The Souls of Yellow Folk
Page 18
This “malleable and insidious” racism was more than malevolent people espousing hatred. It was implicit in things said and left unsaid. It hid away in the subconscious, exerting a subtle pressure on individual judgment and perception. This “structural” racism was manifest everywhere you looked and at every level of analysis. You could tease it out through a test like the IAT. You could find it written into criminal laws with racially disproportionate effects. You could interpret it in backhanded statements known as “microaggressions” that revealed hidden biases of the speaker. One example of a microaggression would be demanding to know where a person of Asian descent is “really from” when they respond to your initial request by informing you that they are from the United States (which reveals that you regard Asian people as perpetual foreigners). Another would be telling an expensively dressed child of wealthy Nigerian immigrants who attended private boarding schools in Britain that “I don’t really think of you as black” (revealing that your default expectation of black people is that they are not expensively dressed graduates of exclusive British boarding schools). These subtle indignities, trivial in themselves, could, when iterated over the span of a lifetime, reproduce patterns of stratification comparable to those under an overtly racist system—or so they theory went.
An all-pervading account of structural white supremacy makes the whole world into a field for both interpretation and contestation. Since the system of domination was unitary, attacking it at any point was to attack it everywhere. Since the system of domination was built into the language, campaigns on social media to alter usage were themselves a kind of political praxis. Social media has proven to be, among other things, a remarkably efficient means to inject novel ideas into a public sphere occupied by members of the media, activist, and intellectual classes, who use it, among other things, to coordinate an ever-advancing consensus about what being an antracist entails. There one can watch in real time as the unfolding of the internal logic of various ideological tendencies emerge, evolve, and reach their terminus. One handy rule of thumb is that any accusation or charge made as a half-ironic provocation in May will be avowed with earnest conviction in December and chanted by activists the following April. On October 4, for instance, a group of Black Lives Matter protesters disrupted a speech by a lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union, chanting, among other slogans, “Liberalism Is White Supremacy,” thus bringing to completion certain latent tendencies bubbling up on Twitter.
White supremacy encompassed differential expectations and outcomes both grave and trivial. It was why the cosmetics counter offered fewer options for those with darker-hued skin. It was why the heroes of Hollywood movies tended to be white men, why the Oscars were so white. It was why the CEOs and the leadership class were mostly white and male. It rested an invisible thumb on the scale of those who did nothing to seek it. It preserved the innocence of those whom it aided (white people) while denying those whom it fettered (everyone else) a readily articulable language to describe the obscure sources of their frustration. All those who were passive recipients of its favor were complicit with it. And complicity with white supremacy, like denial of white privilege, was itself a form of white supremacy.
There was both reward and risk involved with the promulgation of such a doctrine. There was catharsis in it. Everyone who had ever bridled at the easy assumption of the priority that certain white people carried with them recognized the descriptive value of the novel language immediately. It therefore spread through social media as rapidly as any novel jargon has ever spread. There was also power. The risk was inherent in the power: conceiving of daily life as a field of micropolitical contestation in which all are either privileged or oppressed conjured up the wish for remedial action, and because the enemy was everywhere and nowhere, the struggle to extirpate it would lack for a limiting principle.
“Microaggression” began its meteoric career as a therapeutic concept. It quickly became, in the hands of activists in virtual and real spaces, a weapon in an ideological war. A list of microaggressions circulated to professors at UC-Berkeley included statements such as “I think the most qualified person should get the job”; “America is a land of opportunity”; or “America is a melting pot.” Each of these statements encodes a commonly held way of thinking about the country (that you could just make it here if you worked hard, that the best should rise to the top without favoring people based on their color, that newcomers should adapt to the manners and mores of the existing culture) that current generations of scholars now regard as pernicious—so pernicious that they no longer believe that they should be engaged with, debated, or debunked. They should instead be policed. As the pyramid of overt and covert white supremacy stipulates, “color-blindness” is itself a form of white supremacy. Two hundred thirty-one universities now have “bias response teams” that investigate the speech of professors and students, often with the aid of campus police officers, for infractions that include microaggressive speech.
