The Weekly Sift making sense of the news one week at a time

A Short History of White Racism in the Two-Party System
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If you’ve seen the Lincoln movie, maybe you’re still walking around with this bit of cognitive dissonance[….]

The story is doubly worth telling because Republicans like Ann Coulter and Jonah Goldberg have been misrepresenting it so grossly.

A good place to start is the presidential election of 1860, which brings Lincoln to power and convinces Southern whites (the only people who can vote in the South in 1860) that secession is their best chance to maintain slavery*.

Lincoln gets only 40% of the vote, but in a four-way race (the Democratic Convention split over whether the platform should endorse the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision) that’s enough to win. In terms of the popular vote, his closest competition is Illinois Democrat Stephen Douglas (30%), but in electoral votes another Democrat, sitting Vice President John Breckenridge of Kentucky, finishes second with 72 EVs to Lincoln’s 180.

Douglas fails because he is a national candidate representing continued compromise over slavery, while Breckenridge and Lincoln are sectional candidates with clear pro- and anti-slavery positions. So Douglas gets 15% in Alabama (to Lincoln’s 0%) and 43% in Wisconsin (to Breckenridge’s 0.5%), but only manages to carry Missouri and New Jersey, giving him 12 EVs and fourth place behind John Bell’s 39.

During Reconstruction, Southern whites still blame Lincoln’s party for their humiliation in “the War of Northern Aggression“, but the new black vote makes Southern Republicans competitive — particularly in South Carolina, where blacks have long outnumbered whites. So the 1876 map looks like this:

1876 electoral map

But by 1896 the Jim Crow laws have disenfranchised Southern blacks, and Southern whites still remember how Lincoln destroyed their society, so Southern Republicans go extinct. Mississippi, for example, gives Democrat William Jennings Bryan a 91% majority. The 1896 map is almost a negative of the 2012 map — Democratic in the South and Mountain West, Republican in the Northeast, Midwest, and Far West.

1896 electoral map

2012 electoral map

The “solid South” stays Democratic through 1944, when FDR carries Mississippi with 94% of the vote.

1944 electoral map

So until 1944, there is no doubt that the Democrats are the party of Jim Crow. National figures like FDR may not be actively racist — and blacks benefit from the general anti-poverty provisions of the New Deal — but Democrats are not going to rock the boat of Southern white supremacy. Republicans, on the other hand, have nothing to defend in the old Confederacy, so it costs them nothing to champion civil rights. Their 1944 platform does them credit:

Racial and Religious Intolerance

We unreservedly condemn the injection into American life of appeals to racial or religious prejudice.

We pledge an immediate Congressional inquiry to ascertain the extent to which mistreatment, segregation and discrimination against Negroes who are in our armed forces are impairing morale and efficiency, and the adoption of corrective legislation.

We pledge the establishment by Federal legislation of a permanent Fair Employment Practice Commission.

Anti-Poll Tax

The payment of any poll tax should not be a condition of voting in Federal elections and we favor immediate submission of a Constitutional amendment for its abolition.

Anti-Lynching

We favor legislation against lynching and pledge our sincere efforts in behalf of its early enactment.

But outside the South, Democrats are also changing. In 1941 Roosevelt bans racial discrimination in defense industries.

At the 1948 Democratic Convention, a young Hubert Humphrey leads a Northern liberal bloc that adds this Civil Rights plank to the platform:

We again state our belief that racial and religious minorities must have the right to live, the right to work, the right to vote, the full and equal protection of the laws, on a basis of equality with all citizens as guaranteed by the Constitution.

We highly commend President Harry S. Truman for his courageous stand on the issue of civil rights.

We call upon the Congress to support our President in guaranteeing these basic and fundamental American Principles:

(1) the right of full and equal political participation;
(2) the right to equal opportunity of employment;
(3) the right of security of person;
(4) and the right of equal treatment in the service and defense of our nation.

Southern delegates respond by walking out of the convention and establishing the States’ Rights Democratic Party, a.k.a. the Dixiecrats, who nominate South Carolina’s Democratic Governor Strom Thurmond for president and endorse “the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race”. In spite of later efforts to sugarcoat his memory, Thurmond is a racist running an openly racist campaign. He tells one rally:

There’s not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger** race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.

After the Dixiecrat walkout, President Truman decides the die is cast and desegregates the military.

The 1948 electoral map looks like this:

1948 electoral map

So Democrats and Dixiecrats split the South, with still no Southern Republicans worth mentioning. Tom Dewey gets only 3% of the vote in Mississippi and 4% in South Carolina.

1948-1980 is a transitional period. On the state level, the South is still solidly Democratic. Republicans often don’t even bother to field candidates, as in Alabama in 1962, where George Wallace wins the governor’s race with 96% of the vote. (Wallace previously ran in 1958 with the endorsement of the NAACP and without support from the KKK. After losing the Democratic primary to a more openly racist candidate, he said, “I was out-niggered by John Patterson. And I’ll tell you here and now, I will never be out-niggered again.”)

The great civil rights face-offs of the 50s and 60s are between Southern Democratic governors and presidents of either party. In 1957, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower sends troops to Little Rock when Democratic Governor Orval Faubus refuses to integrate Central High School. But Democratic President John Kennedy does exactly the same thing in 1962 when Democratic Governor Ross Barnett refuses to integrate the University of Mississippi, and in 1963 when Governor Wallace refuses to integrate the University of Alabama.

With Eisenhower’s invasion of Little Rock still rankling, 1960 is the second-to-last hurrah of the Democratic South. Putting Texan Lyndon Johnson on the ticket holds most of the South for Kennedy, but the Democrats’ hold is slipping: 15 Southern electoral votes go to Virginia Senator Harry Byrd, and Nixon is competitive in places Republicans never were before; he gets 49% in South Carolina, far more than Dewey’s 4% just three elections ago.

1960 electoral map

After JFK’s assassination, Johnson pushes the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress with bipartisan support. 18 Southern Democrats and one Republican filibuster in the Senate — a rare occurrence in those days — but the bill ultimately passes with 46 Democratic votes and 27 Republicans. As he signs the bill, Johnson comments, “We have lost the South for a generation.“

But will the Republicans pick the South up, or will spurned Dixiecrats be a regional party whose support no one wants? Through the 60s, moderate Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller and George Romney push to uphold the Lincoln-Dewey-Eisenhower civil-rights tradition and compete for black votes. But they lose. The 1964 Republican nominee against Johnson is Barry Goldwater, one of the few non-Southern senators who voted against the Civil Right Act.

Goldwater marks the beginning of I’m-not-a-racist-but Republicanism. His stated reasons for opposing the Civil Right bill have nothing to do with race. (He thought it was unconstitutional.) And the 1964 Republican platform stands by the Party’s pro-civil-rights record:

[W]e pledge: …

—full implementation and faithful execution of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and all other civil rights statutes, to assure equal rights and opportunities guaranteed by the Constitution to every citizen;

—improvements of civil rights statutes adequate to changing needs of our times;

—such additional administrative or legislative actions as may be required to end the denial, for whatever unlawful reason, of the right to vote;

—immigration legislation seeking to re-unite families and continuation of the “Fair Share” Refugee Program;

—continued opposition to discrimination based on race, creed, national origin or sex. We recognize that the elimination of any such discrimination is a matter of heart, conscience, and education, as well as of equal rights under law.

But it also gives white racists reason to hope.

[The Johnson] Administration has failed to apply Republican-initiated retraining programs where most needed particularly where they could afford new economic opportunities to Negro citizens. It has preferred, instead, divisive political proposals.

i.e. the Civil Rights Act and what becomes the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The platform also denounces ”inverse discrimination” and “the abandonment of neighborhood schools, for reasons of race”. So Goldwater is against a public school saying “no niggers”, but if a neighborhood (just by pure chance, of course) happens to be all-white, its all-white school is just fine. His party also pledges

to open avenues of peaceful progress in solving racial controversies while discouraging lawlessness and violence.

Note the change: Dewey was worried about lynchings — white-on-black violence. In 1964 lynching are still happening, the Watts riots are still in the future, and Martin Luther King’s campaign of non-violent civil disobedience is being met with murders like the infamous Mississippi Burning case. But Goldwater’s platform lumps civil disobedience (“lawlessness”) together with “violence”, and pledges to “discourage” it.

So if you’re a Southern white supremacist who worries about civil rights agitators stirring up trouble in your town, Goldwater is your guy, just like he’s Strom Thurmond’s guy. Goldwater carries the South (and his home state of Arizona) as the rest of the country soundly rejects him.

1964 electoral map

Re-elected, LBJ passes the Voting Rights Act of 1965, also with bipartisan support. LBJ addresses a joint session of Congress, in a speech that still makes me misty-eyed:

It is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.

Thurmond the Dixiecrat-turned-Republican is the only Republican senator who votes No. Republicans field a candidate for governor in South Carolina in 1966 for the first time since Reconstruction. He loses 58%-42%, but erosion of support for the national Democratic Party is reaching the state level.

