Racialized Memories and Class Identities - Thinking About Glenn Beck's and Rush Limbaugh's America

[babylonsister]

Racialized Memories and Class Identities - Thinking About Glenn Beck's and Rush Limbaugh's America
Tuesday 07 September 2010
by: Henry A. Giroux, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed


(Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: Gage Skidmore, Karl Schmeck 1, 2)


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Any talk about the political and material transformation of a deeply racial social order is largely off the radar for the mainstream media, if not for most of the American public. Consequently, it comes as no surprise that the dominant media has largely refused to connect the racism characteristic of the current debate and resistance to building a Mosque near ground zero to a more comprehensive political and cultural agenda or even the escalating and brutal burning of Mosques and violence being waged against Muslims in other parts of the country. The barely disguised racism at work in this controversy is simply treated as another opinion, an expression of post-9/11 anger, legitimated by the principle of free speech. What is disturbing about this controversy is that it registers both an alarming growth of racism in the United States and it indicates how the escalating of racist name calling and proliferation of racist representations easily moves into a nightmarish siege mentality brimming with the threat, if not actual practice, of violence. As insecurities and anxieties grow among the American public in the midst of an economic recession and the failure of state and federal governments to offer substantive reforms, race, religious, cultural and class hatred become convenient scapegoats for allowing right-wing corporate and religious drones to promote their ideological and political agendas while enhancing their celebrity status and raking in large profits.

Growing up in the fifties and sixties, I witnessed how egregious acts of racism such as the killing and torture of Emmett Till, the beatings of civil rights demonstrators and the humiliation suffered by Rosa Parks sparked major demonstrations, mobilizations and social movements dedicated to fighting racism. Racism was brutally exercised, but did not escape the public shame the country rightly felt about it. There is no shame over racism today because it is no longer viewed as a social problem, but merely an individual issue, and when its poisonous rhetoric and policies emerge, we seem to lack any vocabulary for addressing it, except through the discourse of those fanning the flames of racial injustice.

How else to explain the willingness of many Americans to accept Beck's claim that he is appropriating the civil rights movement while at the same time spewing out daily the most offensive racial commentaries? What are we to make of NBC's Brian Williams revisiting Katrina on a heavily promoted Dateline special, "Hurricane Katrina: the First Five Days," and focusing largely in a self-congratulatory manner on how well the media then covered the event? Lost in his analysis was any commentary on the racist policies that defined the Bush administration's response to Katrina or the racist brutality exercised in the aftermath of the storm by elements of the New Orleans Police Department. Instead, he reinforced the myth Katrina was a natural tragedy rather than a political one and that violence was out of control in the days following the tragedy - a myth that has been exposed by none other than the new Orleans Times-Picayune. But, of course, the media in this instance did not merely fail to adequately report on the events and response leading up to Katrina, but, instead, became complicit in once again suggesting that African-American culture is largely a culture of violence. We need to pay attention to how race is being spoken in our dominant media and everyday language just as we need to examine the cultural and social formations that benefit from class and racial injustices. We need to remind ourselves about how race and class injustices undermine the fabric of democracy.

As a child growing up in the midst of severe racial segregation, there were spaces of resistance where the gap between America's democratic ideals and the realities of class inequality and racial injustice were made visible. There were oppositional spaces, movements and a trace of democratic idealism running through the sixties and President Lyndon Johnson's image of the "Great Society." While such idealism often covered over a host of injustice, it did provide a political and ethical referent for thinking about the gap between the existing democracy and the promise of a substantive democratic polity. I think that idealism has turned to cynicism in America. The gap between the rich and poor and the powerless and powerful is larger than ever and the deepening inequalities and misery and human suffering these gaps produce are growing out of control. Moreover, everywhere we turn, the shadow of Jim Crow is engulfing the policies, practices and discourses about race in America. The racial segregation of public schooling is greater today than in the sixties; racism is on full display in the increasing collective anger waged against Muslims; the prison has become the pre-eminent public space for black youth; poor minorities of class and color are now viewed by politicians, the dominant media and the general public as largely disposable, a drain on the public coffers and unworthy of social protections. Similarly, the racially specific burdens of poverty, unemployment and despair and the emergence of a neoliberal market driven order suggests a new era in racial violence and a dangerous moment in the proliferation of multiple forms of racism. America has lost its capacity to bear witness as the avatars of racism are now treated in the dominant media as just another ideological position or, even worse, just one opinion among many. The pathology of racism and the growing inequality impacting those marginalized by class and age suggest the emergence of a society in which we no longer believe in the humanity of the other; instead, too many Americans increasingly believe and support the notion that humanity has lost its claim on democracy and is no longer worth fighting for. The deeper causes of class inequality and racial injustice have been drowned out by the shouting and demagoguery of a group of radical authoritarians who control the cultural apparatuses in America and make any form of legitimate politics dysfunctional. They speak of a new American dream and civil rights movement, but they lack either the imagination or the ethics to be taken seriously, especially given how much they despise democracy, thrive on racist and class-based social relations and disdain any vestige of the social state.

If we are going to take democracy seriously, it is time for social movements, parents, unions, intellectuals and elements of the new media to address rigorously the need to contest individually and collectively this new form of racism and class inequality head on as part of a new post-civil rights struggle. This means fighting for public services, emboldening the social state, waging a cultural war in which progressive opinions and democratic values can be heard, connecting various independent struggles as part of one larger movement for a radical democracy. Central to such a struggle is the fight for ideas and power. Structures of power, whether they be in the realm of economics, politics or the cultural realm, will not change by themselves. The struggle for ideas, subjectivities, desires, minds and different modes of agency signify that pedagogy and education and the public spheres that make them possible have to become primary to any form of politics that believes in the merging of reason and freedom. We are at a watershed in American history and dark clouds are forming on the horizon. The price to be paid for living in this increasingly privatized, consumer-oriented and corporate-dominated culture is almost too bleak to imagine. But we have to both imagine it and then organize in every way possible to prevent it.

Maybe it is time to stop the wars abroad and focus on a new war, one that takes seriously those anti-democratic forces ready to plunge America into the grip of authoritarianism.<1>

[rainy]

1. Very nice post. I just, today watched a History Chanel episode about the KKK

and I saw so many parallels between then and now with the tea-baggers. They are the KKK. They are just as full of hate.

[babylonsister]

2. I agree-this guy can write! and his message is true, and worrisome. nt

[babylonsister]

3. PLEASE read a great article!!! nt