to the dog whistle by which white supremacy is often communicated. Those messages are not the exclusive domain of people on the right.

UPDATE: On twitter Scheiber is responding to a critique of his op-ed (which I didn't make - but his response is still instructive) by saying that it was meant to be "descriptive, not normative." In a sense, he's right about that. What he did was describe how politics on the left looks these days from a white privileged perspective. I simply reject that perspective.

What is the trajectory of the moral arc of the universe?

One of the things President Obama said is necessary for us to solve our current challenges is that we have to recognize that we've made progress - because it gives us hope that we can make more. But there is a strain of liberalism that - either due to psychological or strategic preference - seems to be wedded to the idea that things are getting worse. Exhibit A: Chris Hayes.


At about 1:45:

"Equal Justice Under Law," as it reads above the Supreme Court. And I've gotta say that for a long time I believed the U.S. is such a place. Sure, its flawed and sure, there are places where justice is miscarried. But fundamentally I have long thought that the U.S. really is a nation of laws. I have to say...it is getting harder and harder to hold on to that faith.

When I saw Hayes tweet a link with that video, I had a question for him.

@chrislhayes Are you saying that US is less a nation of laws than it was 50 or 100 yrs ago? Or are you simply waking up to the inequalities?
— Nancy LeTourneau (@Smartypants60) December 10, 2014

I haven't heard back from him. But the only way a statement like that makes any sense is if he was commenting on his own growing awareness of white male privilege, which has shielded him from seeing our history as a country.

As Bryan Stevenson often says, we have a justice system that "treats you better if you are rich and guilty than if you are poor and innocent. Wealth - not culpability - shapes outcomes."

But does anyone else remember that there were days when black people were lynched instead of tried in a court of law - while public officials either participated or simply looked the other way? Or how about the days when neither women nor people of color were allowed to sit on juries? Better yet...where is the accountability for slavery...or Native American genocide? And when have any public officials been held accountable for torture?

The most generous take on what Hayes had to say is that he is awakening to his own sense of privilege. Because the only other alternative is to see it as a narcissistic statement devoid of any historical awareness.

I am reminded of why President Obama focused his 2008 speech about race in America on the opening statement in our constitution: "We the people, in order to form a more perfect union..."

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution — a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part — through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk — to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

It is the sacrifice of those "Americans in successive generations" to perfect our union that is negated by those who cannot/will not see the progress that has been made. Honoring them in no way diminishes the difficult challenges we still face. But it does allow us to see that the trajectory of the moral arc of the universe is long, but its bending towards justice. And that's where hope comes from.

Jim Webb is still pining for "normal"

Jim Webb this week:

Former senator and potential presidential candidate Jim Webb told an audience in Richmond on Tuesday that the Democratic Party has lost white working-class voters by becoming "a party of interest groups."

"The Democratic Party has lost the message that made it such a great party for so many years, and that message was: Take care of working people, take care of the people who have no voice in the corridors of power, no matter their race, ethnicity or any other reason," Webb said. "The Democratic Party has basically turned into a party of interest groups."

At that same link, Paul Waldman does a pretty good job of deconstructing what Webb is saying.

The clientele of conservatism looks to voters like anyone who isn't in the groups making up the Democratic coalition, which is basically white people, and white men in particular. And despite the fact that Republicans represent a lot of actual interest groups (the oil industry, Wall Street, etc.) for some mysterious reason, middle-aged white men are just, well, Americans, while women or blacks or Hispanics are an "interest group."

Bingo!!!

And so I am reminded of what David Simon wrote about "the death of normal" shortly after the 2012 election.

America will soon belong to the men and women — white and black and Latino and Asian, Christian and Jew and Muslim and atheist, gay and straight — who can walk into a room and accept with real comfort the sensation that they are in a world of certain difference, that there are no real majorities, only pluralities and coalitions...

We are all the other now, in some sense. Special interests? That term has no more meaning in the New America. We are all — all of us, every last American, even the whitest of white guys — special interests. And now, normal isn’t white or straight or Christian. There is no normal. That word, too, means less with every moment. And those who continue to argue for such retrograde notions as a political reality will become less germane and more ridiculous with every passing year.

