Chapomatic

History teacher and sparring partner John de Ville of the Mountain Philosopher drops a long analysis into a comment on this post. I’m reposting the whole thing here, because it’s worth thinking about. He’s coming from a different perspective from me, and I disagree with some since I am not of the Left, but take a read. I’d love to see what Cobb (who’s thinking about oil right now, among other things) thinks of this assessment.

My original question involved the long process in the United States of getting to where we are now with race, and where that might be useful to think about for Middle Eastern relations, seeing as there’s a lot of taught, long term hate that needs to simmer down out there.

“…how do we prevent that kind of justice delayed and denied in other contexts where we have a foreign policy interest in having group A andgroup B not trying to squash each other out of existence?”

It’s an interesting puzzle and question, so I’ll take a whack at it.

If we’re going to attempt to maintain any sort of historical parallel between the Civil Rights movement circa 1950-1965, Sunni and Shia and the myriad permutations of both which make clear lines impossible, then I guess you’re asking how is it that the white power structure finally provided African Americans their due justice when they had delayed it, if we take the 1865 end of the Civil War as the starting point, for a century.

It seems to me that a successful civil rights movement, and Iraqi pacification rests on sustainable idealism where the goals are felt to be achievable OR the policy interest is clearly, unambiguously, and undeniably demonstrated to be in the national interest AND the interest of the broader electorate — the pragmatic/realist side of the coin. Otherwise, it’s all a nonstarter and the enterprise is doomed.

Consider, in the wake of WWII and in the early stages of the Cold War, the following was the case:

1. African Americans had fought and died or had spilled blood defending their country (which was basically not the case in WWI as they were denied almost all combat roles). This service provided moral leverage similar to what African Americans had in the wake of the Civil War where approximately 180,000 were in service to their country.

2. African Americans, by virtue of serving in the military, learned two essential sets of skills which provided the infrastructure to CORE etc.: how to take orders and how to give orders.

3. Millions of African Americans had migrated from the South to the North giving them newfound electoral leverage: they could put pressure, as a bloc, on politicians, forcing them to advocate for civil rights.

4. We were in the middle of the Cold War and the State Dept was putting pressure on the rest of the federal government, as much as it was able, to bring about civil rights reform to place the US in a better position to recruit African and Latin American nations viz. the Soviet Union. In other words, pictures of lynchings and Klan rallies assisted the Soviets in their foreign policy objectives and we had to clean house.

5. We had a president in Truman, who, seeing the treatment returning African American soldiers were receiving in the South, integrated the military in 1948, giving a huge boost to the national legitimacy of Af-Am civil rights and coronaries to Strom Thurmond and his ilk.

6. We had a president in Eisenhower, who, while believing and stating that the Brown decision was flawed, was nevertheless prepared to enforce it once it became clear that Southern governors were going to defy the courts, and sent 1,000 paratroopers to Little Rock to demonstrate just exactly who the hell was in charge–the Powell Doctrine before the Powell Doctrine was enunciated–if you’re gonna make a stand, send in overwhelming force and make ‘em shit their pants.

7. We had a president in Kennedy, who, while largely paying mere lip service to the cause of civil rights, did indeed at least pay lip service. And when he was assassinated that lip service was elevated to cause celebre by:

8. LBJ, who was determined to out-Kennedy Kennedy in all respects, who harnessed the national guilt over a president assassinated in the South, his long standing relationships and political capital with his party (especially the Southern wing), combined with incredible arm-twisting ability to push through the Civil Rights Bill of 1964.

9. We had Martin Luther King, Jr, a master organizer and the master infowarrior of his day, who understood the power of nonviolent protest, of dramatic confrontation with the likes of Bull Connor, and how to use television, be it in Montgomery, Birmingham, or on the Edmund Pettus bridge–where the image was forged that both enabled and forced LBJ to push through the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Lots of other less tangible things–middle/upper-class white boomers who saw themselves as an oppressed class who found common cause with African Americans who were truly oppressed, a more educated and progressive public in general, television’s positive role in the “infowar” facet of the civil rights movement, a southern white middle class that didn’t exist 75 years earlier and thus wasn’t as economically and politically threatened by Af-Am civil rights as it had been in the early 20th century. It’s a long list.