Goldwater’s landslide loss hardly establishes a new normal for Republicans, who still flirt with Rockefeller and Romney before settling on Nixon, whose civil-rights position is fuzzy. While few Dixiecrats are ready to follow Thurmond into the new tribe of Southern Republicans, they also can’t vote for the hated Hubert Humphrey. So in 1968 they give the regional-party thing another try with George Wallace.

1968 electoral map

But Nixon understands that Republicans have to pick up what the Democrats have dropped. His “Southern Strategy” (with Thurmond’s endorsement) captures the upper South in 1968, which is his victory margin in a close election. His long-term vision is for Republicans to absorb the Wallace vote into an unbeatable conservative coalition that Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips calls The Emerging Republican Majority.

Phillips writes:

The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.

The Nixon re-election landslide of 1972 sweeps the South, but it’s hard to read much into that, since he takes every state but Massachusetts, and Georgia’s Jimmy Carter manages to pull the Democratic South together one last time in 1976.

But 1980 is the re-alignment election that has been brewing since 1964.

Ronald Reagan’s first speech as the Republican nominee is in the symbolic location of Neshoba County, Mississippi, site of the Mississippi Burning murders of 1964. So: symbolic time, symbolic place — what’s he say? Nothing about race at all. Just this:

I believe in state’s rights; I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.

States rights, local control — just what Orval Faubus and Ross Barnett and George Wallace wanted when they refused to enforce federal court orders to integrate their schools. Just what Eisenhower and Kennedy didn’t allow when they sent federal troops.

It’s the beginning of the dog-whistle era. After the election, Reagan strategist Lee Atwater lays it out:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, “forced busing”, “states’ rights”, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

So Reagan isn’t trying to “out-nigger” anybody, because people up North will hear him and think he’s evil. He’ll just say “states rights” — like Strom Thurmond and Jefferson Davis before him — and hope “Negrophobe whites” get the message that they are welcome in his coalition.

They get the message.

1980 electoral map

They get it not just nationally, but on the state level. Alabama and Georgia elect Republican senators for the first time since Reconstruction.

In case anybody has forgotten that message by 1988, George H. W. Bush reminds them: If you vote for Democrats, Willie Horton will rape your wife.

Locally, the transition from the “old comfortable arrangement” is gradual. Most Dixiecrat/Democrat politicians don’t follow Strom Thurmond’s path to the Republican Party, though during the 70s and 80s they often combine with Republicans in Congress to form the conservative majority Phillips predicted. But as they retire, they are replaced by Republicans like Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich. (Lott, interestingly, was endorsed for Congress by his retiring Democratic predecessor.)

The chart on the right shows a generational turnover, not a walk-out. Southern Democrats in Congress today tend to be blacks representing majority-black districts, like South Carolina’s Jim Clyburn.

Today, the old white Confederacy is solidly Republican. Nationally, Romney had a clear majority of white voters: 59%. But in Mississippi, a whopping 89% of whites voted for Romney.

How did he lock up the Mississippi white vote? Not by saying “nigger, nigger”. Republicans never did that, because they didn’t exist in Mississippi when that was a winning strategy. Instead, they are the party of traditional values in a state where “tradition” means the stars-and-bars and Colonel Reb. They are the party of property rights and business in a state where property and business overwhelmingly belong to whites. They are the party of small government in a state where only massive federal intervention gave blacks the right to vote or to attend the state university.

Republicans don’t have to say “nigger, nigger”. Everybody gets it. They aren’t the Racist Party, but they are the party where white racists are welcome, where “Barack the Magic Negro” is funny, and people email each other photos of Obama with a bone through his nose or put his image on fantasy food stamps with ribs and watermelon. Just as Republicans aren’t anti-Hispanic, they just think police should stop people who look like they might be illegal immigrants. They aren’t even anti-Muslim, they just don’t think freedom of religion includes the right to build a mosque.

That’s the Party of Lincoln today. And now you know how they got here.

*A longstanding argument claims that secession was about “state’s rights” and not about slavery. Mostly you’ll hear this from people who have affection for the Confederacy but find slavery embarrassing. Actual Confederates did not suffer this embarrassment, and were very open about why they were seceding. South Carolina’s declaration of secession is clear:

A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. … On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.

We, therefore, the People of South Carolina, by our delegates in Convention assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, have solemnly declared that the Union heretofore existing between this State and the other States of North America, is dissolved.

** When this recording came up in a different context a few months ago, I gave Thurmond the benefit of the doubt, that he might have said “negro” very fast and slurred. You can listen and judge for yourself.

An excerpt from a New York Times article, titled Race in the South in the Age of Obama. It covers a black politician, James Field, who is a representative of Cullman, Alabama.

Versions of Cullman’s old sundown sign hung beside county roads well into the 1970s, and all of them repeated the message that the travel writer Carl Carmer saw when he visited Cullman in the late 1920s: “Nigger Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on You in This Town.” The sign was notorious all over Alabama, and coupled with Cullman’s powerful Ku Klux Klan, it created a racial deterrent so effective that even today, Cullman’s are exits off the Interstate that most African-Americans avoid.

You can find the full article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/magazine/28Alabama-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

Once, when I visited Peek’s shop alone, Peek told me: “James is not like any black man that I know. He’s just different. He just don’t have that mentality, anybody owes him anything. He just gets out and works and helps people, earns what he gets. If James wasn’t black, you’d think he was white. That doesn’t sound right, but you know what I mean.”

Everybody in Cullman knows what he means, perhaps most especially the men who gather weekday mornings at a round table at the All Steak restaurant, where many of them spent much of this past year not getting over the fact of an African-American president. The group fortified themselves with daily doses of rue — “Thought I’d never see it”— dared one another to use “the N-word” in front of a Yankee and shared memories of how Cullman used to be — “They were afraid to come to town.” One day in September, a retired Alabama state trooper named Charlie Shafer leaned back from his eggs and asked, “Have you all ever stopped to consider how much better off the country would be if Obama’d been. . . . ” Quick and fast came the replies:

“White.”

“Died in childbirth.”

Periodically, Fields’s name came up, and people leapt to describe what “a hard-working, down-to-earth person” he is. It was recurrent. Harsh expressions of disdain for blacks in general would smoothly give way to admiration for the black individual in their midst. The dichotomy was expressed in a particularly blunt way by a jeweler named Richard White. “Cullman’s the best-kept secret in the South,” White said. “Low-key. Everybody gets along. And the three-tenths of 1 percent might have something to do with it.” Then, without any kind of transition, he added: “James is a good friend of mine. He’s a good man. He’s straight. He’s honest. He’s well educated.”

When I asked Rozalyn Love, the medical student, about the daily scene at the All Steak, she said that in Cullman, “there’s almost to some degree pride about being a little bit notorious.” Then she added, “They’re a lot less racist there than some of them would like people to think they are.” This is undoubtedly true; it’s not 1964 anymore. Many older white people from Cullman also believe that attitudes toward race are slowly shifting. “My children have a different view of racial makeup than I had,” says Judge Chaney. “From my father’s generation — extremely prejudiced — to mine — we’re working through it — to my children, race is a nonissue. That’s not to say there still aren’t racial tensions, whether it be black or Hispanic.”

The owner of a classic-car rebuilding shop, Jerry Burgess, made a similar generational point one day at his garage when he described something he saw in the 1960s and has never forgotten. Burgess is a bootlegger’s son with long, stringy hair under a dirty cap, a ZZ Top beard, an arm sleeved in tattoos and friendly eyes. “I can remember when the sign was on the edge of Cullman, down on Highway 31, close to the tracks,” he told me. “It said ‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on a Nigger at Night.’ I can’t hardly say the word. My kids raise Cain about it. A lot of old-timers still use the word. My uncle does. Don’t think a thing about it. He’s a little old-fashioned. To me it seems like a very different time. Now most people would be O.K. with black people.”

Still, when Cecil Parker, a retired African-American construction worker who grew up near Colony, thinks about race relations in Alabama, he says: “It’s better, but it’s not great. Some know better. Some don’t care. Same people who did all the hanging and burning are still alive. They were taught against us. That we weren’t human. Alabama do not like black folk telling him what to do.”

That Fields evaluated this situation and sensed he could win an election remains a source of wonder among Alabama political insiders. “Other legislators,” he says, “still ask me, ‘How’d you do that?!’ I look at them, ‘How’d I do what?’ It’s not like I woke up and hoped people would vote for me.” But of course he was aware of what he was up against. The famous phrase that V. O. Key invented to describe the intensely localized, almost tribal nature of Alabamians at the polls is “friends and neighbors” voting. Key’s insight was that Alabama voters prefer political representatives who lived close by, even when the more distant figure might better speak to issues of common concern. A result, according to Morris Dees, the founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, is that “I haven’t seen a lot of coming together in a shared cause.” Thus, the enduring importance of some feeling of personal connection: of a handshake, of being able to say a candidate embraces my values, if not my plight. In small communities like Cullman, there is an aversion to the intensely mediated sense of experience that the Internet has brought to so much American life — and to American politics. Fierce Southern resistance to political messages of change has a lot to do with belief in the value of immediate encounters and a primary fear of strangers and outsiders — especially black or Northern ones — who may bring harm. “Folks down here kind of like to touch and feel the merchandise” is the way a Cullman banker named Dan W. Mann puts it. So the problem for Fields as a candidate amounted to a fundamental, transformative question about race in the white South: could a black man be considered a friend and a neighbor?

