Rubin: Fantastic Hypocrisy -- ABC on Obama and the Weather Underground

At last night's Clinton-Obama debate hosted by ABC News, former Clinton White House official George Stephanopoulous asked Barack Obama about his acquaintance with William Ayers, a former leader of the Weather Underground. The Weather Underground was a short-lived splinter group of the Revolutionary Youth Movement faction of the Students for Democratic Society. RYM split from SDS at the organization's national convention in 1969 in Chicago, where the Worker-Student Alliance Caucus led by the Maoist Progressive Labor Party captured control of the organization. The following fall, a minority of the RYM leaders staged a riot under the name "Days of Rage," in which one person was killed and 600 vehicles were damaged. The leaders of Days of Rage failed to appear in court and went "underground." They took the name the Weather Underground; the original RYM manifesto had used Bob Dylan's verse from Subterranean Homesick Blues ("You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows") as an epigraph.

I know all this because as a 19 year old member of the Yale SDS chapter I attended the 1969 SDS conference. Subsequently my telephones were tapped by the New Haven police and I was overheard on an FBI National Security wiretap of the Black Panther Party office in New Haven. Thanks to a later lawsuit, I now have documentary records of my activities at that time (even transcripts of phone calls) and won a small amount in a lawsuit for illegal wiretapping. I was with the SDS Worker-Student Alliance Caucus for a couple years after that, until I decided it was better to have friends than to build a base for the revolution.

Apparently RYM could have used a better meteorologist, because prevailing winds were heavily blowin' in the direction of white backlash. Only five years before the Days of Rage white racist terrorists captured and murdered three activists working to promote democracy in Philadelphia, Mississippi, buried their bodies in a dam, and were acquitted by an all-white jury. I remember that too. Goodman, Schwerner, and Cheney came from different places, but they ended up together.

Which gets me thinking -- I wonder if any U.S. presidential candidates or members of the Senate have ever had any acquaintance with, or socialized with, any white racists, former members of the Ku Klux Klan or the White Citizens Council or any of the other groups that supported anti-democratic racist terrorism in the United States when I was a teenager? Why don't the media check that out? Maybe they'll understand why some people were enraged -- and not only Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Maybe Barack Obama was only eight years old in 1969 -- but I was a little older.

(Cross-posted at DailyKos.)

Rubin: Patriotism and War on Drugs Remain the (Last?) Refuge of Scoundrels

Gary Kamiya tells it like it is at Salon:

Maybe we really are doomed to elect John McCain, remain in Iraq forever and nuke Iran. Nations that forget history may not be doomed to repeat it, but those that never even recognize reality in the first place definitely are. Last week's ridiculous uproar over Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermons proves yet again that America has still not come to terms with the most rudimentary facts about race, 9/11 -- or itself.

The great shock so many people claim to be feeling over Wright's sermons is preposterous. Anyone who is surprised and horrified that some black people feel anger at white people, and America, is living in a racial never-never land. Wright has called the U.S. "the United States of White America," talks about the "oppression" of black people and says, "White America got their wake-up call after 9/11." Gosh, who could have dreamed that angry racial grievances and left-wing political views are sometimes expressed in black churches?

Scott Horton goes back to the Faulkner source of Obama's quote in the speech to tell it like it was and is but doesn't have to be:

What do two short stories by William Faulkner published by Harper’s in the fall of 1940 have to do with the 2008 presidential campaign? Faulkner finalized them in the midst of a presidential election campaign, as Franklin Roosevelt sought his third term, a fact which breaks through in a few spots. These stories seem to be a simple narrative of life in the rural South, one is a rite of passage story and the other a strange tragi-comedy. But these stories are indeed intensely political, and their message was one that the readership would hardly have been prepared to cope with, in those dark days as the specter of war loomed over America. It seems we have to go forward seventeen presidential elections to come to the day when they become a matter of public discussion.

Last Tuesday, Senator Barack Obama, facing a withering assault over his relationship with his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, delivered a carefully measured and thoughtful speech on race relations in America. The speech was by almost every measure something extraordinary. It was delivered against the advice of Obama’s advisors, who felt—probably correctly—that any discussion of the race issue would only be used to isolate him in public debate. But more significantly, the language of the speech was not measured and shaped by focus groups. It proceeded assuming an educated and intelligent audience. As Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan reminded us in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, no political advisor would ever hear of such a thing. She points to two give-aways: the use of the word “endemic” and a quotation from Faulkner.

The words quoted were

‘The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.’

But actually the language is just off. The actual words are “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” They come from Requiem for a Nun. But the meaning and use that Obama takes is taken straight from an earlier Faulkner novel, Go Down, Moses, a brave and profound work about race relations in America. Being bound to, but struggling to overcome the past is a key message of that work. In fact these words could be taken as a sort of moral test that he has put to a focal character: will he remain a servant to the past, or will he succeed in shaking those chains free? The protagonist fails that test, with his very Southern attitudes and bigotries. In fact, Faulkner did himself at least once–in an outburst in an interview in the fifties, which Faulkner later attributed to too much alcohol. But Faulkner left a transcendent message: Some day, he tells us, some day the people will rise above these divisions and will recognize the ties that bind all. They will recognize the fundamental lie of racism. This was not, of course, a message which could be easily delivered to an American audience in 1940. Today, however, the message finds people ready to listen and to believe.