But the important thing is that a broad convergence of idealism and pragmatism made it all possible and the leaders were on the stage to push it on through.

And back to your implied question: could the civil rights success of the 1960s have happened earlier and/or could the current neoconservative goals for the contemporary Middle East taken in the least cynical, most charitable light, succeed?

TR famously invited Booker T. Washington to be the first African American to dine in the White House who wasn’t a servant. Bold. And the political fallout convinced him that repeating any overture to advance the cause of civil rights wasn’t either feasible or, at the least, worth the political capital. And we all know TR was no wimp in any arena.

Wilson, the godfather of neoconservatism, was a hard core racist–he loved Birth of a Nation/The Clansman which elevated the Klan to cult status (the KKK’s hallmark of cross-burning was invented by D.W. Griffith); Wilson turned to Griffith after a White House screening and said, “It’s like history written with lightning.” The karmic wheel turned for Wilson in Paris at the treaty conference. The portions of the 14 points which called for autonomy were partially laughed away by the French and British who could point to almost an entire ethnic group in his own country which was disenfranchised and lived in fear.

Neither national saw any mileage in Af -Am civil rights after WWI until Truman revived the issue in 1948, and did so entirely on principle, not for any pragmatic or political reasons. It seems a nation that couldn’t even bring itself to outlaw the practice of lynching certainly wasn’t able to advance the cause of something so radical as guaranteeing the franchise until the factors mentioned above were in play. Justice was delayed, justice was denied, and it appears to this amateur historian that it was fatally so until after WWII. In retrospect, it’s amazing that it did indeed happen when it did; take out one or two of my fore mentioned causes and I don’t think the legislation is passed when it was.

Could the current goal of democracy/end of government by thuggery or despot take place in today’s Middle East?

I think the answer was yes. But not in the way we’ve tried to go about it. We’ve put far too many carts before their respective horses and we’re using nothing but stick, whip, gun, and bomb on the horse. And we’re not consistent.

A better Bush Doctrine would have been that the US will look favorably with its trade, its economic assistance, and its political and military alignments with countries who foster democracy and we will withhold the love on those who won’t and we will do so on a consistent basis. That means scotching the coziness with the Saudi royal family, and it means doing everything possible to push for a CONTIGUOUS Palestinian state. It would have meant going for the low-hanging fruit first; Iran, with its thriving, materialistic middle-class should have been easy pickings. But instead, we’ve blown it, made a goddamn hero out of Aheminejad with our bellicosity. Lebanon was on the threshold of realizing the neoconservative ambition, admittedly in part to our flexing of muscle, but we provided almost no aid to Lahoud and allowed Hezbollah to thrive in the vacuum. In Afghanistan, where military heavy-handedness actually might have had a chance to work, we are about to redeploy thousands of American troops to Iraq. And the ugly, poetic capper? We’ve made a goddamn martyr out of Sadaam Hussein. About the only thing we have to show for the past four years is the old public enemy #1, Muammar Gaddafi, is now our buddy.

Incoherence, incompetence, lack of consistency, and not-so-nascent realpolitk (“It’s about the oil and the bases, stupid”) have doomed the neoconservative dreams. And it’s sad because the non-cynical neocons had their hearts in the right place and we might have been able to make the world a better place.

The leadership that was present to enable the civil rights movement success just hasn’t been there. I don’t buy the argument that the Arabs (or Persians or Palestinians) weren’t/aren’t capable of self-government.”

I’ve kept uncharacteristically silent during a week with events that matched issues I’ve talked about more than once: milblogs, embeds, CNN’s continued aid and comfort in the guise of objectivity, the discovery of a single Al Qaeda media strategy document, sentencing of an American performing traitorous acts by knowingly passing information, and the unconfirmed identification of one potential leaker for a New York Times story revealing classified information that had a strategic effect.

Yes, it is indeed an information war, and we’re stuck with it. (I would like to credit myself for getting Instapundit saying “it’s an information war”–I think I was the first he linked to saying that–but it’s a pretty common idea nowadays.)

