Ex Cathedra

Making moral decisions is a definable, improvable process. It’s a field of study in psychology and education. I took a course in moral development (I cheated on the final ). I’ve also studied and done workshops and training materials for values education when I was a YMCA Director.

When we turn that process into a thing, “morality,” we end up with something static that isn’t improvable, that has no operational meaning, that is useless, and that is susceptible to a limitless array of misuses and abuses.

The reified thing killeth. The process giveth life.

This article is one more example of white people trying to lecture other people on the subject of race. Take it cum grano salis, as a white perspective, and value it as you will.

I had several young African American colleagues and friends during the late 1960s and early 1970s who were involved in the grassroots of what would become black studies.  They explained that, contrary to what you hear today, racism is more than prejudice. Racism equals prejudice plus the power to do something about it.

That equation led to the concept of institutionalized racism.  Characteristics of individuals can become the characteristics of institutions. Long after the original prejudices of the founders of organizations had faded, the practices that perpetuate race-based inequality persist.  For instance, when organizations recruit new employees they recruit from the predominantly white universities they’d recruited from in the past. White managers felt uncomfortable hiring black managers to supervise white workers.

Affirmative action was required to overcome this organizational inertia.

In contrast to Nixon’s strict quota-based affirmative action, which the inventor of the Southern Strategy probably intended to stir white resentment, affirmative action does not equal quotas. It means examining practices within private and public institutions to see which of those practices have the effect of perpetuating racial inequality and effective discrimination.  One practice I’ve seen is managers’ habit of recruiting support personnel and ineffectual middle management suck-ups from their own neighborhoods and churches. Neighborhoods are seldom laboratories for diversity,  and the most segregated hour in America is 10:00 Sunday morning.

Racism equals rejudice plus power, and the greatest of these is power.

As the years went by, the idea of institutional racism evolved into the idea of structural racism.  This notion explains a phenomenon I’d seen. The Boeing Company grew up in the Pacific Northwest, where the plantation mentality of preserving white privilege through oppressing black people was unknown, as were, largely, black people.  And yet a photograph of any engineering lab in Boeing looked and often still looks like a snapshot of a White Citizens’ Council meeting.

It’s possible to have structural racism without overt racial prejudice, apart from the lingering strains of racial prejudice that were part of America’s history.

One strain that persists is based on the notion that “whiteness is rightness”: that when you’ve got a person, even in a work of fiction like a TV show or commercial, you’ve got a white person.  The African American movement scored notable successes in the 1970s in the media. Even if it had direct economic impact on the careers of a relative handful of people, the victory was in denormalizing the white race. People no longer equal white people.

Continued work in the diversity movement has started to normalize a racially diverse group, though blindingly white neighborhoods, organizations, and particularly churches remain.

Racism has become decoupled from prejudice. But the old definition of racism remains in the dictionary. It’s time for a more realistic term: practical racism.

Practical racism: the set of forces and  practices that maintain civil inequality for members of less privileged races.

The use of the word “force” is not incidental. This formulation support’s Kurt Lewin’s analysis of forces in ourselves, in other people, and in the situation that favor or oppose change in the direction we desire and Lewin’s tactics of strengthening the former forces and (particularly) weakening the latter.

The least important word in this definition is “race.” It generalizes to class, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and on and on. Race is merely a visible token which the people who benefit from inequality can use, among many others, to privilege their practices.

Even if we generalize racism to class struggle, there’s enough practical racism still going on  that it makes a handy place to start.

When we insist that racism requires racial hatred, we not only ignore many causes of racism, we grant bigots a power they do not possess.

What’s more,today’s more subtle racists don’t go around saying “nigger, nigger, nigger” any more.  They learned their codeworded vocabulary from Nixon’s heirs like Ronald Reagan. It’s in their interest to keep the concept of racism bound to the most obviously despicable racists like George Wallace and Jesse Helms. “I’m not like them,” they claim. They claim it plausibly enough to fool themselves and to distract some of us.

Since that coupling is what they want, I can’t think of a better reason to use a new term like “practical racism” and deny it to them.

If I could teach 9th and 10th graders for a year I’d spend the whole year teaching them about the word and .

Lesson 1: The Naked Archaeologist. Week after week Simcha Jacobovici tells about a tale from the Bible and travels all over the middle East showing that this site has one thing in common with the Bible tale, that site has another thing in common with the tale, and a third site somewhere different has yet another thing in common with the tale. We are left thinking that he’s demonstrated that the Biblical tale is plausible.

He hasn’t done any such goddamn thing. If he had shown that a single site had all three things in common with the tale – feature A and feature B and feature C, he’d really have something. He hasn’t, and all he’s given us iscotton candy.

Then we’ll talk about false dichotomies. The American Israel PAC has positioned itself as the advocate of Israel. When another group like J Street takes a position that might be fairly described as pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian and pro-peace, , AIPAC and its followers holler “anti-zionist” and sometimes even “anti-semitic!”