The candidate who ran against Fields in the special election was Wayne Willingham. The difference between Fields’s devoted life of public service and his opponent’s sparser record was stark. Further, a Cullman relative of Wayne’s, Joe Willingham, is a reputed Klan leader. At some point, Fields says, in the Deep South, the race card “always comes up when there are African-Americans running against whites.” At the campaign’s outset, people told Fields: “James, it’ll be hard to beat him. He’ll bring out the worst in folks.” In recent years, racial and sexual innuendo helped North Carolina’s Jesse Helms and Tennessee’s Bob Corker defeat black Senate opponents, and of course, race-baiting also happens locally. In 1992, Selma’s white incumbent mayor, Joe T. Smitherman, prevailed against his black challenger, James Perkins, in part by renting a room, filling it with rows of elderly white women and just as many telephone lines and instructing the women to make white voters aware of what was at stake. Fields understood that to win he especially would need to neutralize resentments, fears and prejudices by blurring his color into the background where it was subordinate to his character. His life was his case, but his means of expressing it would have to be his personality.

To explain his thinking about elections, Fields talks about Charlie Shafer. Fields says that Shafer was on active duty in 1965 in Selma, during the seminal civil rights movement demonstration that became known as Bloody Sunday after lawmen carrying clubs and tear gas attacked unarmed protesters. “When they marched to Montgomery from Selma, he was one of the troopers,” Fields says. “But if he lived in my district, I think he’d vote for me. I truly believe that. Because he’s gotten to know me. But then again he may not, and that’s O.K.” Fields’s point was not that he was irresistible, just qualified, and that voting for him didn’t have to be a big deal. The more normal it could be made to seem, the better.

Normal in Cullman means Christian. Conspicuous displays of faith by politicians are so common that it’s a surprise when one doesn’t have the Ten Commandments posted on his office wall. Accordingly, Fields began his last competition by placing a newspaper advertisement challenging Willingham to “a race that is God-driven and Christ-centered.” This was the only election on the ballot in the state at the time, and a black man running in Cullman was a big deal. Dozens of idealistic volunteers, most of them young and white, joined the campaign. Fields says: “I told the outsiders, ‘Don’t go out in the county. Just work the city.’ Out in the county there are people I grew up with, played ball with. If they went out there, some people would say, ‘Who are you, boy?’ ” Fields himself traveled door to door with his handshake and a message that, he says, boiled down to “vote for me for no other reason than you know and trust me.”

He continued: “I sat beside you in churches, restaurants, parks, at funerals, on the streets of Cullman, on hospital beds.” There were, he says, no soaring pulpit elocutions: “I don’t say anything profound. Just common, everyday things.”

I have meant, for a while now, to get around to writing a post regarding my own political stances (in regards to government, it's place, political efficacy, etc. I think all here are well aware of my political stances in most social issues). I'm not certain it's solidified into anything new (hence requiring an entry of its own rather than simply providing other sources) but I may discover that more clearly by at least starting to write such a post.

In the meanwhile, here's an article. It takes a position a bit more Left than my own politics (hence I'm not providing it with the affirmation of agreement) but it's interesting for the way it fleshes out more aspects of the past (particularly American history) that aren't often covered in mainstream circles.

I actually find it far more lengthy than it had to be and a bit repetitive (though that might be because I was reading it for the sake of a tid-bit rather than rigorous academic proof…). Consider it a the-more-you-know-the-better-always-so-read-it-just-so-you-know-even-if-you-never-use-it-again moment of mine.

The magazine itself is interesting, though – once again – I find it more Left than my own politics. While that doesn't necessarily negate use – for anything (I am, after all, still subscribed to Red State though I often find myself screaming at my computer screen in anger while reading it) –, I find that it takes certain ideas for granted and works from them while I might question those very ideas. Still, it often falls into the category of analysis (rather than simple critic) so I come across interesting articles (like the below) more often than not.

Wage-Slavery and Republican Liberty

Generations of workers critiqued wage-labor in the name of republican liberty.

In a recent interview, historian Quentin Skinner had the following to say about Karl Marx and the republican theory of liberty. The republican or ‘neo-Roman’ theory says that we are unfree when we are subject to another person’s will:

I am very struck by the extent to which Marx deploys, in his own way, a neo-Roman political vocabulary. He talks about wage slaves, and he talks about the dictatorship of the proletariat. He insists that, if you are free only to sell your labour, then you are not free at all. He stigmatises capitalism as a form of servitude. These are all recognizably neo-Roman moral commitments.

Skinner also says that “this is a question which would bear a great deal more investigation than it has received.”

I have been engaging in some of this investigation. It is not just Marx or even primarily Marx who believed that the neo-roman theory of freedom leads directly to a critique of wage-slavery. As early as the late 1820s, urban workers seized on the inherited republicanism of the American Revolution and applied it to the wage-labor relationship. They organized themselves city-by-city into the first self-conscious political parties of labor and their main campaign was against ‘wage-slavery.’

They argued that the wealthy “keep us in a state of humble dependence” through their monopoly control of the means of production. As Thomas Skidmore, founder of the Workingmen’s Party of New York, put it:

thousands of our people of the present day in deep distress and poverty, dependent for their daily subsistence upon a few among us whom the unnatural operation of our own free and republican institutions, as we are pleased to call them, has thus arbitrarily and barbarously made enormously rich.

Their “humble dependence” meant that they had no choice but to sell their labor to some employer or another. Their only chance of leading a decent life was if some employer would give them a job. Though formally free, these workers were nonetheless economically dependent and thus unfree. That is why they saw themselves as denied their rightful republican liberty, and why wage-labor merited the name slavery. Skidmore made the comparison with classical slavery the most explicit:

For he, in all countries is a slave, who must work more for another than that other must work for him. It does not matter how this state of things is brought about; whether the sword of victory hew down the liberty of the captive, and thus compel him to labor for his conqueror, or whether the sword of want extort our consent, as it were, to a voluntary slavery, through a denial to us of the materials of nature…

The critique of wage-slavery in the name of republican liberty could hardly be clearer.

Given their analysis of wage-labor, these artisan republicans were inexorably led to radical conclusions about the conditions that could restore workers their full independence. Every leading figure of these early workingmen’s parties made some form of the argument that “the principles of equal distribution [of property be] everywhere adopted” or that it was necessary to “equalize property.” Here, the “property” to be equally distributed was clearly means of production. And it was to be distributed not just in the form of land, but cooperative control over factories and other implements.

For instance, the major report articulating the principles of the Workingmen’s Party of New York included the demand for “AN EQUAL AMOUNT OF PROPERTY ON ARRIVING AT THE AGE OF MATURITY.” Only with control over this kind of property could workers’ structural dependence on owners be eliminated. For these ‘Workies’ following out the logic of the republican theory led not to a nostalgic, agrarian idealism, but to the view that each person’s independence depended upon everyone possessing equal and collective control of productive resources. Even more striking, they argued that the only way to achieve this condition of independence was through the joint political efforts of the dependent or ‘enslaved’ class.

As Langdon Byllesby, one of the earliest of these worker republicans, wrote, “history does not furnish an instance wherein the depository of power voluntarily abrogated its prerogative, or the oppressor relinquished his advantages in favour of the oppressed.” It was up to the dependent classes, through the agency of their workingmen’s parties, to realize a cooperative commonwealth.

There is an important historical connection between these radical artisans and Marx. As Maximilen Rubel and Lewis Feuer have shown, just at the time that Marx turned from Hegelian philosophy to political economy, in 1841-2, he began to read comparative political history. He was particularly interested in the American republic, and read three main sources: Beaumont, Tocqueville, and a less well-known Englishman, Thomas Hamilton. Hamilton was a former colonel who wrote his own, very popular observation of his time traveling in the United States called Men and Manners in America, published in 1833. For Marx, Hamilton was the best source of the three because Hamilton, unlike the Frenchmen, actually met with and spoke to leaders of the Workingman’s Party of New York. That section of Hamilton’s travelogue includes ominous references to the “Extreme Gauche” of the “Workies” who wish to introduce an “AGRARIAN LAW, and a periodical division of property,” and includes gloomy reflections on the coming “anarchy and despoliation.” It is these very sections of Hamilton that Marx copied into his notebooks during this period of preparatory study.

Unbeknown to Marx, he was copying a copy. In those sections of Men and Manners Hamilton had essentially transcribed parts of Thomas Skidmore’s report to the Workingmen’s Party of New York, which were a distillation of the ideas that could be found in Skidmore’s lengthy The Rights of Man to Property! Skidmore’s book included the argument that property rights were invalid if they were used to make the poor economically dependent, allowing owners “to live in idleness, partial or total, thus supporting himself, more or less, on the labors of others.”

