An Incoherent Truth

By artappraiser on Thu, 01/16/2020 - 3:07pm |

Much public discourse devolves into purity tests that hew to a two-party political system—you're either all-in, or you're out. Thomas Chatterton Williams's (@thomaschattwill) first column for us explores the usefulness of political incoherence.https://t.co/xyce4uOqVd
— Harper's Magazine (@Harpers) January 16, 2020

URL:

https://harpers.org/archive/2020/02/an-incoherent-truth/

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Comments

Thomas Chatterton Williams reminds us that blacks identify as Conservative. The Democratic Party is identified as being Liberal. Black women identify affordable housing as their major issue. Black men identify affordable health care as their most important issue. Neither issue is a major focus of the Republican Party. Blacks overwhelmingly vote for Democrats.

When GW Bush ran an anti-Gay rights campaign, at best he received 16% of the black votes in some states. Williams accurately says that blacks are Conservative, but less than 20% vote with Republicans in national campaigns.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2004-11-07-0411070383-story.html

Larry Hogan, the poster boy for the moderate Republican, only received 27% of black voters in his race for Governor.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths/five-myths-about-black-voters/2019/12/06/89195a7c-1788-11ea-8406-df3c54b3253e_story.html

Blacks prefer the public option, similar to the Biden plan and something not associated with the Republicans.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/27/politics/medicare-for-all-vs-public-option-black-democrats/index.html

Blacks are Conservative. Blacks are the most reliable segment of voters in the Democratic Party. Blacks supported Obama, Hillary, and now Biden. Blacks are pragmatic voters. The Republican platform offers nothing that appeals to blacks.

by rmrd0000 on Thu, 01/16/2020 - 7:41pm

Just as there were Obama to Trump white voters there were Obama to no voters among blacks. You think we should work to get out the Obama to no black voters but do nothing to get the Obama to Trump white voters. Your plan might be enough to win the presidency but it won't get us the senate

by ocean-kat on Thu, 01/16/2020 - 8:12pm

Williams noted that blacks are Conservative. I noted that the major concerns of black voters align more with the Democratic Party. Blacks voting for the Democratic Party makes sense. Even without the racial bias perception of the GOP, there is little incentive to vote for Republicans,

Democrats are appealing to everyone by explaining their healthcare plans, etc. The midterms and 2019 election results suggest the Democratic Party is reaching out.

Edit to add:

More blacks supported Republicans in the past

Here is the 1956 Republican platform

1. Provide federal assistance to low-income communities;

2. Protect Social Security;

3. Provide asylum for refugees;

4. Extend minimum wage;

5. Improve unemployment benefit system so it covers more people;

6. Strengthen labor laws so workers can more easily join a union;

7. Assure equal pay for equal work regardless of sex.

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/oct/28/facebook-posts/viral-meme-says-1956-republican-platform-was-prett/

Eisenhower received about 40% of the black vote

https://www.npr.org/2016/08/25/491389942/when-african-american-voters-shifted-away-from-the-gop

Blacks have not changed, current Republicans are insane.

by rmrd0000 on Fri, 01/17/2020 - 7:48am

What you are talking about has nothing to do with this article.

All you are revealing is that you haven't read the article, or are incapable of understanding it, and furthermore have a grudge against him judged by a single point you read somewhere

But in the meta sense, he is talking about discourse behavior like yours. Including what you are doing to him here. You have once again shown yourself to be a good example, where everything and everybody is reduced to politically manichean sides, us vs. them (and with you it is myopically on single issue as well) and one can only be on one side or the other and it applies to everything.

Excerpts:

One of the outgrowths of the frenzied, justifiably Trump-panicked moment in which we find ourselves is a profound unease with ambiguity or multidimensionality of any sort—moral, intellectual, ideological, political, artistic

Witt echoes Haslett’s assumption that people who express a mix of views are by default incoherent and politically homeless, as if there were some intrinsic logic to the “left” and “right” binary that obtains today.