"Normal" in politics used to mean straight white christian male, i.e., Jim Webb. Everyone else was an "interest group." That's how Webb still defines the world. But what Simon is saying is that the whole paradigm is in the process of shifting. The sooner we all wake up to that reality, the better off we'll all be.

Pundits: Please start paying attention to white people again!

The success of the Southern Strategy for Republicans can be chronicled by the narrative that developed in the 1980's which suggested that the only way for Democrats to win the White House was for them to nominate a Southern governor (i.e., appeal to southern white people). Then along came Barack Hussein Obama - a black man who came from Illinois and Hawaii. All of the sudden, everyone was talking about the Obama coalition and the way the country's changing demographics benefited Democrats.

And so its been interesting to watch pundits try to change the narrative that developed after the 2008 election based on the 2014 midterms - in which we saw the lowest voter turnout in 40 years. What I hear when I listen to people like Charlie Cook and NBC's First Read is: "Please start paying attention to white people again!"

It probably shouldn't surprise us that Cook (who recently wrote that passing Obamacare was a horrific choice) feels vindicated by Sen. Schumer's recent comments. But what IS amazing is that he can go on to talk about how - in the Obama era - Democrats have lost support among white working class voters without ever once mentioning the impact racism has had on that reality. Given the constant challenges to this President's legitimacy coming from the backers of the confederate insurgency, any rational discussion simply has to put that one in the mix. The failure of Cook to do so is a classic example of white privilege.

And, of course, the white folks who write NBC's First Read picked right up where Cook left off.

Earlier this week, our friend Charlie Cook made a great point: While Republicans are struggling with minority voters, Democrats have a problem with working-class whites. In the 2014 midterms, they made up 36% of all voters, and they broke Republican, 64%-34%. Yes, long-term demographic trends are in the Democrats' favor -- the minority population in this country is growing and growing. But ask yourself what is more likely in the immediate future: Republicans winning Minnesota and Wisconsin in presidential contests, or Democrats winning Arizona and Georgia. You've got to go with the former, right? In 20 years, with the country's growing Latino population, the presidential map appears tilted toward the Democrats. But in the short term, the Democrats could find problems in states with lots of white voters.

That one prompts me to make a "new rule:" Any pundit who even suggests that the 2014 midterms can be used to predict what is going to happen during a presidential election has just declared themselves an idiot.

But what those authors also fail to mention is that - while "the minority population in this country is growing" - the group of people they think is so determinative, working-class whites, is on the decline. One way demographers define "working-class" is to track those who do not have a college education. In 1940, only 5% of the population had a four-year degree. That number has grown steadily over the years and by 2007, it was 29%. Those with some college (but not a degree) added an additional 25%.

Given all these trends, its not like we are going to wake up 20 years from now and all of the sudden notice that the political landscape has changed. It is in the process of changing right now! But the good-ole-white-boys that populate so much of our media just can't/won't see it.

Hey pundits, you might want to listen to Jorge Ramos

Here's my latest tweet:

If you’re prognosticating about PBO’s action on immigration & not listening to Jorge Ramos…whiff pic.twitter.com/8SGYhOLgfH
— Nancy LeTourneau (@Smartypants60) November 20, 2014

It was inspired by this article from Michael Scherer about Ramos.

This morning as I was reading the usual prognosticators about President Obama's announcement tonight on immigration, I noticed how few of them are incorporating the reaction of Latinos and/or immigrant rights activists into their opinions. Case in point...NBC's First Read.

I have to wonder if (mostly white) pundits made the same mistake back in 1994 when California Republicans went all-in on Proposition 187.

...a 1994 ballot initiative to establish a state-run citizenship screening system and prohibit illegal aliens from using health care, public education, and other social services in the U.S. State of California.

Remember last week when I talked about how the West Coast states went from red to blue? In hindsight, a lot of people credit that change in California to backlash from the passage of that proposition.

One of the effects of white privilege is that we tend to view the world through the lens of our own experience. The impact of someone like Jorge Ramos and the people he touches tend to not be on our radar screens. But if you want to prognosticate about how this country will react to President Obama's action on immigration, you might want to check out what he and his 10 million viewers are thinking/saying (in comparison, Bill O'Reilly gets about 3 million viewers on Fox).