If property rights were illegitimate the minute they were used to make some dependent on others then it was clear all freedom-loving citizens were justified in transforming property relations in the name of republican liberty. This was why Skidmore proposed the radical demand that the workers “APPROPRIATE ALSO, in the same way, THE COTTON FACTORIES, THE WOOLEN FACTORIES, THE IRON FOUNDERIES, THE ROLLING MILLS, HOUSES, CHURCHES, SHIPS, GOODS, STEAM-BOATS, FIELDS OF AGRICULTURE, &c. &c. &c. in manner as proposed in this work, AND AS IS THEIR RIGHT.” The manner proposed for this expropriation of the expropriators was not violent revolution but a state constitutional convention in which all property would be nationalized and then redistributed in shares of equal value to be used to form cooperatives or buy land.

Marx never knew these labor republicans by name, nor any of their primary writings, but it is clear from his notebooks that their ideas and political self-organization contributed to his early thinking, especially at the moment at which he was formulating his view of workers as the universal class. Indeed, in On the Jewish Question, Beaumont, Tocqueville and “the Englishman Hamilton’s” accounts of the United States feature heavily in Marx’s discussion of America. It is there that Marx makes the famous distinction between political and human emancipation, arguing that the American republic shows us most clearly the distinction between the two. This was almost exactly the same distinction that the Workies made when saying, as Philadelphian Samuel Simpson did, “the consequence now is, that while the government is republican, society in its general features, is as regal as it is in England.” A republican theory of wage-slavery was developed well before Marx (see here for evidence of similar developments in France that were also very likely to have influenced Marx).

In the United States, the republican critique of wage-labor went into abeyance for a time after the 1840s, or more appropriately, it was absorbed into the agrarian socialism of the National Reform Association – a tale masterfully told by the historian Mark Lause in Young America: Land, Labor and Republican Community.But ‘labor republicanism’ exploded back onto the political scene in the United States after the Civil War, especially with leading figures around the Knights of Labor and the eight-hour movement. The Knights were for a time one of the most powerful organizations in the country, organized skilled and unskilled labor together, and at their peak included more than 700,000 official members, probably representing more than 1 million participating workers. The Knights used the republican concept of liberty to assert the universal interests of labor and to argue for the transformation of American society. George McNeill, a leading Knight, wrote that “There is an inevitable and irresistible conflict between the wage-system of labor and the republican system of government.” Ira Steward, most famous as an eight-hour campaigner, demanded a “a republicanization of labor, as well as a republicanization of government.”

These turns of phrase were more than rhetorical gestures. They were self-conscious appeals to the republican theory. Indeed the Journal of United Labor even reproduced a famous passage on slavery from Algernon Sidney’s Discourses on Government in order to articulate why wage-labor was a form of servitude. The passage goes:

Slavery.—The weight of chains, number of stripes, hardness of labor, and other effects of a master’s cruelty, may make one servitude more miserable than another; but he is a slave who serves the gentlest man in the world, as well as he who serves the worst; and he does serve him if he must obey his commands and depend upon his will.

This passage, and Sidney’s writings, have played a major role in contemporary scholarship on early modern republicanism, and here it is deployed to critique not the political enslavement to a monarch but wage-slavery.

In fact, the labor republicans not only drew on the republican theory but further developed it in light of the new dynamics of industrial capitalism. They noted that there were two interconnected forms of dependence. One was the general or structural dependence of the wage-laborer on employers, defined by the fact that the monopoly of control over productive property by some left the rest dependent upon those owners for their livelihoods. This, as George McNeil put it, meant that workers “assent but they do not consent, they submit but do not agree.”

The voluntaristic language here was meant to capture how, thought the workers were not literally slaves, they were nonetheless compelled to work for others. As Skinner has shown in his book on Hobbes, it is precisely this conflation of voluntaristic action and freedom that modern republicans have always rejected, and which their enemies, like Hobbes, have regularly defended. Though here, the worker’s dependence was not a feature so much of being the legal property of another as it was being forced, by economic need, to sell his labor:

when a man is placed in a position where he is compelled to give the benefit of his labor to another, he is in a condition of slavery, whether the slave is held in chattel bondage or in wages bondage, he is equally a slave.

Emancipation may have eliminated chattel slavery, but, as eight-hour campaigner Ira Steward once put it, the creation of this new form of economic dependence meant “something of slavery still remains…something of freedom is yet to come.”

According to labor republicans, the structural dependence of the wage-laborer was translated, through the labor contract, to a more personal form of servitude to the employer. After all, the contract was an agreement of obedience in exchange for wages. It was an agreement to alienate control over one’s own activity in exchange for the privilege of having enough money to buy necessities, and perhaps a few luxuries. Indeed, even if the wages were fairly high, the point of the contract was to become subject to the will of a specific owner or his manager. As one anonymous author put it, in the Journal of United Labor, “Is there a workshop where obedience is not demanded – not to the difficulties or qualities of the labor to be performed – but to the caprice of he who pays the wages of his servants?” As nearly every scholar of republican thought has noted, the language of being subject to the caprice of another is one of the most enduring rhetorical tropes of the neo-Roman theory of freedom. It is no accident that it would feature so heavily in labor republican arguments about domination in the workplace.

It was for this reason that the Knights of Labor believed that the only way to ‘republicanize labor’ was “to abolish as rapidly as possible, the wage system, substituting co-operation therefore.” The point about a cooperative system was that property was collectively owned and work cooperatively managed. Only when the class differences between owners and workers were removed could republican liberty be truly universalized. It would, at once, remove the structural and personal dependence of workers.

As William H. Silvis, one of the earliest of these figures, argued, cooperation “renders the workman independent of necessities which often compel him to submit to hectoring, domineering, and insults of every kind.” What clearer statement could there be of the connection between the republican theory of liberty, economic dependence, and the modern wage-system? Here was a series of arguments that flowed naturally from the principles of the American Revolution.

To demand that “there is to be a people in industry, as in government” was simply to argue that the cooperative commonwealth was nothing more than the culmination and completion of the American Revolution’s republican aspirations.

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Study debunks notion that men and women are psychologically distinct

 

A first-of-its-kind study to be published in the February issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology has dealt a devastating blow to the notion that men and women are fundamentally different when it comes to how they think and act.

“Although gender differences on average are not under dispute, the idea of consistently and inflexibly gender-typed individuals is,” Bobbi J. Carothers of Washington University in St. Louis and Harry T. Reis of the University of Rochester explained in their study. “That is, there are not two distinct genders, but instead there are linear gradations of variables associated with sex, such as masculinity or intimacy, all of which are continuous.”

Analyzing 122 different characteristics from 13,301 individuals in 13 studies, the researchers concluded that differences between men and women were best seen as dimensional rather than categorical. In other words, the differences between men and women should be viewed as a matter of degree rather than a sign of consistent differences between two distinct groups.

Numerous studies have examined gender differences between men and women. Carothers and Reis were able to find a whopping 3,370 articles on the topic in 2011 alone. The vast majority of the research examined the average differences between men and women. The research can easily be misinterpreted as finding that “Men are better at X” or “Women are worst at Y” — ignoring the fact that the studies are comparing averages and contain variance.

“The world presents us with a huge amount of information, so we often take shortcuts to help process it all (this is known as the ‘cognitive miser’),” Carothers explained to Raw Story in an email. “One of those shortcuts is a tendency to categorize things — it’s easier to think of 2 things (men are one way and women are another) than it is to think of all of the nuances of overlapping distributions, particularly if they’re not brought to our attention when we hear about an average difference.”

Many researchers, particularly those who were “evolutionarily oriented,” appeared to “favor a more categorical interpretation of gender differences,” Carothers and Reis wrote. They speculated this was because no research had actually addressed the specific question of whether gender differences were categorical or dimensional.

If men and women were psychologically distinct from one another, then their scores on psychological measures should form large clusters at either end of a spectrum with little overlap between the two groups.

This is the case for physical characteristics such as height, shoulder breadth, arm circumference, and waist-to-hip ratio. Men tend to be tall, have broad shoulders, large arm circumference, and a small waist-to-hip ratio, while the inverse is true for women. A man is extremely unlikely to be taller than a woman, yet have narrower shoulders, for instance.

Yet the same could not be said for the myriad of psychological characteristics examined by the two researchers, including fear of success, sexual attitudes, mate selection criteria, sexual behaviors, empathy, and personality. A man could be aggressive, but verbally skilled and poor at math, for example, combining stereotypical masculine and feminine traits.

“It’s not enough that men, on average, score higher than women on a scale of masculinity,” Carothers told Raw Story. “Nearly all of the men would have to score higher than nearly all of the women on nearly every item of the scale. We did not see that level of consistency with the psychological variables we had.”

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[Man and woman in bed with gender symbols via Shutterstock]

(warning: article deals with the topic of rape, in the event that may be triggering)

Three Words I Said To The Man I Defeated In Gears Of War That I’ll Never Say Again

PATRICIA HERNANDEZ  31 MAY, 2012 1:00 PM

“I raped you.” If words could lynch someone, then this was the moment for it. The post-game scoreboard said I had technically won, so I’d shown them all, right? No, no I hadn’t. The avalanche of trash talk was one thing — you play online enough, you come to expect it — but the laughter, the laughter stripped meaning from my victory. The laughter made me feel like I was shrinking, like I was in danger of disappearing at any moment.