In fact, there is no reason why a particular position on, say, access to abortion or gay marriage must track with a particular view on economics. One of the more intriguing recent political developments in France, for instance, has been the far-right National Rally’s swift and increasingly successful move to outflank the leftist Green Party on ecological concerns. The xenophobes deduced quite shrewdly that there’s nothing fundamentally contradictory about anti-immigrant “blood and soil” rhetoric and decreasing reliance on fossil fuels. Things can always be otherwise, and there is a myopia that stems from examining all political questions through a strictly American lens. In a hyperpolarized system such as ours (as opposed to a European parliamentary government), what seem to be inevitable political coalitions are just as often post hoc frameworks grafted on top of marriages of convenience.

The dysfunctional nature of the two-party, winner-take-all system that dominates American political culture is only magnified by the crisis of our social-media-driven journalism. Those “dark fields of ‘the discourse’ ”—on which we are expected to suit up and join our respective teams—have become ever more dependent on unreported “takes” by underpaid commentators and polemics by ever more ideologically rigid voices contending for virality (or at least visibility) through “likes” and retweets. None of this lends itself to nuance or self-doubt. This, in part, explains how we’ve arrived—far faster than I’d have ever imagined—at the dizzying place where even Barack Obama’s heterodoxy has become a topic of serious complaint on the left.

“This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff,” Obama observed last October, “you should get over that quickly. The world is messy. There are ambiguities.” The statement drew widespread condemnation. “I gasped at what I heard,” Ernest Owens wrote in the New York Times.

“Barack Obama is a conservative,” David Swerdlick argued several weeks later in the Washington Post. Of course, his “perspectives don’t line up with every position now seen as right-of-center,” Swerdlick acknowledged, listing Obama’s policies on climate, Dodd–Frank regulations, and same-sex marriage—as well as his tripling of the number of women on the Supreme Court, antidiscrimination efforts, and protections for young undocumented immigrants—as evidence of liberal credentials. “But his constant search for consensus, for ways to bring Blue America and Red America together,” was more revealing: None of these changes “revolutionized governance or structurally reordered American life. None of them were meant to.”

Arguments about purity are nothing new. Writing about Machiavelli in The New York Review of Books in 1971, Isaiah Berlin observed that the lingering power of the man’s five-hundred-year-old ideas....

by artappraiser on Thu, 01/16/2020 - 10:53pm

I focused on his statement about blacks being Conservative. I read the article. I read his books. Williams was trying to incoherent-splain his incoherence

From the beginning of the article

Last fall, Tobi Haslett, a young writer and critic with Marxist leanings, noticed a shift in the contours of popular intellectual debate. “Something is happening out there in the dark fields of ‘the discourse,’ ” Haslett wrote in Bookforum. “Incoherence is now a virtue.”

By incoherence I don’t mean an “extreme” position or the shriek of the provocateur, but a specific genre of chin-stroking, brow-furrowing, “eye opening” sophistry that’s now robustly represented in mainstream newspapers and magazines. Fluttering near the political center (they refuse to be pinned down!), the exponents of the new incoherence look at the Right’s mushrooming despotism, then at the enfeebled, regrouping Left—and, with theatrical exasperation, declare that both are a bit tyrannical. These pundits are the opposite of adherents; all hail the Incoherents!

Edit to add:

The Haslett article points out that Williams desire is to rescue the black community so that blacks can be respected. He attempts to deflect by pointing out her Marxism.

From the article.

Instead Williams rakes through his story for glittering lessons in respectability. He used to be ensorcelled by hip-hop; now he speaks French and reads the existentialists. He’s entered a lofty, sophisticated milieu, and truly, all black people ought to. I suggest they begin by making sure they have light skin, a suburban childhood, a Ph.D.-holding parent, and a voluminous pool of cultural capital, to be drawn from as they please. These days, Williams listens less to Jay-Z and more to jazz—but he declines to mention that the latter was once demonized using the very arguments he flings at rap.

Yet all of Williams’s own misdeeds stand as a howling indictment of “hip-hop culture.” As a teenager he thrashes his black girlfriend Stacey across the face after dragging her into the woods. This isn’t the routine horror of misogynist violence as inflicted across the planet by men of every color; Williams’s brain, perhaps the real victim, has simply been warped by Biggie Smalls. And Pappy had never approved of Stacey; he found her coarse and disappointing. After the incident, he refers to the “herd of mules and donkeys” that threaten the “thoroughbred,” his son.