On another topic: UNODC has published the discussion paper on poverty and opium production that they promised would respond to the criticisms I made of their claim that poverty is not linked to opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan. Of course the paper does no such thing. It once again indicates that while UNODC is very skilled at estimating cultivation and yields, it does not understand social structure. Furthermore, while superficial analysis is unfortunate, UNODC Director Antonio Maria Costa continues to present this analysis misleadingly in a way that supports the "War on Drugs" approach to counter-narcotics.

I will post a complete analysis soon.

Rubin: Racism is the Nightmare of History, not Just Bias (Cross-Posted on Daily Kos)

In January a diarist on Daily Kos, recounted the writer's conversation with her "racist" father, who said he would vote for Obama:

He would vote for Obama over Huckabee. He says he would really have to hold his nose to do it, but he would. I asked him "what's your big objection to Obama?" He said well, he thinks Obama would further a "black agenda" and I said "what's that?" He said, oh you know, more affordable housing, which black people would tear up and destroy, and more welfare. I sort of rolled my eyes and said "Dad...........Barack and Michelle Obama both have advanced degrees and are bigtime overachievers...........do you really think they have a lot of sympathy for people that take advantage of the welfare system and tear up affordable housing?"

I said, in my view, Barack Obama would be to the kind of people he is talking about, sort of like a "Nixon goes to China" thing...........if anything, they would be totally against that sort of thing.

He said "sort of like Bill Cosby" I said yeah exactly.

I really really apologize to any African American Kossacks that are reading this. These are not MY views. It's my Dad - which I am afraid is still too much the views of a lot of older white people who vote in droves, still.

Another "Kossack," shanikka, a black woman attorney and former public official exactly the same age as Barack Obama, wrote to say:

IMO, the sentiments the diarist used to "sell" her Dad on Barack Obama as a Black man running for president are racist. Each of the examples she made to her father about the "differences" of Barack Obama is grounded in a deeply negative, anti-Black stereotype. The fact that they were not "get a rope" lynching stereotypes does not change their nature. They reflect the post-civil rights movement social compact which substituted newfangled polite left-wing anti-Black racism (code) for her dad's far more honest (and therefore far easier for Black folks who actually love Black folks to deal with, as my parents often said once they left the South in the 1950’s) right-wing anti-Black racism.

After Senator Obama's magnificent (or sublime) speech on Tuesday, I would like to repost what I wrote in response and add a few more ruminations:

Part of the problem is the unspoken American conceptual frame: radical individualism; defining race as a characteristic of individuals; racism as an belief of individuals about other individuals; equality as consciously judging an individual without regard for "skin color," as if race were just a question of complexion, and behavior were just a function of conscious belief.

Race is a code for classifying people as different. Skin color is one of many markers for "race" -- the one we use in the U.S. These markers are social constructs. In Brazil or South Africa, someone with parents like Obama's would not be considered "black," because race is a spectrum in Brazil and was a pseudo-scientific multiple classification in South Africa. In the U.S., the historical definition of race was the one-drop rule; but this used to be different in Louisiana, which was more like the Caribbean/Latin world in its construction of race. For Nazis, hair color, nose size, and religious background were markers of race (that's why some of my relatives were killed).

My wife is a social worker in Bedford-Stuyvesant who sees mostly black people -- not typical black people, but those with severe psychological and social problems. But I hear about the family histories. And these family histories are the result of trauma, unemployment, marginalization, forced migration, rape, exclusion from education .... you name it. Sometimes it is amazing that anyone can emerge sane and whole from these experiences (though not all black people share all of them in the U.S.). "Race" is a category for color-coding the socially marginalized.

Some people intellectualize it into a theory or belief system. In contemporary American most people don't. But the social system in which we live produces and reproduces such attitudes because of the interactions it makes us have.

A seemingly trivial example about myself: Once I couldn't find something in a huge supermarket. I saw a neatly dressed black guy with short hair and a pen in his shirt pocket, so I went over to ask him where it was. It turned out he was another shopper -- he wasn't a supermarket worker. He didn't have the uniform on. I was mortified at my stereotyping racist behavior. I wasn't even thinking about race! I was thinking about organic breakfast cereal.

That's the point. I wasn't thinking about race. I don't "believe" that all blacks are supermarket workers or social inferiors. My adviser at Yale was a black professor of Afro-American history, and I was his research assistant on a book on the history of black communities under slavery. But my social experience led me unconsciously -- without thinking -- to code my fellow shopper as a social inferior in this context. I am not a "racist" in any ideological sense. My mother took me to hear Dr. King speak at the March on Washington when I was 13 (I have a dream etc.). I marched with the Black Panther Party in the 1960s. Etc. etc. But I committed an act of racism (and probably others) because of the way that social structure affects my perceptions and behavior. What if I were a teacher or a policeman or an employer? What effect would I unconsciously have on others?