Again.

“I raped you.”

The words weren’t coming from them. No, they were coming from me. Me. The rape survivor. I was the one saying those words, which now hung tremulously in the air after they failed to find a target. Shaking, I got up from my seat and turned the Xbox off.

At one point, those three words were a little girl’s parroting, an attempt to puff my chest and make it seem like I was tough enough to roll with the rowdiest, nastiest of them all. I, too, was one of the boys — see?! It almost seems like the words crept up on me, really — I can’t tell when I started using them, but they quickly became a part of my daily language. I didn’t win things, no, I ‘raped’ them — raped people, too. The phrase became compulsion, knee-jerk.

How did that happen? How did I come to sling that idea, which was of the worst experiences of my life, so nonchalantly at others?

I’ve been raped a number of times, by a number of different people. It was always different, but it was always the same in one important, crucial way. Rape, in my personal experience, was the literal manifestation of a power dynamic. My aggressor was physically assaulting me, yes, but more than that, he was ‘metaphorically’ subjugating me. To rape someone, after all, is to lack respect for someone as a human being enough that consent is no longer necessary.

I know that. And yet…

That match. Something about it made me break. For them, this was just another milking match in Gears of War 3 where one poor sap — that’d be me — decided to brave the odds. My teammates had abandoned me after a lacklustre first round in an attempt to protect their precious K/D ratio. They were convinced that the other team was superior, so it didn’t make sense to waste time with a hopeless match. Might as well take the penalty for leaving a game and go find a match where we stood a chance, instead.

I couldn’t leave though.

For starters, I’m an extremely competitive person — in this ranked gametype, I was one of the top one hundred players in the world. They’d seen that to start off. That was the reason that I became a person of interest, someone to look out for just in case I posed a threat. Once the pre-game banter made it obvious that I was a woman, it was like Sam, my character, now had a bullseye painted across her forehead. A decision was taken: they were going to make an example of me.

Fine. While they were busy homing in on me, going for the kills, I’d go for the objective. This happens all the time regardless of game; while a team is too preoccupied with something stupid, I’d just stay focused, play it straight and win. Whatever.

There’s something ‘special’ about Gears of War, though. When you don’t fully kill someone, they go into a state called ‘Down But Not Out.’ This state is when a character model goes on all fours. Like teabagging in Halo, a new, unintended dynamic arose in multiplayer: players would take downed characters and pretend to rape them.

Playing games can bring the Jekyll out in many of us. Well-mannered, sometimes meek friends in an intense setting will transform into someone else, temporarily. They’ll don an entirely different demeanour, and spit disgusting, vitriolic words with passion, with gusto. The more ridiculous the string of words, the more amusing it could be when you stop to listen to yourself. I mean, most of the time, its ‘harmless’, just a natural spirit that arises from competition.

Or, so I wanted to think. It’s easier to not feel accountable for your actions and words when everyone is doing the same thing, isn’t it?

And me, there was something about my experiences with rape that facilitated the way I acted, too — not that I was aware of it at the time. Here’s my deep dark secret: after the rapes, I felt completely worthless. What the hell did I care anymore? I had already been broken. I didn’t feel like I have a reason to push back against ‘rape culture’ because I wasn’t worth fighting for anymore. Who gives a shit?

So yeah. I “rape” things. What of it? What are you gonna do? That was my attitude. It wasn’t until a friend heard me say it that everything changed.

“I raped everyone.”

I was smiling, but when my friend looked at me like I had just murdered a small child, the smile vanished. Oh.

Oh.

Crap. She was a rape survivor, too, you see. I understood, then. Everything fell into place. Maybe I didn’t feel like I was worth anything, maybe I didn’t value myself anymore, but this friend, she was dear to me. I loved her. I needed to change what I said — if not for myself, for her sake.

Back to that match. As my friends left, it became easier and easier for the other team to gang up on me — and why wouldn’t they? Not only did they want to make me feel less than nothing, I was the only one left. The rest of my team were mindless, aimless computer-controlled AI. Ideally, the match would be entirely against AI, because that made it easier for players to boost points online — the bots are too dumb to provide any resistance. Boosting would help improve their rank, so many players try to make entire teams leave if possible. So this was their attempt to try to make me leave, too. The fact that I wouldn’t just leave made their resolve that much steelier, made them that much bolder.

So there I was, my counter steadily rising as I was winning, but I was almost perpetually surrounded by an entire team of players who decided they’d take every opportunity to pretend to rape me. At first, it didn’t phase me — the rape thing was a normal part of playing Gears online, really. Hell, even I did it (!), sometimes. It’s kind of a part of the ‘culture’, as problematic as it is to say.

Matches didn’t usually take this long, though. The other team was good, and as proficient as I was, there was only one of me. After a couple dozen grating ‘sessions’ of it, I was wearing down. And that wasn’t all; they were sending me messages, too, asking me how I liked it, egging me to leave.

I refused.

Instead of backing down, all the theatrics just made me that much more determined to win. I was going to show them. They weren’t going to get the best of me. And on the chance that they still beat me, I’d walk out feeling like the better ‘man,’ because I stuck it through instead of cutting and running like my friends.

I tried sending messages back to them, to let them know my spirit was still in it. I took every opportunity to perform ‘executions’ on them, which are lavish, indulgent QTE kill sequences. An arm ripped off here, a head golfed off there. I wanted to express my superiority in the ‘right’ way. See, I was trying to be better about the way I carried myself in games. I was in the middle of finding alternatives to the things I said online, and was trying to stop performing the pseudo-rape, too. I wanted to do right by the people I cared about.

One of those players got under my skin, though. The ring leader. Towards the end of the match, all I could feel was anger, but Gears of War can be a frustrating game on its own. It was after he sent me a message of himself cackling, that I snapped. That was it. I found him, cornered him, and, screw it all, I wanted to make it clear to him that he would not hold power over me. I downed him, and instead of mercifully killing him, my character raped his.

That unnerved me. And when I won, I was so disheveled that I wanted my words to feel like lacerations. I wanted my voice to burn them through the headset.

“I raped you. I f**kin’ raped you.”

What I said is troubling, especially because the way I was saying it, I wanted to make it clear the sentiment wasn’t figurative. I wanted them to have some vague semblance of the actual experience: that was just how upset I was. I wanted to make it clear that I had destroyed them, because that’s what rape represented in my mind. Someone destroying someone else.

But they just laughed. It didn’t mean a thing, it wasn’t something that would ‘register’ or even something that could be used against them.

The power dynamic was already set in place before the match even started, and it wasn’t in my favour. Trash talk makes it obvious that the implicit understanding of the language of dominion isn’t just sexualised. It’s gendered. That power struggle is culturally understood to be a man versus woman thing, even though rape doesn’t just happen to women. Most of the slurs of choice point toward the same thing. Someone is a bitch, they’re a faggot — feminine — and if you beat someone, then you raped them. The imagery there for most of us will be the same: a man physically assaulting a woman, not the other way around.

That’s the tragic thing about rape and its surrounding culture. It’s not just that it’s so potent as an image of power dynamics, but that that potency also has the ability to pull even survivors like me into using it against others. It’s not just what I did in Gears of War. There’s plenty of other things that I’ve been guilty of in the past, before I started giving a damn — like slut shaming, like thinking that a woman could ‘ask for it’.

I can’t help but ask myself, then. Who really won that match? Me, who completed the objectives successfully? Or them, who, despite as hard as I tried, made me complicit in the rape culture that has taken so much away from me?

The Weekly Sift making sense of the news one week at a time

The Distress of the Privileged
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In a memorable scene from the 1998 film Pleasantville (in which two 1998 teen-agers are transported into the black-and-white world of a 1950s TV show), the father of the TV-perfect Parker family returns from work and says the magic words “Honey, I’m home!”, expecting them to conjure up a smiling wife, adorable children, and dinner on the table.

This time, though, it doesn’t work. No wife, no kids, no food. Confused, he repeats the invocation, as if he must have said it wrong. After searching the house, he wanders out into the rain and plaintively questions this strangely malfunctioning Universe: “Where’s my dinner?”

Privileged distress. I’m not bringing this up just to discuss old movies. As the culture evolves, people who benefitted from the old ways invariably see themselves as victims of change. The world used to fit them like a glove, but it no longer does. Increasingly, they find themselves in unfamiliar situations that feel unfair or even unsafe. Their concerns used to take center stage, but now they must compete with the formerly invisible concerns of others.

If you are one of the newly-visible others, this all sounds whiny compared to the problems you face every day. It’s tempting to blast through such privileged resistance with anger and insult.

Tempting, but also, I think, a mistake. The privileged are still privileged enough to foment a counter-revolution, if their frustrated sense of entitlement hardens.

So I think it’s worthwhile to spend a minute or two looking at the world from George Parker’s point of view: He’s a good 1950s TV father. He never set out to be the bad guy. He never meant to stifle his wife’s humanity or enforce a dull conformity on his kids. Nobody ever asked him whether the world should be black-and-white; it just was.