A while ago I wrote a small thesis proposal which was much harder to complete than I would like to admit. (I know the reasons; I completed the task; I am not happy it took so long.) In the process of making a thesis proposal I talked to several folks who work in academia in topics related to “information warfare”. I’ve learned that the overwhelming majority of those folks work in terms of electronic and computer warfare; I have yet to find a marketing guru, for instance, hanging out with the geeks. I’ve also learned that if there’s an unclassified document in English that talks about information warfare in terms of ideas and thoughts and decisions, and is built like a doctrine manual or tactics techniques and proceures (also known as TTP’s), then nobody I’ve talked to knows about it.

So. I’ve asked one university if they’ll let me pay them lots of money to work on this problem in my free time, and if they like it perhaps I could get a doctorate out of it.

Wish me luck, and if you know of a backup school that allows one to complete a degree in this area while physically not at the university let me know…it’s not as if they accept just anyone, and I might be above the quota for “loud annoying guys”. So far every person I’ve talked to doing information warfare has been interested in the subject and is supportive–either this group of people is very very polite, or I might be on to something. If I’m rejected I don’t think it’ll be because of my choice of subject.

The “more” tag hides a longer explanation of the same thing, with citations and footnotes not added because I forget how to convert those from Word without a lot of pain, and just “saving as” in Word breaks the browser. Comment or email if you’d like a source I didn’t link. There may be a risk in mentioning this subject so that someone else can write what I wish to write more quickly, but it’s an important subject–and I think perhaps that the odd way one has to think to get deeply into this subject may act as a barrier to entry.

(more…)

This overlong and unrefined essay has been sitting in my head, unarticulated, for too long. Finally a post on Cobb’s blog got me going. This is an area in which I don’t feel I can be as precise as I like, so I apologize in advance for screwing it all up. For some reason it’s got to come out. Maybe I can say something useful.

Once I had to write a speech involving USS Mason. This ship’s namesake, the World War Two Mason, had a black crew, which was almost unique at the time. (In the submarine force, the black and Filipino guys only got to be stewards and cooks. Fortunately for the country, any qualified man on a boat had to be a warfighter, too.) I started my speech by gathering information–all the gouge I could about what the ship was, why Mary Pat Campbell felt so interested in the WWII Mason’s accomplishments that she wrote a book and then the Hilfigers made a movie, what was interesting about this new USS Mason, all that jazz.

Everyone I talked to in the days before the speech told me to not mention race. It was the third rail. The movie was coming out. An ex-president would be there, and other flag officers, and they’d get into the race thing only if they had to. Stay away.

So I wrote what I thought was a damn good speech that celebrated the WWII vets’ accomplishments and how it linked into today’s history. And when my boss went up to the podium with my speech, the first words out of his mouth were, “In nineteen-sixty-something, when I arrived at the Academy, there were only three Jews and no black officers.”

I awaited the Furies to descend.

And something different happened.

My boss spoke for three minutes in this crowd of Navy types, politicos, and Hollywood people crammed on the fantail. He said that we shouldn’t celebrate the fact of the WWII Mason, although their courage and accomplishments were definitely worth celebrating. Instead, we should be sad for our loss in getting to this point again and again. Why did we figure out military integration was okay in the Civil War–and then go back? Why did we not learn the lessons of World War Two and race, and have to go through the Civil Rights movement in the sixties? Why should we not mourn the lack of black officers on the Mason in WWII?

It was a simple twist, but brilliant in its execution. Three minutes, and there was not a dry eye on that ship. And he meant it.

For this reason I know there is a possibility that I can talk about race as honestly as I can, and not have the only response be Oliver Willis calling me a bigot. So let’s dance on that third rail, shall we?

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Countee Cullen wrote the poem below. You may have had it assigned to you in grade school. I think I read it then, and I was shocked by the language–there was a word I did not hear in reasonable company.

“While riding through old Baltimore, so small and full of glee

I saw a young Baltimorean a-lookin’ straight at me.

Now, I was young and very small and he was no whit bigger

So I smiled – but he stuck out his tongue and called me ‘nigger.’

I saw the whole of Baltimore from May until September.

Of all the things that happened there, that’s all that I remember.”