I'm not confessing "guilt." I am taking responsibility for trying not to be a racist in a racially coded society. Not being a Nazi or an ideological white supremacist is not enough, because this system (racism) reproduces itself even without such ideological rationales as long as we don't consciously struggle against it (and even then...).

The conclusion being: many white (and other non-black) people may vote for Obama regardless of his race because he is an extraordinary individual. But that by itself does not change the racially coded social structure of the United States. Maybe Obama will be the leader who can help whites realize that changing this social structure is not a threat against them but a promise for us all. I hope so. Maybe his candidacy will at least get us started on these discussions.

But eliminating racism requires a transformation of structures of employment, housing, education, taxation.... and also a change in U.S. national identity. Most people in the U.S. have European ancestors (including a large number of black people), but our culture is a mix of African, European, and our own creativity. "White" gospel music in this country shows strong African influences. So does "white" popular music and popular religion. The people of this country invented forms of music -- an essential part of all civilization -- that have conquered the world with their genius and beauty, and in this music African and European elements are fused into an entirely new creation.

Now the update -- reading this today I became conscious that the first diarist above used the common shorthand on Daily Kos for members of the site -- "Kossacks." For Jews whose ancestors came from the former Russian empire (those parts that were previously part of the Polish Commonwealth), the word "cossack" evokes memories of pogroms, of rape and killing. I am old enough to have heard these stories. My wife's paternal grandmother told of a pogrom in her village (in Kamenetz-Podolsk) where the pogromists cut off the baker's hands so he could not knead bread. My wife's maternal grandmother was in Odessa during the pogroms of 1905, when the Tsar tried to blame the Jews for the 1905 revolution. A Christian (probably Russian) neighbor hid their family. When the pogromists (known as Black Hundreds) came by, they came out with a cross and swore there were no Jews in the house. You can read "fictional" depictions of these events in the stories of Isaac Babel, who also lived through them and saw the corpses littering the streets.

Of course to Don Cossacks -- the people described in the work of Mikhail Sholokhov, it must be painful to be stereotyped as anti-Semitic pogromists. Jews, Ukrainians, and Poles will never agree about the seventeenth century Cossack leader Bogdan Chmielnitski, the national hero of Ukraine (his statue is in the center of Kyiv). Poles remember him for killing Poles, and Jews remember him as one of history's biggest killer of Jews before the twentieth century. You can read a Jewish depiction of that period in Isaac Bashevis Singer's The Slave. The trauma of those massacres gave rise to the chiliastic movement that formed around the false messiah, Shabtai Zvi, who married a daughter of a survivor of the "Chmielnitski massacres" and whose preaching led thousands of Jews to sell their belongings and pack in preparation for their return to the Land of Israel -- Palestine. They thought that the massacres were "hevlei mashiah" -- the birth pangs of the Messiah. Today the followers of Rav Kook -- the founder of the Merkaz ha-Rav seminary (yeshiva, bait midrash, madrasa) where the March 6 massacre took place -- also pray that today's conflict should become those birth pangs. I wonder if Condoleeza Rice has any ideas how deep are the streams she is tapping when she talks about the "birth pangs of a new Middle East."

When Shabtai Zvi met with the Sultan in Istanbul in 1667, he emerged from the Sublime Porte a convert to Islam. His followers claimed that the real Shabtai Zvi had ascended to heaven and that only an empty "vessel" remained behind. They too pretended to convert to Islam and became a sect of Judaizing pseudo-Muslims known in Turkey as the Donme. The Islamic foes of Kemal Ataturk claimed that he was a Donme, and it appears that some members of the Young Turks were. Many of the Donme were in Salonika (today's Thessaloniki, in Greece). Hitler killed the remnants.

Nonetheless, the legend of the Young Turks and the Donme feeds anti-Jewish currents among Islamists. And Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, and others reading this might ask, "Why should the Palestinians be driven from their homes because of Chmielnitski and Hitler?" I noticed that despite all his truth telling, the one group that Obama studiously pandered to was my own, as he criticized those who blame the Middle East conflict on "the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam." Need I note that when the conflict between the Zionist movement and the Palestinian Arabs began, Sayd Qutb had not yet been offended by a dance in Greeley, Colorado, and perhaps had not even been born.
Still, some Arabs and Muslims propagate the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery used by the Tsarist secret police to justify the 1905 pogroms. On Labor Day 1990, just a few days after I moved to New York, I went to the Caribbean Day parade in Brooklyn and found an Afro-centric nationalist selling copies of the Protocols -- edited by the well known Afro-centric liberationist Henry Ford (yes the one with the Model T). Such confusions led some Arab nationalists to see Hitler a potential liberator from British imperialism and Zionism. Similar confusion led Ariel Sharon to see apartheid South Africa as a model for how Israel should control the Palestinians. It was Sharon who started this comparison, by the way, not the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Bishop Tutu, or any anti-Zionist or anti-Semitic propagandist.

History is a nightmare from which we all have to struggle, and keep struggling, to awake and stay awake.