Democrats: Now is NOT the time to abandon the Obama coalition!

Any pundit who attempts to comment on our current political climate while ignoring the role of race and racism is simply blind - most likely by their own white privilege. While I have had some issues with his approach lately, Tim Wise nailed it a few years ago when he talked about the current "perfect storm" for white anxiety.


To ignore that is to miss a big part of the picture. The factors Wise outlines are exactly why we are currently living in - as Rev. Barber articulated - a Third Reconstruction. That struggle isn't limited to the battle over voting rights. It is also captured by things like the nativism that has been stirred up over immigration reform and the tension that is building between law enforcement and communities of color (i.e., Ferguson). 
Today I woke up to a story about how that is playing out in my own community. Yesterday, the local ABC affiliate in the Twin Cities ran a story titled: Mpls Mayor Flashes Gang Sign with Convicted Felon; Law Enforcement Outraged. 

As it turns out - this "convicted felon" is not a gang member, but has a job working as a canvasser for a local GOTV organization while he is on probation. He and the Mayor were celebrating their door-knocking work last weekend by pointing at each other. KSTP (the local ABC affiliate) was quite clear that they based their story on the "outrage" of law enforcement - who just so happen to be fighting the Mayor on the reforms she is proposing to the Minneapolis Police Department to end disparities. 

So the back story is that law enforcement thought they could discredit the Mayor by tapping into the racist idea that she is convorting with (black) criminal gang members. One officer in the clip of the newscast that I linked to above even goes so far as to ask "Is she going to support gangs or us?"

But folks are fighting back. If you want to see how, just check out the twitter hashtag #pointergate - the story is going national.

In conclusion, the point I want to make with all of this is that lots of pundits and political strategists are in the process of suggesting that - as a result of the midterm losses - Democrats should abandon Obama's efforts to expand the electorate and instead focus on how they can win support from southern white working class voters. I read that as: "Standing up for civil rights is not going well with white voters, so its time to abandon that one." You can FOR SURE count me out on that idea!!!!

Maureen Dowd pines for the "good old days"

So Maureen Dowd is depressed and cynical. What's new? You can read BooMan's total take-down of her cynicism here. But he skipped over something she said that made me literally do a double-take.

We’re a little bit scared of our own shadow. And, sadly, we see ourselves as a people who can never understand one another. We’ve given up on the notion that we can cohere, even though the founders forged America by holding together people with deep differences.

What in holy hell is she talking about? Those "deep differences" our founders held together were the ones between white land-owning males. Meanwhile, our black and brown neighbors were subjected to slavery and genocide while we claimed Manifest Destiny over the continent. Our founders showed precious little interest in cohering with folks who weren't just like them.

I'm pretty sure Maureen Dowd knows this history. But it is so typical of the role white privilege plays in our minds that a knowing of facts is not enough to challenge the conclusions we reach based on the myths we've come to believe.

Its all a reminder to me about why so much of white America (both conservative and liberal) are in the midst of a giant freak-out these days - especially those in the baby boomer age group. We were nurtured on the idea of an America that ruled the world after WWII and emerged believing that Ozzie and Harriet were the definition of life in America. Sure, we occasionally heard about the injustices black and brown people faced. And we watched our country struggle through the Civil Rights Movement, Viet Nam and Watergate. But the basic contract of white men in charge of America and America in charge of the world remained intact. That myth is now under assault and an awful lot of folks are losing their g-d minds about it.

In the end, what Dowd and so many others are depressed about is the death of normal.

America will soon belong to the men and women — white and black and Latino and Asian, Christian and Jew and Muslim and atheist, gay and straight — who can walk into a room and accept with real comfort the sensation that they are in a world of certain difference, that there are no real majorities, only pluralities and coalitions. The America in which it was otherwise is dying, thank god, and those who relied on entitlement and division to command power will either be obliged to accept the changes, or retreat to the gated communities from which they wish to wax nostalgic and brood on political irrelevance...

Hard times are still to come for all of us. Rear guard actions will be fought at every political crossroad. But make no mistake: Change is a motherfucker when you run from it...