What many of the beliefs now deemed microaggressive have in common is that they serve as conceptual and rhetorical obstacles to the spread of doctrines of group rights and compensatory justice that antiracist campaigners believed would be required to equalize the condition of black and white in America. The current definition of white supremacy is therefore best understood as an instrument in pursuit of a substantive political program. Policies such as thoroughgoing school and residential segregation, guaranteed employment, prison reform or abolition, and reparations for the coerced labor of slaves were considered and rejected in the wake of the civil rights movement. They have never been popular and are unlikely to win the assent of a country whose political tradition is one of limited government grounded in individual rights under law.
The troubling aspect of this campaign, in my view, is not the substantive politics that the antiracists wish to pursue. There is a body of critical and revisionist scholarship that makes a serious case for the necessity of exertions on behalf of historically disadvantaged minorities that exceed what a political doctrine of limited government and individual rights would be willing to contemplate. But the manner in which activists are seeking to win a debate is not through scholarship, persuasion, and debate. It’s through the subornation of administrative and disciplinary power to delegitimize, stigmatize, disqualify, surveil, forbid, shame, and punish holders of contrary views.
“White supremacy” is the crux of this strategy, at once the source of its power and its ultimate vulnerability. For the term is both descriptive of an ever-expanding corpus of ideas and practices, and a weapon of opprobrium. It derives its power to anathematize from the consensus against the overt forms of white supremacy that appear above the dividing line. This power is contingent on the preservation of a narrow definition that sustains the consensus. The analogy with classification of state secrets obtains here: If everything is classified, as the saying goes, then nothing really is. When people cease to recognize the legitimacy of the classification regime, the state becomes far more leaky than it would be if you husbanded your power to classify more judiciously. Broadening the definition to encompass things that most people beyond a tiny coterie of activists consider to be benign can only inflate the value of the currency and water it down. Doing so while sustaining the power of term to surveil and punish those who are, by virtue of their skin color, presumptively complicit with it, might begin to feel like an act of aggression.
For while terms like “white supremacy” seem to have the power to trump any white liberal objection to them, and thus to give license to those who wield it—anyone curious as to what this can look like in practice, should find the online videos of the antiracist protests at Evergreen State College, wherein the president of that college asks his captors for permission to go to the bathroom and is instructed to hold it in—most of the country’s white people are not liberal. The same poll that found that fewer than 10 percent of all respondents supported a white supremacist politics also found that 39 percent of all res
pondents agreed with the statement “white people are under attack in America.”
Antiracists seized on this finding as further confirmation that tens of millions of Americans are white supremacists, thus renewing the charge that the country is a white supremacist country, thus surely increasing the number of white Americans who feel under attack. Actual white supremacists interpreted the findings as evidence of the potentially enormous size of the population receptive to their message, thus surely increasing the number of nonwhite Americans who fear the return of white supremacy. Now would be a good time to be careful with the meanings of words, aware of their multiple connotations, the uses to which they are being put, the ways they appear to different groups of people. If we can tweak our language and concepts to distinguish between great and petty instances of white supremacy, insisting on proportionality and nuance in our description of different kind of harms associated with race, it would go a long way to defuse some tension and ensure that the moral consensus that keeps the truly toxic isolated continues to hold. There are factions of awful people who benefit from this polarization. One of them occupies the White House.
Tablet, 2017
Acknowledgments
Thanks to all those who contributed in various ways to the pieces in this collection including but not limited to: my wife, Erika Kawalek Yang, Marco Roth, Chad Harbach, Keith Gessen, David Haskell, David Wallace-Wells, David Samuels, Willy Staley, Emily Cooke, Alexander Benaim, Joshua Pashman, Elif Batuman, Philip Fung, Jai-Hoon Yang, K. Hee Yang, Chinnie Ding, Isabel Howe, Matt Weiland, Remy Cawley, and Edward Orloff.
Copyright © 2018 by Wesley Yang
All rights reserved
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