George never demanded a privileged role, he just uncritically accepted the role society assigned him and played it to the best of his ability. And now suddenly that society isn’t working for the people he loves, and they’re blaming him.

It seems so unfair. He doesn’t want anybody to be unhappy. He just wants dinner.

Levels of distress. But even as we accept the reality of George’s privileged-white-male distress, we need to hold on to the understanding that the less privileged citizens of Pleasantville are distressed in an entirely different way. (Margaret Atwood is supposed to have summed up the gender power-differential like this: “Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.”)

George deserves compassion, but his until-recently-ideal housewife Betty Parker (and the other characters assigned subservient roles) deserves justice. George and Betty’s claims are not equivalent, and if we treat them the same way, we do Betty an injustice.

Tolerating Dan Cathy. Now let’s look at a more recent case from real life.

One of the best things to come out of July’s Chick-fil-A brouhaha was a series of posts on the Owldolatrous blog, in which a gay man (Wayne Self) did his best to wrangle the distress of the privileged.

The privileged in this case are represented by Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy, who stirred up a hornet’s nest when he denounced the “prideful, arrogant attitude” of those who support same-sex marriage, saying that they “are inviting God’s judgment on our nation”.

His comments drew attention to the millions that Chick-fil-A’s founding family has contributed to anti-gay organizations, and led to calls for a boycott of their restaurants.

To which his defenders responded: Is tolerance a one-way street? Cathy was just expressing the genuine beliefs of his faith. As an American, he has freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Why can’t gays and their supporters respect that?

“Nothing mutual about it.” Self starts his post by acknowledging Cathy’s distress, but refusing to accept it as equivalent to his own. Cathy is suffering because people are saying bad things about him and refusing to buy his sandwiches. Meanwhile, 29 states (including Self’s home state of Louisiana) let employers fire gays for being gay. There are 75 countries Self and his partner can’t safely visit, because homosexuality is illegal and (in some of them) punishable by death.

The Cathy family has given $5 million to organizations that work to maintain this state of oppression. Self comments:

This isn’t about mutual tolerance because there’s nothing mutual about it. If we agree to disagree on this issue, you walk away a full member of this society and I don’t. There is no “live and let live” on this issue because Dan Cathy is spending millions to very specifically NOT let me live. I’m not trying to do that to him.

Christian push-back. That post got over a million page views and (at last count) 1595 comments, including some push-back from conservative Christians. Self’s follow-up responded to one commenter who wrote that he supported Chick-fil-A as

[a] company with a founder who speaks for what seems to be the minority these days.

In other words, I specifically feel BASHED by the general media and liberal establishment and gay activists for simply being a Bible-believing Christian. From TV shows, movies, mainstream news and music, so much is Intolerance of my conservative beliefs. I am labeled a HOMOPHOBIC and a HATER. … I neither fear nor hate homosexuals.

Self brings in a blog post by Bristol Palin, in which she scoffs at an interviewer’s implication that she might refuse to have a gay partner on “Dancing With the Stars”.

In their simplistic minds, the fact that I’m a Christian, that I believe in God’s plan for marriage, means that I must hate gays and must hate to even be in their presence. Well, they were right about one thing: there was hate in that media room, but the hate was theirs, not mine.

… To the Left, “tolerance” means agreeing with them on, well, everything. To me, tolerance means learning to live and work with each other when we don’t agree – and won’t ever agree.

Like Bristol Palin, Self’s commenter sees himself as the victim of bigotry. He isn’t aware of hating anybody. He just wants to preserve the world he grew up in, and can’t be bothered to picture how others suffer in that world.

He wants dinner.

Aesop II. Self answers with a story: a sequel to the Aesop fable of the mouse who saves a lion.

[A story is] the only way I know to address some of these things without resorting to words that hurt or offend, or shut down discussion.

Aesop’s tale ends with the mouse and the lion as friends, but Self notes that they are still not equal: The Lion is King of the Jungle and the Mouse … is a mouse.

In Self’s sequel, the Lion hosts the Kingdom Ball, to which mice are never invited, because they disgust many of the larger animals. Nothing personal, the Lion explains to his friend, it’s just the way things are.

At this point, Self breaks out of the story to explain why (in spite of the fact that his commenter feels “BASHED by the general media and liberal establishment”) he is casting conservative Christians as the Lion and gays as the Mouse: It is not illegal to be a Christian in any state. You can’t be fired for Christianity. Christians may feel bashed by criticism, but gays get literally bashed by hate crimes. Christians may feel like people are trying to silence them, but the Tennessee legislature debated a bill making it illegal to say the word gay in public schools. (The senate passed it.)

There is a vast difference between being told you’re superstitious or old-fashioned and being told you’re an abomination that doesn’t deserve to live. There’s a vast difference between being told you’re acting hateful and being told God hates you.

I’ve been gay and Christian all my life. Trust me: Christian is easier. It’s not even close.

Leonine distress. But does the Lion have reason to be annoyed with the Mouse? Of course. The Mouse is making trouble by asking to go where he’s not wanted. The Mouse is “prideful” for expecting the rules to change to suit him. However, Self admits that the Lion probably doesn’t hate or fear the Mouse.

I don’t think you hate me. I certainly don’t think you’re afraid of me. Neither is Bristol Palin. She probably even has LGBT people she calls friends. She just disagrees with them about whether they should be invited to the party (the party, in this case, being marriage).

But here’s the problem: the basis of that disagreement is her belief that her relationships are intrinsically better than ours.

There’s a word for this type of statement: supremacist.

Ah, now we get to “words that hurt or offend”. Here’s what he means by it:

Supremacy is the habit of believing or acting as if your life, your love, your culture, your self has more intrinsic worth than those of people who differ from you.

Self sees a supremacist attitude in the commenter’s

sense of comfort with yourself as an appropriate judge of my choices, ideas, or behaviors, … unwillingness to appreciate the inherent inequality in a debate where I have to ask you for equality … [and] unwillingness to acknowledge the stake that you have have in your feeling of superiority rather than blame it on God.

[…]Now let’s finish the fable: Uninvited, the Mouse crashes the party. The shocked guests go silent, the Lion is furious, and the ensuing argument leads to violence: The Lion chucks the Mouse out the window, ending both the party and the friendship.

The lesson: Supremacy itself isn’t hate. You may even have affection for the person you feel superior to. But supremacy contains the seeds of hate.

Supremacy turns to hate when the feeling of innate superiority is openly challenged. … Supremacy is why you and Bristol Palin have more outrage at your own inconvenience than at the legitimate oppression of others.

We can talk about the subjugation of women later, honey. Where’s my dinner?

George Parker’s choices. All his life, George has tried to be a good guy by the lights of his society. But society has changed and he hasn’t, so he isn’t seen as a good guy any more. He feels terrible about that, but what can he do?

One possibility: Maybe he could learn to be a good guy by the lights of this new society. It would be hard. He’d have to give up some of his privileges. He’d have to examine his habits to see which ones embody assumptions of supremacy. He’d have to learn how to see the world through the eyes of others, rather than just assume that they will play their designated social roles. Early on, he would probably make a lot of mistakes and his former inferiors would correct him. It would be embarrassing.

But there is an alternative: counter-revolution. George could decide that his habits, his expectations, and the society they fit are RIGHT, and this new society is WRONG. If he joined with the other fathers (and right-thinking mothers like the one in the poster) of Pleasantville, maybe they could force everyone else back into their traditional roles.

Which choice he makes will depend largely on the other characters. If they aren’t firm in their convictions, the counter-revolution may seem easy. (“There, there, honey. I know you’re upset. But be reasonable.”) But if their resentment is implacable, becoming a good guy in the new world may seem impossible.

[…]Confronting this distress is tricky, because neither acceptance nor rejection is quite right. The distress is usually very real, so rejecting it outright just marks you as closed-minded and unsympathetic. It never works to ask others for empathy without offering it back to them.

At the same time, my straight-white-male sunburn can’t be allowed to compete on equal terms with your heart attack. To me, it may seem fair to flip a coin for the first available ambulance, but it really isn’t. Don’t try to tell me my burn doesn’t hurt, but don’t consent to the coin-flip.

When I heard that the DSM-5 was coming out, I wondered if being Trans would cease being classified as a disorder. And it has!
Source: http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2012/12/03/1271431/apa-revises-manual-being-transgender-is-no-longer-a-mental-disorder/?mobile=nc

By Zack Ford on Dec 3, 2012 at 10:50 am

This Saturday, the American Psychiatric Association board of trustees approved the latest proposed revisions to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, what will now be known as the DSM-5. This marks a historic milestone for people who are transgender and gender non-conforming, as their identities are no longer classified as a mental disorder. Homosexuality was similarly declassified as a mental disorder in 1973.