The law of the excluded middle turns into the law of the excluded conjunction in the hands of these sloppy and rigid thinkers. Just as a belief in the literal truth of the Bible makes people neglect the necessity of the and, fear and rigidity make people neglect the possibility of an and.

We tried the light side. Come over to the dark side. The music is better. — K Ackermann

No more moderation. No more Mr. or Ms Nice Lefty.

They aren’t southern conservatives, they’re White trash. Don’t say trailer trash. It insults people who live in manufactured housing, who are often really cool people who don’t deserve to be associated with White trash.

Always capitalize “White.” It’s a race like any other. Ditto for Black. Denormalize Whiteness.

They aren’t evangelicals, they aren’t even Christian conservatives, and they especially aren’t Christians. They’re Jesus Goblins. If you want to be nice, they’re Jesus huggers. Reserve “Christian” for sane Christians.

Use Jesus wherever you can, as in “The Republican Southern White People’s Jesus Party.”

They aren’t Tea partiers. They’re teabaggers or Teabag Trash.

Never, never capitalize “confederate.” It means the same as counterfeit: phony, like confederate money.
Never call the confederate flag the Confederate Battle Flag.

“Nativist” is too big a word. Call them anti-immigrant.

Use Bible College whenever you can: “Don’t they teach math in Bible College?” or “When you took that journalism class in Bible College, did you sleep through the class on ‘facts’?”

Forget ontological language. Don’t say they are racists and homophobes. That goes nowhere and they’re ready for it. Say they’re acting like racists and homophobes. And like White trash fools.

When they use “Democrat Party or Obamacare, call them on it every time and call them Comrade: “Doubleplusgood, Comrade, Chairman Cheney approves.”

Mock them, mock them, mock them. E.g.,

Pickup line for teabaggers: It’s OK, the Constitution doesn’t say anything about age of consent.

Wherever they go, go farther. They call you a liberal, say you’re radical left.

They insinuate violence or threats or aggression, we say “Violence is for losers.”

Grab the word “American” and raise it like the flag at Iwo Jima. We’re American and conservatism is un-American.

If this is culture war, let’s be Sherman. Bring your marshmallows.

Digby shows how corporate vocabulary, assumptions, and framing tilt the playing field to make liberalism nearly impossible.

But something remains unsaid. If you adopt our opponents’ vocabulary, assumptions, and framing, you don’t just enable our opponents. You become one of our opponents.

I’ve accumulated these recently

words and phrases that don’t belong in apologies:

• If I as in “if I misunderstood” or “if I called you an ignorant jigaboo” . Unless you’ve been possessed by demons or a suffered a sudden fit of amnesia, you know perfectly well what you did.
• if you as in “If you were offended when I said the smell of your crotch makes birds fall out of the sky”. If you don’t know how to use words to convey meaning, you’re unfit for human company. Confessing that inability and trying to make somebody else responsible doesn’t make you less of a jerk. It makes you more of a jerk
• I didn’t mean as in “When I called you a watermellon chomping pickaninny I didn’t mean to be/sound racist.” Once more, this is either demonic possession or inability to use words to convey meaning.

When you fuck up, for Christ’s sake own up to it and say you’re sorry. Doing that doesn’t get you instant and automatic forgiveness. But you’ll have the small satisfaction that for once in your life you did the right thing,

Late addition, inspired by commenter riese (h/t to Amber Rhea): when you’ve apologized, don’t do that shit no more! Keeping on with the same behavior makes you look like George W. bush: too stupid to learn, too rigid to change.

If I swiped your work in the list above without giving proper credit, well excuuuuuuuuuuse me!

I’m seriously behind in finding and crediting sources for this again. I’ll keep searching. Sorry. One good thing: I’m reading and re-reading some wonderful pieces.

And if you can’t find examples aplenty of what not to do, you might want to read this piece by nojojojo about how Helix editor William Sanders handled his apology.

When you write your opinions, use strong or crude language. I first learned this when I facilitated a presentation to the Board of Management of Wilmerding YMCA. This is in the days when white people wanted to listen to black people, in contrast to today when white people want to tell black people things.

In part of the presentation, as interlocutor I said “Black people don’t, by God, want to be white people.”

My boss, Ernie Ryman, called me into his office the following day and told me that some of the board members objected to my saying “by God.” This meant that the board members or Ernie himself didn’t want to hear that black people didn’t want to be white people. That their own existence was valid, that while their social or economic positions may have been unsatisfactory, they were perfectly satisfied with who they were and that they needn’t hold up someone else’s culture as a norm.

I’ve found the occasional “fuck” or other strong word will flush people out of the underbrush who don’t want to hear the thing being said, but don’t want to think of themselves as people who won’t hear it.

In my experience, people who’ll bear any kind of language at all when it affirms their worldview will jump straight up to object to language people who challenge their worldview are using.

I usually let that criticism go. Never clog up a valve that sings so reliably.