Such righteousness, such haughtiness, such flabbergasting resentment and open disdain—naturally, Losing My Cool won Williams an established perch in anglophone media. As a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine whose byline dots many other august publications, he serves the regular, titillating function of impaling our pieties about race. The “pessimism” of Ta-Nehisi Coates is a repeated, irresistible target. And Williams is always willing to revise our view of Black Lives Matter. But if Losing My Cool had dreamed aloud about a splendid new attitude for black people, his new book—Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race, also a memoir—proclaims, with intriguing relief, that the thing we call “black America” does not, in fact, exist.

by rmrd0000 on Fri, 01/17/2020 - 8:10am

What responsibility do whites have in this proposal? It seems that blacks have to take the first steps

On a cold, clear night in January 2008, when Iowa Democrats selected Barack Obama over a white woman and a white man in the state’s first-in-the-nation caucus, the moment felt transformative. If voters in this overwhelmingly white, rural state could cast their ballots for a black man as president, then perhaps it was possible for the entire nation to do what had never been done; perhaps America had turned far enough away from its racist past that skin color was no longer a barrier to the highest office of the land. In the months that followed, as Obama racked up primary victories, not just in the expected cities but also in largely white Rust Belt towns and farming communities, it seemed evidence for many Americans that the nation had finally become “post-racial.”

Of course, that post-racial dream did not last long, and nothing epitomizes the naïveté of that belief more than the election last week of Donald J. Trump. As I watched my home state of Iowa join the red flood that overtook the electoral map last Tuesday, I asked myself the same questions that so many others did: What happened? Why had states that reliably backed Obama — states like Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — flipped Republican?

I was struck by how quickly white pundits sought to tamp down assertions that race had anything to do with it. It was, it seemed to me, almost a relief to many white Americans that Trump’s victory encompassed so many of the heavily white places that voted for a black man just years before. It was an absolution that let them reassure themselves that Donald Trump’s raucous campaign hadn’t revealed an ugly racist rift after all, that in the end, the discontent that propelled the reality-TV star into the White House was one of class and economic anxiety, not racism.

But this analysis reveals less about the electorate than it does about the consistent inability of many white Americans to think about and understand the complex and often contradictory workings of race in this country, and to discuss and elucidate race in a sophisticated, nuanced way.

While we tend to talk about racism in absolute terms — you’re either racist or you’re not — racism and racial anxiety have always existed on a spectrum. For historians who have studied race in the United States, the change from blue to red in heavily white areas is not surprising. In fact, it was entirely predictable. “There are times when working-class whites, whether rural or urban, will join an interracial alliance to get the short-term gains they want,” Robin Kelley, a history professor at U.C.L.A., told me. “They don’t ever do it without kicking and screaming.”

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/20/magazine/donald-trumps-america-iowa-race.html

From an interview in the Guardian

If I were writing this book, my worry would be, ‘They’re going to think I’m a sellout. They’re going to think I’m giving white people a pass by just saying, “Fuck all that. Let’s just move past all of this.”’

Yeah. I mean, I mention it a bit in the book. I try to make this point … If you’re at an impasse when you’re trying to get by somebody and then you both keep moving, somebody’s got to move first or not move first. Somebody’s got to stop and so the other person goes around.

I think we’re at a kind of impasse that we are obsessed with. We’re really looking backward. I don’t think it’s wrong to look backward, but I’m also trying to look forward and imagine another way. And maybe, it’s another wrinkle in the story of blacks in America. Black people are also the people that will ...

Forgive.

Yeah. Maybe that’s not fair and I would still ask that if that was the case, because I think that the reward for everyone, including blacks. I don’t think this idea that white people get rewarded, too, ruins the prize of a better future, if black people also get the better future. You know what I mean? I’m not just into keeping white people on the hook and retribution. Should there be some reparation? Probably. Has there been some reparation? For some blacks, there has been reparation. Does there need to be more? I thought that the most convincing and really spectacular piece of writing was Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Case for Reparations.