Until now, the term “gender identity disorder” has been used to diagnose people who are transgender. For conservatives, this has provided rhetorical carte blanche to describe the entire trans committee as disordered, delusional, and mentally ill. In some cases, this diagnosis has even been used to discriminate against trans people, with claims that they are unfit parents or employees, as examples. On the other hand, insurance companies have been more willing to cover the expenses associated with transition under this language, because treatment for a disorder is considered medically necessary, rather than cosmetic.

The new manual will diagnose transgender people with “Gender Dysphoria,” which communicates the emotional distress that can result from “a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender.” This will allow for affirmative treatment and transition care without the stigma of disorder. Earlier this year, the APA also released new health guidelines for transgender patients, as well as a position statement affirming transgender care and civil rights. Both documents align with a new standard for respecting trans people in the medical community.

It was only after homosexuality was declassified as a mental disorder that ex-gay ministries formed, protesting the medical community’s decision to affirm non-heterosexual orientations. Some dangerous ex-trans ministries exist already and are championed by Focus on the Family, NARTH, PFOX, and other anti-LGBT organizations. It’s possible that these efforts may similarly increase in the wake of this DSM revision.

At some Hardy Party a few years ago – as my tipsy boyfriend wanted to just make out and I wanted to cuddle and talk –, Andrew illustrated that the difference between our two worldviews (particularly when it came to physical attractiveness) was that I derived goodness, or morality, from function while he derived it from beauty; as he had put it then, something has worth from its beauty alone.

While an interesting dynamic, he had my worldview wrong. While I don't think I've given any large defense on the importance of art, my own appreciation for it (and, thus, its implied importance) is rather evident throughout the whole of my xanga. I mean, after all, I majored in English in part because I'm a (thus far recreational) writer; clearly art is of importance to me. And, once again obvious from my xanga, I generally don't take a all-art-is-equal approach to it. In this regard, I seem to agree fully with him that a ranking by beauty is fully acceptable and even encouraged (though it is notable that I assess art largely through a logical criterion in which emotional response is often less important than the other facets of said criterion (at least outside of personal assessment of art); more important to me is form (though often the second least important aspect), symbolism, message, etc. Of course, this may be in part due to my complicated relationship with emotions and that they are, for the most part for me, derived from how I logically and intellectually assess things rather than any instinctual, thoughtless emotional response).

Yet, when it comes to physical attractiveness (and the point which caused Andrew to make this distinction), I take, at my most extreme, the exact opposite approach. Now, the reasoning behind it is less ideal, to me, because it's necessitated by a technicality of life rather than on a merit of its own; of course, this may be a result of the fact that, while I think it important, this notion of upholding and celebrating beauty for the sake of beauty actually has no clear basis (as far as I've seen thus far) on my morality (hurting a person or restraining zir autonomy is immoral).

The technicality of my defense of beauty in general and an opposition to physical attractiveness is that, when it comes to a person, you should only judge based on their merit; judging someone based on how they were born is one of the cruelest and unacceptable positions to take. Contrasting that, art has no ability to create itself and no feelings; thus, we can judge the fuck out of it (of course, that may just be an extension of the fact that the artwork doesn't make itself and, thus, we are judging the creative work of another person).

All of this is to preface my difficult relationship with accessories that often intersect with ideas of physical attractiveness (clothing, makeup, etc.). For example, I had been against makeup; while I personally don't like it, my bigger reason was that I felt it was an extension (or remnant) of the patriarchy's attempt to control women's appearances (though I often mentioned the latter far less than the formal due an uncertainty about an sound argument for the latter). However, in the long run (in spite of our habit to try to universalize all personal opinions), I have to come to the understanding that all notions of "cool" or "nice looking" in relations to clothes, makeup, etc. are socially constructed ideas; while – to some degree – still speculating for others, my own styles are very much based on the decade I grew up in as well as an interest in the 1920s. Really, that's it. There isn't some larger, more logical reason for it. And, while the lack of logic hurts my soul and I would swear up and down that tastes such as these can have some objective element to them (otherwise why else would I have such a seemingly instinctual response to certain styles‽), the only thing that makes any logical sense as to why tastes would reasonably form for people or why we do end up differing is that it is firmly subjective.

And, truly as a side note, that isn't to say that makeup didn't play a large part within the patriarchy. Or that certain tastes in types/styles of makeup aren't simply an unconscious outgrowth of demands as to what is considered legitimately pretty by the patriarchy. It simply means that such tastes can outgrow the patriarchy (and, more importantly, no one should be making assumptions as to why anyone decides they enjoy a particular style). After all, my own objection – were I into policing people – could easily be used as part of the patriarchy's formation of what it thinks women ought to be.

Of course, understanding all of this doesn't necessarily make it easy to implement (perhaps the reason its easy to reject physical attractiveness so wholesale for me is that I started following that reasoning as far back as the beginning of high school); as you cultivate a taste, you want to reject that which doesn't match it (perhaps another defense for my rejection of humoring physical attractiveness).

In any case – as I work through that moral dilemma –, the below article is fantastic and well illustrates what I'm outlining above. The original thing can be found here: http://tutusandtinyhats.wordpress.com/2012/11/01/fashion-policing-a-playground-of-oppression/.

Yeah, I’m wearing leggings as pants. You got a problem with that?

The deeper I get into the fa(t)shion world, the more I come across examples of fashion judging and policing, even within spaces that are explicitly body-positive.

It pisses me off immensely. First, because one person’s style is no one’s business but their own. Period. Second, because it’s inextricably tied up with pretty much every prejudice under the sun: sexism, ableism, ageism, racism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, fatphobia…

Warning: epic rant ahead.

A few examples I’ve come across recently:

1.) Sal at Already Pretty did an interview with three women who dress within a defined aesthetic. I found it interesting, especially since I, like Sal, enjoy dabbling in many different styles. Some days I feel goth, other days pink bubblegum with a touch of fairy kei. Sometimes I just want to be Effie Trinket, or a flapper, or a slightly more sophisticated version of my seventh-grade self (Nirvana t-shirt and wide-leg jeans represent!). And my favorite outfits tend to involve combining multiple styles. So it’s cool to read about people who approach fashion differently.

But this statement, from Candice of Super Kawaii Mama, set my teeth on edge:

And the other thing that I feel very strongly about is raising the bar for the next generation. As a society we have never been so well off (historically) or had such ready and cheap access to good clothing and beauty options. We spend billions on advertising in these markets, spend our pay-checks on magazines of celebrities looking fantastic, and yet never as a nation have we been so poorly dressed / presented. It is a maddening irony and one that will only change if people are brave enough to challenge that status quo and raise that bar.

ARGHHHH NO. Just no.

I like glamour. I really do. But it’s only fun when it’s optional. Sometimes I don’t need or want to be glamorous–like when I’m on my way to go hiking, or sick, or dealing with shitty New England weather, or just in a yoga-pants-and-T-shirt-and-no-makeup mood. I don’t expect anyone else to prioritize glamour or any other aesthetic, or to justify their clothing choices to me.

And I certainly don’t define bravery as “dressing in a way that I like.” You want bravery? Try the NYU Hospital nurses who carried ICU infants down nine flights of stairs in the dark, manually providing them with air and ventilation.

If you find other people’s outfits “maddening,” that’s your problem, not theirs. No one has a responsibility to dress in a way that you like. And the very concept of “poorly dressed” is completely arbitrary. One person’s “eww” is another person’s “awesome.” One person’s clashing is another person’s oh my God your coat is so amazing, I almost want to go to England and steal it from you.

Also, just because we’re well-off overall as a society doesn’t mean we don’t have poverty. It doesn’t mean that everyone has access, financial or otherwise, to the clothing they would like to wear.

Especially if they wear plus sizes, and even more so if they wear a size above 22 or 24. Especially if they lack reliable transportation to stores that carry their size, or the money to pay for shipping. Especially if they have a disability that makes getting dressed difficult, or sensory issues that make certain fabrics uncomfortable. Especially if their weight has changed (for intentional reasons, or due to childbirth, aging, medications, post-diet rebound, health problems, stress, etc.), and they haven’t had the time or money to assemble a new wardrobe. Especially if they’re busy and overworked, or un(der)employed and searching for a job–both of which are currently huge problems in the US and many other countries–and don’t have the energy to put into caring about clothing. Or some combination of these things.

As just one example, if you saw me on the street today, you might think, “why is that lady wearing a lovely goth-meets-business-casual outfit with butt-ugly running sneakers?” I hate how these sneakers look too, believe me. But I’m wearing them because I have plantar fasciitis in my left foot, and sneakers are the only footwear that doesn’t exacerbate it. I can’t even wear cute sneakers, like Converses–my feet are both wide and flat, which makes finding shoes that fit nearly impossible. I take what I can get, regardless of whether they fit my style. And if people want to judge me for it, that’s their problem.

Who knows, maybe I’ll start a trend?

They may not be pretty, but they make my feet less sad.

2.) I don’t normally read MSN Style, or other mainstream fashion sites/magazines/blogs. But I happened to come across this article somehow, and it’s a perfect example of everything I hate about fashion policing.

In the slideshow “8 Fashion Mistakes Men Make,” two fashion “experts” criticize various men’s outfits.

I want to get into this guy’s pants. Literally. They’re just that awesome.

