Chauncey DeVega is starting to have a recognizable tone.
For example, government policy both directly and indirectly created the urban ghettos in America's central cities and a two tiered system of citizenship until it was brought down by The Black Freedom Struggle in the 1960s. By extension, government support for affirmative action and a robust effort to end discrimination in federal hiring practices helped to create the Black middle and professional classes. Conversely, government programs such as the GI Bill and FHA loan programs created suburbia, as well as the wealth and prosperity enjoyed by the white middle classes of the post World War 2 period--opportunities that were by design and in practice all but closed to people of color. And most certainly, government policy created the alienation and poverty that are as common to the Native American reservations of the Southwest as they are to the mining towns of Appalachia.
In total, The Limits of Policy exposes one of the central contradictions of neo-liberal, center-Right, Conservative politics in this country. When the government policy works in your favor it is invisible, and one's successes are all one's own, the result of hard work, individualism, and "good culture." You can nurse at the succor provided by the Horatio Alger myth of rugged individualism. When government policy fails, it is because "those people" have "bad culture," somehow tied to race and blood, and that the solution is less government and not more. Your failings are all your own.
In this regard, the final paragraph of Mr. Brooks' piece is quite telling: "Finally, we should all probably calm down about politics. Most of the proposals we argue about so ferociously will have only marginal effects on how we live, especially compared with the ethnic, regional and social differences that we so studiously ignore."
Sorry Mr. Brooks. Race is how class is lived. And yes, policy has a great deal to do with that fact.
I have several standing reactions and a few tangential considerations.
The first standing reaction is that something in the conclusion is lacking finesse, but I can accept the rhetorical excess for the validity of the point it tries to express. And to the extent that I find it agreeable the first thing I consider is Cornel West's edict about the existential burdens African Americans (choose to) bear regarding their enlightened self-interest. West essentially says that there is an additional hurdle black Americans must overcome before they can see themselves as beneficiaries of the American system. I agree. I call it 'the sound of the drum' and it is an exercise in self-discipline and discovery that black Americans must perform, not necessarily because of direct racism, but for the background noise of racism and racisms past. Ask how many black Americans are still dealing with DuBoisian dual-consciousness and you have a significant percentage. It's somewhat psychological but it is also cultural.
Just the other day I recounted for the first time since I was a kid, that I had to learn Ebonics. Neither my father nor my grandfather spoke anything but the English of New Englanders with little more than the accent of jazz club jive, which I tend to keep alive in this joint among you cats. As I became fluent in my own daddy's dialect I also had to learn how to speak alongside the neighborhood kids very Ice Cube, and then later amongst the prep school kids very Cary Elwes (yes James Spader was my favorite brat packer). Three distinct dialects, two of choice (plus French and Swahili). This has come to be known among Progressive circles as code switching, and it has been a standard mark of the Talented Nth where us'n ever we be. My point is that at a very basic level black Americans choose their own cultural markers and I think that a choice of dialect is very key when we start talking about 'the black community'. It is my preference, always and everywhere to breakup race into innumerable parts. Those cultural markers many find convenient to define race, culturally, as deVega does, I say nay - they are what they are.
So I think that anyone who can choose a dialect can choose a politics and perhaps those who cannot, likewise cannot transcend their daddy's worldview either. Or at least for those who might, it's not worth the trouble. I say this in light of what I call black radical autonomy - which is a way of expressing a lightweight cultural nationalism through the privileges of Black Culture. Nobody really questions whether or not black Americans inherit MLK, whether we think our way through his philosophy or not. Nobody really questions whether or not we have any privileges in those things we have, whether it's Soul Food, Gospel Music, rhetorical signifying or anything else that 30 years of Black Studies on American campuses has revealed. If I told you I didn't know who Bob Marley was, you'd look at me strange. You'd say, how could I as a black man not know? There is a broad spectrum of this cultural privilege which is almost never considered anything but invisible until one of us darkies pipes up and says we're Republican. Then all hell breaks loose questioning our blackness and the invisible becomes suddenly visible. My point here is that everyone has a choice, but as well we have a default. The default can be invisible.
I want to re-iterate my predilection towards monolith breaking when it comes to these cultural choices masquerading as racial markers. For example, I assert five socio-economic classes of black Americans of my generation. Where deVega might say race is how class is lived, I say yeah well there are five classes in the black race and we live quite differently. {projects, ghetto, hood, burb, hill} and there are urban and rural versions. (I only first saw rural projects in 1998 or so). It should be then a matter of course to consider these five classes of black Americans with regard to their attitude towards policy.