We are all the other now, in some sense. Special interests? That term has no more meaning in the New America. We are all — all of us, every last American, even the whitest of white guys — special interests. And now, normal isn’t white or straight or Christian. There is no normal. That word, too, means less with every moment. And those who continue to argue for such retrograde notions as a political reality will become less germane and more ridiculous with every passing year.

R.I.P. normal. Its going to take the Maureen Dowd's of the world a while to adjust. In the meantime, a column like this is a perfect example of her waxing nostalgic and brooding on her own political irrelevance.

What racism usually sounds like these days

The kind of racism expressed by Donald Sterling is rarely uttered in public. As a matter of fact, we wouldn't know about what he said if his girlfriend hadn't recorded his private conversation.

Most often these days, public statements of racism tend to come in the form of what North Carolina Senate candidate Thom Tillis said in an interview back in 2012.

The traditional population of North Carolina and the United States is more or less stable. It's not growing. The African American population is roughly growing but the Hispanic population and the other immigrant populations are growing in significant numbers.

The "dog whistle" nature of a statement like that is that everyone knows that when he says "traditional," he means "white." The suggestion therefore is that people of color in North Carolina and the United States are "non-traditional."

In saying that, he marginalized Native Americans and Latinos who preceded the arrival of white Northern Europeans to America as well as African Americans who arrived on slave ships simultaneously. In other words, he ignored historical facts. That he can do so speaks to the way our "traditional" efforts to dismiss black and brown people as something other than human have been ingrained in our thought and language.

The way these kinds of conversations usually proceed is that people will point out to Tillis that what he said was racist for the reasons I articulated above. He will respond by saying something to the effect of "I don't hate black/brown people so I'm not a racist! How dare you call me that!"

The truth is that most of us don't know whether or not Thom Tillis "hates" black/brown people. And that's not the point anyway. The point is that he just told the black and brown people of this country that they don't belong by totally dismissing their traditional history in this country. That is a racist thing to say, regardless of whether its motivated by hate or ignorance or indifference.

As long as white people can convince each other that racism = hating black/brown people, we'll never tackle the conversation we actually need to have. Once again, this is why Jay Smooth's advice is so important.

"The world as it is and the world as it should be"

Once again today President Obama summoned the paradox that undergirds the work of his favorite philosopher - Reinhold Niebuhr.

Now, ultimately, global leadership requires us to see the world as it is, with all its danger and uncertainty. We have to be prepared for the worst, prepared for every contingency, but American leadership also requires us to see the world as it should be -- a place where the aspirations of individual human beings really matters, where hopes and not just fears govern; where the truths written into our founding documents can steer the currents of history in the direction of justice.

As I read various pundits react to the President's speech on foreign policy at West Point's commencement, I am struck by how difficult it is for many Americans to deal with the reality of "the world as it is." There persists in our imagination a myth that if we simply summoned the right formula for our foreign policy approach, we could control the outcome and create "the world as it should be." And so, when President Obama fails to make grand sweeping promises about how his approach will get us there, he is seen as somehow equivocating.

That kind of thinking seems to me to go right to the heart of our problems with exceptionalism. Since I find tremendous overlap between American exceptionalism and white privilege, I thought immediately of something Tim Wise wrote years about about the difference between an emphasis on efficacy vs the struggle.

Invariably, it seems it is we in the white community who obsess over our own efficacy, and fail to recognize the value of commitment, irrespective of outcome. People of color, on the other hand, never having been burdened with the illusion that the world was their oyster, and thus, anything they touched could and should turn to gold, usually take a more reserved, and I would say healthier view of the world and the prospects for change. They know (as indeed they must) that the thing being fought for, at least if it's worth having, will require more than a part-time effort, and will not likely come in the lifetimes of those presently fighting for it. And it is that knowledge which allows a strength and resolve few members of the dominant majority will ever, can ever, know.

And so perhaps its no great coincidence that our first African American President is the one who suggests that we must live with the tension of the world as it is while continuing to struggle for the world as it should be. Apparently that is big news to some pundits.

It's relatively easy to not order a cruise-missile strike or troop redeployment. Replacing that hard military power with soft power, and making it work, is a lot harder. Obama's got two years to prove to the world that he can do it. If he wants to see his superdove foreign policy doctrine survive beyond his time in office, he'll have to do a lot more with this doctrine than make speeches about it.