Poetry is a craft that thrives on multiple and simultaneous readings. One way to read that poem is to think of how terrible it is for an eight-year-old kid to have some other kid be so mean, and the state of racism against such a little kid.

It took me twenty years to understand another reading, to think of how terrible it is to have your entire life with this burr under your saddle–and that defining moment, that thing you kept with you from eight till now, was merely some kid sticking out his tongue and saying something nasty. How terrible it is to be so focused on a verbal slight that you missed a summer in a new town.

I started to learn it after being a haole, usually with a more rude epithet attached; a gweilo, a gaijin, and whatever they yelled at me in Guam. Not to mention being a fat guy–I’m sure if riled up I could beat Cyrano’s schnoz insult list. I continued to learn it when living overseas, a practical lab experiment for racism. I remember being the third race in the room while race 1 members, comfortable sitting on the floor after a dinner and drinks among friends, opened up and talked about how race 2 looked like monkeys–and the next week having the same thing happen with race 2 talking about race 1! In this lab I saw the hard bigotry of being refused admission to a restaurant or an apartment lease due to my race, and the soft bigotry of a different set of language or expectation. Did the bad thing happen to me just because life sucks, or was it because of something I did wrong, or was it because of my ethnic group? Hell, I remember my enlisted guys in another race being told how great a chance they’d get with the girls in the ‘E’ club because the locals liked to shock their parents by bringing them home!

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it, I didn’t suffer for the sins of the world, this isn’t What It’s Really Like, but I see what people are talking about. (I do not understand why I have to bring this whole List Of Similar Suffering up, but I do.)

Up to a certain point of slight, which is waaay above the eight-year-old Cullen’s insult, the slight doesn’t matter. A different apartment, and the money goes to someone else who isn’t stupid. A pair of uncomfortable dinner moments, thinking to myself “Well, neither of you guys are Americans, so you both lose.”

I have no idea what my ethnicity is, but one of my grandparents got the Roots bug and traced some folks back to a big chunk of Western Europe. I could be just about anything, with the likely exception of East Asia. So I don’t have membership in a Club.

A Club has its secret rites. Sometimes you divine a rite or two. I learned The Nod in college (how to say hello as you walk by someone in a particular Club) because I was paying attention–apparently it was the Club men’s handshake. I knew when Yom Kippur was because we were broke and lived in the same neighborhood as the Russian Jewish immigrants. I knew what a “breeder” was and why I “was one”. Yep, I was aware of all this crap, but I didn’t have a Club to fit in. I still don’t. St. Patrick’s Day? Well, everyone’s Irish on St. Pattie’s, so I guess so. If I’m in a bar on that day, anyway.

But there are Clubs, and there are Clubs. Nobody makes movies about kids from different ethnicities crashing polka festivals at the Ukranian Center like they did for white kids and rap. I guess there are people who are kind of Deaf Nationalists, and the latest couple of waves of immigration have some who assimilate slower than historically. I think this Club idea is the reason I’m writing this–the Black Club as seen by a guy without a Club.

And I don’t believe for a minute that I am a member of a mysterious, shadowy Club more powerful than all the rest. I have no group to go to, where people sympathize and share my unique situation because I’m in the Club. I have no place with exclusivity, no BET, no Ebony, no month (–and don’t tell me all the other months are mine because it ain’t true), no music or clothing or language fad designed to exclude others, no Ambiguous Ethnicity section of the bookstore or Group Blog that locks others outside. Hell, if I tried, I’d get in trouble, now wouldn’t I?

I understand that if I looked it up far enough there may be someone in my ancestry who did very bad things to someone in your ancestry. Or the opposite may be true. I also understand that there is evil in this world; I remember Fridays in North Carolina when each group got paid, got drunk and shot each other, and I know what meanness happens when people I am distantly related to by marriage get together to talk with me not around.