Now my longstanding excuse, and I perceive that it is deVega's as well, is that black Americans wanted more government because we had a cultural and political imperative to believe that whatever goods are being handed out in whatever form, we haven't been getting our share. That's just natural self-interest. But I'd say that natural self-interest would express itself differently depending on how much of the sound of the drum you've got, and what class of shoes you wear on the daily. And that latter form makes the most difference when it comes to policy.
If you're living on the Hill, why would you want the civil service jobs opened up by Affirmative Action? You wouldn't. If you're living in the Projects, why would you care about Ronald Reagan's invention of the IRA? You wouldn't. Some black Americans look at military service and say Bam! Instant middle class. That's for me. And for the three generations since WW2, how many black Americans have looked at military spending as a policy privilege, speaking of those GI Bills?
But let me get to the part that's nagging me about the entire matter of policy - and I'm likely to concur with David Brooks on this. There is a culture of earning / family business that follows all of the cultural/class archetypes of America. And when it came to black Americans, what you could never get to was a cogent way of talking about that past the legendary Philadelphia Negro. Everybody else has been mashed up into one monolithic 'black community' for various good and bad reasons. So we haven't evolved a coherent way of talking about in any significant way, those five classes of black American and distinguishing their needs and wants. It is this lack of common vocabulary that keeps the same pundits paid when it comes to talking about the Brothers and Sisters. (And even Chuck D knows every Brother aint a brother.) It's down to an ugly stupid 300 year old divide of House and Field, of respectability and coonery, of Aunt Obama and Uncle Tom. To hell with black diversity. Moreover that unbroken monolithic view of black Americans has yielded no conventional way to talk about a family like mine, four generations out of pidgin English and levels of professionalism and entrepreneurship we not only attain but inherit.
My own focus tends towards the reasons why, in typical bourgie fashion, I took up the political cudgels of the oppressed in the same way some society dork from P.G. Wodehouse might. After all, in black America It's not the voice from the streets or their hiphop producers that are calling for increased funds for Headstart or abortion on demand. I struggle a bit to identify how it is that Doshpoint money is acquired and families set for life, and almost every time what is confirmed is that it comes not from benefiting from government policy, but outwitting and gaming it. Then again, I'm the sort who would look at Goldman Sachs as an example to be followed, not a demon to be bled for my long overdue slice of government cheese. But even self-proclaimed Affirmative Action babies who never grew up on food stamps understand this aspect of gaming the system. So who's calling for that to be means tested? Did black people cheer for OJ? I didn't, but I did give props to Johnny Cochran. (and in fact saw him at SFO the day before the verdict, and wished him luck). My point here is that the idea of getting from no money to some money to new money to old money is a continuum in black America - and while there are industries pre-disposed to be culturally black there is an oversized fraction that just got started by the opening up of civil service and Affirmative Actions. (And too damned many went into academia, but we digress).
I'm one of those people who cursed under their breath that A. Phillip Randolph didn't finish his job. I see some excess of irreparable damage done by the Black Power Movement that networked among counter-cultural youth instead of in the laundries, hotels, restaurants and domestic service industries of America. Black America used to dominate all that. We should have owned at least Marriott by now. And I know of many families out of Michigan who are Ford or Chevy families depending on where their parents worked. And I would give props to any sort of organic politics that trafficked in real patronage as legitimate. I want to hear about local communities and policy - well, really I don't. I want to hear about how a national mainstream culture, political philosophy and public square supports local aspirations to grow their own businesses.
The problem with deVega's argument is that there is no real national black politics that is effectively organic. And the single most important thing that is most socio-economically true about black Americans of all sorts is that their children are born to single mothers, and there is nothing policy has done to get that same majority to admit that Moynihan was right. There's that black radical autonomy in play. So it is the fixation of clinging to a single dialect, culture and political worldview and calling that black that blocks a genuine conversation about who all these black Americans really are and what they really want. Saying that class is lived as race promotes the false monolithic fact of race by undermining black diversity and not contributing to the knowledge of how class is lived within race.
There are lots of true things about lot of various groups in America that we keep forgetting or never get right because of a fixation on race and on class. Because of that we stereotypically think that you are not going to find Starbucks in West Virginia. I haven't been there but I'll bet the mocha is just right. I don't think policy is meaningless, but we must really take into consideration that the varying enlightened self-interests of the diversity of black Americans is not being taken seriously.
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