On whether or not this "superdove foreign policy doctrine" survives, I can't help but ask, "Or what?" We go back to our "success" in military adventurism in countries like Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan? Ordering cruise-missile strikes and/or troop redeployment might be easy. But please, can we dispense with the notion that they have been proven effective? The fact that so many people haven't learned that lesson in over 60 years of failure speaks to enduring myth of exceptionalism. Or as Nezua put it... privilege.

The voice of privilege thinks no seat is unavailable, no land unconquerable, no food untasteable, no right deniable, no experience out of reach. 

Who are the optimists these days?

Frank Bruni is pessimistic about America.

More and more I get the sense that we’ve lost it, and by “it” I mean the optimism that was always the lifeblood of this luminous experiment, the ambition that has been its foundation, the swagger that made us so envied and emulated and reviled.

We’re walking small. And that shift in our gait and our gumption has been palpable for many years, during an unusually sustained period of frustration that has the feel of something more than a temporary dive: a turned corner, the downward arc of a diminished enterprise.

To bolster his case, Bruni quotes his friends - most of whom are other NYT writers and columnists. Given the current demise of print media, that shouldn't be too surprising. But I suspect he's also speaking for a lot of - here comes the kicker - white Americans.

The very basis of white privilege is that it means not having to listen to the thoughts/opinions/experiences of people of color. If Bruni were to listen, he'd hear a different story. For example, three years ago, Ellis Cose wrote about The New Optimists.

African-Americans, long accustomed to frustration in their pursuit of opportunity and respect, are amazingly upbeat, consistently astounding pollsters with their hopefulness. Earlier this year, when a Washington Post–Kaiser–-Harvard poll asked respondents whether they expected their children’s standard of living to be better or worse than their own, 60 percent of blacks chose “better,” compared with only 36 percent of whites.

Since then, this finding has consistently been repeated. For example:

Although many African Americans identify long-standing problems that still plague the community—such as unemployment and access to high-quality education—the black population remains largely optimistic about the future and satisfied with the direction the country is going in, according to a new survey by Ebony magazine and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Almost 90 percent also said they were either "very satisfied" or "somewhat satisfied" with the overall quality of their lives, the "State of the Black Family Survey" reports.

And apparently its not just African Americans who are optimistic.

The AP-NORC analysis of data from the General Social Survey, a long-running biannual survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, found just 46 percent of whites say their family has a good chance of improving their living standard given the way things are in America, the lowest level in surveys conducted since 1987. In contrast, 71 percent of blacks and 73 percent of Hispanics express optimism of an improved life – the biggest gap with whites since the survey began asking.

This is an example of how privilege hurts white America. If we weren't so self-absorbed, we'd be noticing this phenomena and asking questions about it. I suspect we'd learn that the election of the first African American president has had a pretty big impact. But I doubt that's the whole story. There is also the fact that we now have a couple of generations who have grown up in a country without the limitations of legal segregation and Jim Crow.

But here's an even more interesting possibility. Its true that - because of their low position on this country's economic ladder - blacks and Hispanics were hit even harder than white people by the Great Recession. But its also true that what happened in 2008 was a great leveler...because it hit white people too. Perhaps, after decades of inequality, black and brown people have developed the ability to hope against these kinds of odds in a way that too many white people in this country haven't.

If there's any truth to that - maybe we have a thing or two to learn. Oops, that might be a bit of a challenge for us.

Mi novia says that it really frustrates White people that no matter how much they know or want to know, there may be an area of experience or knowledge that they cannot access. Bingo, Gringo.

This is another way of saying White Privilege.

How dare the world harbor some sort of Thing that I cannot experience! How dare you insinuate that you possess knowledge I may have to ask you about in humility! How impertinent of you to even imagine that I cannot, with study and great wisdom and effort, also know what it is like to grow up Brown™ in America! The voice of privilege thinks no seat is unavailable, no land unconquerable, no food untasteable, no right deniable, no experience out of reach. It is a slap in the face to this line of thought that there exists an area that cannot be known, even to a WHITE person. Gasp.