It’s the definitive piece, yeah.

I love that piece. I don’t think that that’s contradictory to wanting to get past, too, and to losing the pessimism. I think that white people are going to have to do a hell of a lot, but if black people show leadership on this issue, it almost seems like it might be fitting. And people will be like, “Well, yeah. But we’re not here to do the labor or to teach you to do your work,” but what are you here for? We want a better world. What are you here for? I think that’s very admirable work, actually. You know?

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/15/thomas-chatterton-williams-race-books-interview

by rmrd0000 on Fri, 01/17/2020 - 10:53am

Meanwhile "culture" just means "identity"

https://m.huffpost.com/us/feature/culture-shifters

by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 01/17/2020 - 2:43am

OMG, ugh, that's the worst yet I've seen, kumbaya dejasvus allover again! Decor as well as the content! Disney-fied! Where's a good sarcastic GenX slacker when you need one?

by artappraiser on Fri, 01/17/2020 - 3:45am

Managing news content on minor blog sites for free?

by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 01/17/2020 - 3:55am

Heard tell HuffPost doesn't pay much more, so there's that.

by artappraiser on Fri, 01/17/2020 - 4:04am

Cool - I'll take that to bed tonight. (along with my mobile)

by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 01/17/2020 - 4:10am

When it comes to reaching post-racial, the plans always seem to begin with blacks taking the first step. Let's get rid of race and everything will be great. Whites have to do nothing.

Blacks see a world where race has impact and have no reason to think that whites will be fair.

Some diseases impact certain races more than others. Some races receive a lower level of health care despite equal income when it comes to treating the same disease. Pointing out the differences requires identifying race.

Some races with equal levels of education receive lower salaries despite pledges from corporations to adhere to equal pay for equal work. Why would blacks trust a race neutral system?

There is currently a debate about the lack of qualified black coaches in the NFL being offered head coaching jobs despite the Rooney rule.

Black actors are routinely overlooked for major awards. Why would color-blindness change the situation. At least the race- based NAACP Image awards, etc. provide an outlet.

William's argues that blacks need to take the first steps. If Barack Obama was followed by Donald Trump, why is it on black people to make the first move?

by rmrd0000 on Fri, 01/17/2020 - 5:52pm

You know the Color Purple didn't get any awards, but everyone know it was a great fucking movie. We all know Hollywoodiis full of douchebags, but blacks are going to sit around waiting for affirmation by douchebags? Just fucking do your shit. This Spike Lee "everybody gotta take off from school to go see Malcolm X" thing sucks. Just let people do what they want to do - knock their socks off but if their socks aren't knocked off, try harder. Look at Prince. Nobody worked harder than him. Did he need to go begging for Grammys, for an audience? Fuck that, he just played. And danced. And performed. How did Monty Python make Holy Grail? Begging musicians for cash - much how Spike Lee made several films. That's half of Sundance. Yeah, it'd be great for a tenth of the money for all these stupid superhero flicks rained down on something better, but people are idiots and that's the crappy taste they have, especially kids. So deal with it. Life sucks, but we get by.

by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 01/17/2020 - 6:19pm

We are in agreement that major awards organizations overlook art made by black artists. If race is no longer to be considered, the NAACP Image Awards would be considered unnecessary. We are part of the human race, therefore awards that focus on race are blocked. I prefer the current system where, when minority artists can be recognized by members of their racial group. JLo can be ignored by the Oscars, but recognized by Latino award organizations

Similarly black activists can point out to the NFL is not hiring qualified black coaches to head NFL teams. Williams argues that we need to get over race. Blacks are supposed to take the first step.

The current system notices race and their are organizations and activists who can press majority organizations to realize racial disparities. In a system where race magically goes away, I don't see things improving.

by rmrd0000 on Fri, 01/17/2020 - 9:29pm

You always speak of blacks and whites as if they are two coherent groups but they're not. Any group of people with certain policy ideas needs to make the first moves. To succeed they need to convinces a sufficient number of others to support them. Every advance made for blacks were made by whites who supported them. Just as the right to vote for women was made by white men. Simply because white men had the power to act. Women made the first moves and convinced enough of the men with power to share it.