The female “expert” says: “Oh, I see. Those don’t just look like lady’s [sic] capris… they fit like them too. The cardigan, shades and even the black case are so sleek, but the pants need a do-over.”

Maybe they are womens’ capris. So what? Some male-bodied people like to wear women’s clothing. Maybe they’re transgender or genderqueer. Maybe they subscribe to Kate Bornstein‘s philosophy: “I think love, sex and gender are like Pokemon, and I want to catch ‘em all!” Or maybe they just like to wear dresses, like Michael of His Black Dress.

Redefining masculinity, one badass outfit at a time.

The male “expert” says: ”I’m sorry, but I could never take anyone seriously if they walked into a room wearing those pants.”

Fuck that noise.

I doubt it’s a coincidence that gay and transgender people face high rates of workplace discrimination and harassment. Contributing to a culture of gender-policing has real, harmful consequences.

3.) A while back, there was a Fatshionista thread about whether there are age cut-offs for cutesy accessories. The original poster mentioned that she will soon be working in museums, and I think it makes sense to tone down your look for work. But what you wear at work is one thing, and what you wear during your free time is another.

In comment thread, one person said:

If I saw something like this http://virtualneko.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/kawaii-girl1.gif on a person older than 15, I’d judge.

If I saw someone of any age dressed like this, I’d appreciate their awesomeness.

She went on to say:

In my opinion the key is not to look like someone who desperately tries to look way younger than he is.

I hate the assumption that wearing certain clothes or accessories means you’re trying to look younger. I don’t wear Hello Kitty stuff because I want to look younger–I wear it because I like it. I’ll probably still be wearing HK when I’m 80, and I’m ok with that. (Also, I’m kind of looking forward to the day when my hair turns gray/white, because I’ll finally be able to dye it pink without bleaching it first.)

If you like it, and enjoy wearing it, you’re not too old for it. Period.

The same commenter mentioned that she is a huge Dr. Who fan, but limits her fan needs to small pins, socks, and bookmarks. Which is her choice to make, but she’s missing out on some pretty awesome stuff–like the amazing TARDamask shirt one of my coworkers wore recently.

4.) I like Trystan’s blog, CorpGoth, where she writes about keeping a goth edge while dressing appropriately for an office job. So I was disappointed to find two posts in which she makes privileged pronouncements about how people should dress.

In one, she repeats the popular meme that leggings are not pants. Which is so tied up with judgment about women’s bodies–especially fat women’s bodies. With the belief that we need to hide our shapes. With disdain for one of the cheapest and most comfortable clothing options.

In another, she declares:

Let it be known that I am firmly in the camp with those who believe that the casualization of clothing in the U.S. in the late-20th & early-21st centuries is the first step to the downfall of our civilization & that wearing pajamas in public is a sure sign of the coming apocalypse.

I know it’s hyperbole. It’s still not funny.

I feel that people are allowed to wear PJs outside the home exactly three times in their lives: (1) once when you have the flu & need to make a trip to the drugstore for tissues & meds, (2) once when you’re miserably depressed & need chocolate &/or booze between the hours of 2am and 6am, & (3) one additional time to be used judiciously, carefully, not in broad daylight or among more than a dozen people, & it can only last for no more than 10 minutes.

Thanks for deciding what other people are “allowed” to wear. You do know that people have the right to wear whatever they want, right? And that there are a million factors that affect what people wear, and judging them for it is an assholey move?

I could rant more, but instead, here’s a picture of me wearing pajama pants.

Hello Kitty, of course.

"In The Goonies, when Mikey throws away his inhaler, we're supposed to understand that he's a stronger person for not needing it. What it's really showing is that Mikey is going to end up in the hospital if he doesn't get a replacement soon, because asthma is a goddamn medical condition."

"It's been literal seconds since anyone mentioned a penis. To hell with movies."

For those two quotes alone, you should read this Cracked.com article: http://www.cracked.com/article_20082_6-insane-stereotypes-that-movies-cant-seem-to-get-over.html. It's actually really a refreshing read and also hilarious.

I should really be going to bed.

Our friend Ancient_Scribe recently shared, in a pulse, this article: http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/son-of-two-moms-defends-regnerus-study-on-same-sex-parenting/.

This is a really simple matter so I'll try to be brief (if I actually hold that capability). While I hate to discount anyone's personal experience (the first rule of understanding is acknowledging there are other experiences beyond the ones you're familiar with; Mr. Lopez's full testimony can be found here: http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/08/6065), I'm going to assume that none of you are stupid and just acknowledge out the gate that articles such as these are used to discredit the notion of gay marriage (note my lack of scare quotes around the word marriage, unlike the article).

However, the first point of criticism is the article's (and Mr. Lopez's testimony's) display of all the hallmarks of a piece written to fit a particular viewpoint (which often, in turn, defies lived experience). How?

There's the never-failing-to-appear point that such behavior leads "one down a sodden path to self-medication in the form of alcoholism, drugs, gambling, antisocial behavior, and irresponsible sex". I once read an article from some site like Yahoo about a mother who (while dealing with her son's decent into homosexuality before he came back to his senses and "became" straight again) would have to tape her eyes shut when she went to bed at night because she cried so much (I don't believe such an endeavor would actually work…). Nothing like sensationalism to drive a point across.

On that note, there's that hallmark expression of Mr. Lopez descending into the "gay underworld". Sounds scary. Particularly since it preys upon fears of a secretive society of homosexuals that are plotting to overtake your safe and cozy straight life (note that it also plays the card of the Other by literally creating another world of separation from what Mr. Lopez consider's normal). Of course, this is ridiculous. Really, underworld? Boy's Town in Chicago is literally just a 45 minute drive away for me. I've gone down there every pride parade I've attended. Friends of mine in high school have gone down there. There's nothing hidden or scary.

There's the claim that being raised by two women rendered Mr. Lopez to having "very few recognizable social cues to offer potential male or female friends, since I was neither confident nor sensitive to others". Apparently the Lopez's didn't have T. V.s in their household. Or never left the house, for that matter. And apparently Mr. Lopez didn't go to school. But, you know what, I can somewhat understand. I flounder completely at social cues to give (as I've mentioned more than enough times on this Xanga) and find meeting (let alone befriending) other people difficult. It's not easy. But it's not life-ending.

Then there's also this peculiar paragraph:

Those who are 100-percent gay may view bisexuals with a mix of disgust and envy. Bisexual parents threaten the core of the LGBT parenting narrative—we do have a choice to live as gay or straight, and we do have to decide the gender configuration of the household in which our children will grow up. While some gays see bisexuality as an easier position, the fact is that bisexual parents bear a more painful weight on their shoulders. Unlike homosexuals, we cannot write off our decisions as things forced on us by nature. We have no choice but to take responsibility for what we do as parents, and live with the guilt, regret, and self-criticism forever.

"Okay, alright, science says that being gay isn't a choice. Hmm, well, if we make the argument that those who have the choice to partake happily in heterosexual acts ought to [using the same evidence that's used when arguing that being gay is a choice, no less] then we still kinda win!" Honestly, you don't decide to live as gay or straight as a bisexual; just because I date mostly girls doesn't mean I live as a straight person. It's still trying to fit into a binary understanding of sexuality.

But what makes the entire affair just hilarious is how disconnected from reality it is.

I'm sorry that discovering you're bisexual caused you to run into the "gay underworld" and all the drugs and sex it must have contained (because gay people are inseperable from drugs and sex in these types of narratives). I'm bisexual too and – oh, wait, I'm still a virgin and I've never used illegal drugs, ever. I guess I just have self-control.

Hey, look, Mr. Wahls above was raised by two women too. Except he looks rather well adjusted, doesn't he?

Or I could appeal to my own life experiences and the people I've known raised in gay/bi households. People who were perfectly well adjusted and had plenty of friends.

Or when a friend of mine, trying to appeal to how the past or the 50s (I forget which) was better, asked me if we had any decent male role-models these days. For the longest time, I didn't know how to formulate a reply. Here's why: what the Hell would that entail‽ Perhaps it's a generational gap but I can't begin to formulate how being neither confident nor sensitive would be a disability to getting to know a person. And, hence, I can't begin to figure out what it would mean to be, specifically, a male role-model since men (at least when I was growing up, in my traditional heterosexual household) could do anything they pleased. I know, I shouldn't be surprised but I always am whenever anyone lends actual legitimacy to the notion of gender roles (the family was watching a movie about Shakespeare the other day when my mother exclaims, "The king is wearing women's shoes!" This shift in gender roles is atrocious and I think we should all go back to the good old days when men wore feminine shoes, like is proper and natural؟).

And, look, honestly, I am truly sorry if Mr. Lopez had a difficult time in his life because, for him specifically, he was raised by two women. I'm sorry that society was so cruel as to make life difficult for him just because he didn't fit their expectations. I imagine such worries plagued the first children of interracial marriages.

But we should work to make society more understanding rather than bending to the current whims of today's society and, in turn, trying to make permanent its cruelties. Such behavior, even if under the guise of being practical or realistic, just continues to hurt people in the end.