But this Club, and the mindset that makes this Club so powerful, excludes me. I believe that for the Club to sustain itself, it needs myths like other Clubs. Those myths are holding back the Club’s members, and that’s a bad thing for the bigger, more important Club, that of Americans. Some examples:

• I don’t, as an American, get to learn what Frederick Douglass said about the difference between a white slave and a black slave if that information is in the book in the African-American section of the bookstore. Yeah, I might go look at it, but it’s a lot less likely. How many readers here who are straight regularly go through the lesbian and gay section of Borders to look at the titles?
• Our new immigrants from Africa are immediately furled into the tornado of American race policy. From accidental preferential treatment in getting into Harvard, to being expected to fit a mindset they don’t necessarily share, to being refused status as African-Americans by Club habitues because they just got off the boat, they’re getting unfair treatment all around.
• How does Howard University become as world-class as Harvard? If it is not to be, why not? Let’s pull the string–why do historically black colleges have to be that way? It seems to be the consensus that historically white colleges should not be. Why can’t I get enough black nuclear engineers in the Navy?

Never comment on a problem without a possible solution

Focus on the Process of Economic Circumstances

I quote something I heard from the professional Chomsky redigester Jello Biafra: “This is a class war disguised as a race war.” Well, I don’t see it as quite that ridiculous, but there’s a truth in there–if you’re poor, you can’t get where you want to go. You’re going to pay more for food, spend more on loans, get in more trouble, get worse opportunities and die sooner–and my uninformed guess is that this tracks more closely via economic data than demographic data. A key difference is that for the rest of the immigrant population, there’s about a three or four generation path from downtrodden underling to treading down the new underlings in this country. This process has not happened for folks who have great-grandparents who were slaves in America.

There are policy remedies in place to help fix some of that–I’d argue that affirmative action as a whole allows some folks to get a more level playing field, despite the damage to individuals. (I know my wife didn’t get the job she wanted in 1990 because of her race. It may be fair in the aggregate, but not for her!) But those policies aren’t enough. I don’t know how, but I would argue from the outside that for some the Club culture also has to change before all of our grandchildren are on economic parity. The military can be that–I have every confidence that the E-3 has a good shot at being in my shoes when he’s my age without regard to the color of his skin.

How do you address the language?

Even the name of the Club has changed a couple of times over the decades, and with the latest wave of immigration complicating “African-American” may change again. One way to dominate a conversation is to control the language–and I don’t know what language will shift me from being in a discussion to being an Evil Racist.

That language has real power. I know Richard Pryor (or was it Dick Gregory?) had a good point that if you said “nigger” enough times the power of it went away, but it didn’t happen exactly the way Pryor intended. I do not use that word. It seriously bothers me here. I hesitate even using content-neutral words that are worthwhile, like “niggardly” (got someone in job trouble in D.C., as I remember, and no relation to the other word) or “rejigger” or something similar. On the other hand the junior guys play rap that has “nigger” every fifth word, playing in our common spaces. The rest of it, from Five Percenter talk to the latest iteration of word invention, creates an in crowd–which is supposedly in the Club.

What is this language supposed to do for us? How do we shift this from a power play to a more even discussion? how can we keep this language from being a way to make us into Us and Them?

How do we get to acknowledge AND accept differences?

If you listen to some old radio shows (and let’s stay away from Amos and Andy for this, because it’s too hard for me), or older ethnic humor, you see ethnic groups from recent immigrant waves reflecting and being reflected by their culture. It wasn’t so much a fight between cultures as a conversation. What I am trying to mean here is that there are differences between people that we can accommodate between each other–but unlike other immigrant groups the process of doing so has been frozen.

It’s at the point we accommodate, with economic parity, that we can talk about how to improve medical care for people with different Clubs. It’s when the word “racist” is both accepted as a possibility for all people (Could there be a black/white/Japanese/Irish racist? Of course!), and not accepted as the new argument substitute for “fascist” that we start to get somewhere.

Here’s where I’m supposed to give some swweping conclusion with definite recommendations. I don’t have any and wish I did. I would say that Cobb’s point about the NAACP makes sense–it’s time to change the process. It’s also time to accept things like the jewish college students who got murdered for the same thing black businessmen did–voter registration–as courageous as a shared ordeal. I’m not saying preferential treatment, I’m saying accepting the shared effort. I’m also saying that this is a lack of freedom that demeans us all and not just the Club, and a Club that stays insular denies itself that freedom.

Oh, boy, here come the flames.