I and those who share my policy ideas are and have been making moves for years but have been unable to convinced enough whites and blacks to join us. I'd love to have black support but it hasn't been forth coming. In fact they are now supporting the worse democratic candidate in my life time. The only reason Biden is still in the race is because of over whelming support of black people. Mostly based on a purely political decision by Obama to choose a safe white male to make it easier for older white people to vote for him. All that tells me is that large numbers of black people can be just as stupid and self destructive as large numbers of white people are.

by ocean-kat on Fri, 01/17/2020 - 10:24pm

I posted about this poll. There are different worldviews

President Trump made a stark appeal to black Americans during the 2016 election when he asked, “What have you got to lose?” Three years later, black Americans have rendered their verdict on his presidency with a deeply pessimistic assessment of their place in the United States under a leader seen by an overwhelming majority as racist.

The findings come from a Washington Post-Ipsos poll of African Americans nationwide, which reveals fears about whether their children will have a fair shot to succeed and a belief that white Americans don’t fully appreciate the discrimination that black people experience.

While personally optimistic about their own lives, black Americans today offer a bleaker view about their community as a whole. They also express determination to try to limit Trump to a single term in office.

A Washington Post-Ipsos poll released Jan. 11 reveals that black Democratic voters showed most support for former vice president Joe Biden. (Blair Guild/The Washington Post)

More than 8 in 10 black Americans say they believe Trump is a racist and that he has made racism a bigger problem in the country. Nine in 10 disapprove of his job performance overall.

The pessimism goes well beyond assessments of the president. A 65 percent majority of African Americans say it is a “bad time” to be a black person in America. That view is widely shared by clear majorities of black adults across income, generational and political lines. By contrast, 77 percent of black Americans say it is a “good time” to be a white person, with a wide majority saying white people don’t understand the discrimination faced by black Americans.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/black-americans-deeply-pessimistic-about-country-under-president-who-more-than-8-in-10-describe-as-a-racist-post-ipsos-poll-finds/2020/01/16/134b705c-37de-11ea-bb7b-265f4554af6d_story.html

Comments in the article

Courtney Tate, a 40-year-old elementary school teacher in Irving, Tex., outside Dallas, said that since Trump was elected, he’s been having more conversations with his co-workers — discussions that are simultaneously enlightening and exhausting — about racial issues he and his students face every day.

“As a black person, you’ve always seen all the racism, the microaggressions. But as white people, they don’t understand this is how things are going for me,” said Tate, who said he is the only black male teacher in his school. “They don’t live those experiences. They don’t live in those neighborhoods. They moved out. It’s so easy to be white and oblivious in this country.”

Francine Cartwright, a 44-year-old mother of three from Moorestown, N.J., said the ascent of Trump has altered the way she thinks about the white people in her life.

“If I’m in a room with white women, I know that 50 percent of them voted for Trump and they believe in his ideas,” said Cartwright, a university researcher. “I look at them and think, ‘How do you see me? What is my humanity to you?’ ”

This is not about me. This is normal commentary in the black community.

by rmrd0000 on Fri, 01/17/2020 - 10:47pm

Your huge cut and paste have nothing to do with my comment. In this case my comment never mentioned Trump and has nothing to do with him. You never have a conversation or a debate. You just use people as a hook to attach your propaganda onto.

by ocean-kat on Fri, 01/17/2020 - 11:26pm

The really ironic thing about that is your comment was just starting to get it back to what Williams was writing about in the first place, before this thread got hijacked into being about race for the umpteenth time--which is what interested me in it. On how we are stuck in this binary/Manichean system which sometimes is very backward and doesn't even make any sense anymore in this new world, why can't we open our eyes and see where there are much different coalitions that could be made. I.E., that a prejudiced Bannonite nationalist can also be interested in doing something about global warming....

by artappraiser on Sat, 01/18/2020 - 6:03am

But when you mention the word "blacks", rmrd like a genie will appear.

by PeraclesPlease on Sat, 01/18/2020 - 12:32pm

Williams is arguing about race.

In his second book, out Tuesday, Self-Portrait in Black and White, he calls for us to consider why we uphold race categories defined “using plantation logic” and encourages us to do away with the arbitrary nomenclature altogether. Not to be confused with the term “post-race”, he suggests “retiring from race”, “transcending race”, “unlearning race”. It’s a big ask, he admits.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/15/thomas-chatterton-williams-race-books-interview

by rmrd0000 on Sat, 01/18/2020 - 2:35pm

The poll is about the views of a majority of blacks. It is about how they feel bout the United States at this point in time.

by rmrd0000 on Sat, 01/18/2020 - 2:36pm

Commentary from the poll.

Black Americans also widely sense that their experiences with discrimination are underappreciated by white Americans. Just about 2 in 10 say that most white Americans understand the level of discrimination black Americans face in their lives.

“As a black person, you’ve always seen all the racism, the microaggressions. But as white people, they don’t understand this is how things are going for me,” said Tate, who said he is the only black male teacher in his school. “They don’t live those experiences. They don’t live in those neighborhoods. They moved out. It’s so easy to be white and oblivious in this country.”

Kenneth Davis, a truck driver who lives outside Detroit, said that when Trump was elected, co-workers who secretly harbored racist thoughts felt emboldened to publicly express them.

“One gentleman is waving the Confederate flag on the back of his pickup truck,” said Davis, 48, who is a Marine Corps veteran. “He was very brave to say, ‘Trump’s president, I’m going to get my window [painted].’ ”

Different views of the world

by rmrd0000 on Sat, 01/18/2020 - 3:07pm

Thank you ocean-kat

All that tells me is that large numbers of black people can be just as stupid and self destructive as large numbers of white people are.

Stacey Abrams from the Washington Monthly

African-Americans in the South have struggled to construct two-way biracial coalitions within the Democratic Party, and when they could it often required conspicuously nonprogressive messages. As the parties have continued to polarize, that path has become less viable than ever. There just aren’t that many white swing voters to whom to “reach out,” as the saying goes…

But the very different strategy pursued by Stacey Abrams looks like the future of biracial Democratic politics in the South: a strongly progressive (though not abrasively so) African-American who can expand turnout among a rising minority population while still appealing to increasingly liberal white Democratic and independent voters as well.

Much as we’ve seen with candidates of color in the 2020 presidential primary, those on the far left criticized Abrams for being too centrist, while moderates worried that she would fuel a racial backlash among working class white voters. But listen to the facets of her message that don’t fit into the ideological boxes we’ve created for politicians.

“We are writing the next chapter of Georgia’s history where no one is unseen, no one is unheard and no one is uninspired. We are writing a history of Georgia where we prosper together…For the journey that lies ahead, we need every voice in our party and every independent thinker in the state of Georgia.”…

“I am the child of a shipyard worker and a college librarian who were called to become United Methodist ministers. I am a proud daughter of the deep South. And I grew up the second of six children in a family where we struggled to stay above the poverty line, but never struggled to know what was right or to believe in our possibilities. My parents instilled in us the core values of faith, of family, of service and responsibility. Hard work is in my bones.”…

Abrams doesn’t have to be dragged into talking about race; she leads with it. “My being a black woman is not a deficit,” she told Cosmopolitan earlier this year. “It is a strength. Because I could not be where I am had I not overcome so many other barriers. Which means you know I’m relentless, you know I’m persistent, and you know I’m smart.”

It is way beyond time for the rest of us to discard our assumptions about black voters—specifically in the south—and begin to not only listen to them, but recognize that candidates like Abrams bring something powerful to the table.

The lived experiences of blacks has obviously been diff et then that of many whites. We are not on the same page. You call them stupid while begging for white votes. Good luck with that platform.

by rmrd0000 on Sat, 01/18/2020 - 4:02pm

fuck you rmrd

by ocean-kat on Sat, 01/18/2020 - 4:07pm

An Incoherent Truth

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