Will electing Obama matter? If it were Clinton rather than Obama, will electing her have mattered for women? Of course the default answer is yes.
For scholars like Walter Benn Michaels? No.
In 1947—seven years before the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, sixteen years before the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique—the top fifth of American wage-earners made 43 per cent of the money earned in the us. Today that same quintile gets 50.5 per cent. In 1947, the bottom fifth of wage-earners got 5 per cent of total income; today it gets 3.4 per cent. After half a century of anti-racism and feminism, the us today is a less equal society than was the racist, sexist society of Jim Crow. Furthermore, virtually all the growth in inequality has taken place since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965—which means not only that the successes of the struggle against discrimination have failed to alleviate inequality, but that they have been compatible with a radical expansion of it. Indeed, they have helped to enable the increasing gulf between rich and poor.
For Michaels, not only will the election of Obama will not decrease inequality, it will actually increase it. Obama for Michaels represents the perfect tool for neoliberalism. His very election can serve as proof that America is an open meritocracy–Obama born to a single mother, and raised on food stamps, was able to ascend to the highest position in the land through hard work. He represents the embodied culmination of almost 400 years of struggle. But while all of this is true, recall that it was Obama who argued that black fathers have to get their act together, taking the neoliberal disciplinary line. It was Obama who at one time–it isn’t on the website anymore–lauded the virtues of the free market economy. To the extent that Obama’s election represents the culmination of the civil rights movement, it also represents the reality that the civil rights movement did little to nothing to deal with the real problem facing Americans–inequality.
Michaels isn’t alone here. Adolph Reed has made somewhat similar claims, as have Richard Rorty, Sean Wilentz, and others, basically taking the side of class in the longstanding race vs. class argument.
Prometheus6 and a number of black scholars disagree strongly. Although Prometheus6 casually dismisses Michaels argument, and Michaels himself arguing that his article is based on a lie, and then later arguing that Michael’s lit-crit approach ignores reality, I think that Michaels is onto something.
The Gini Coefficient is a standard measure of inequality. The higher the number the higher the level of inequality. We all know that there are stark black-white wealth differences. But what I present above is the level of intra-racial inequality. Note the level of intra-racial inequality is actually greater among African Americans than it is among whites. This is the secret that few scholars outside of leftists like Reed address. If we were to go through a whole host of ills that we attribute solely to racial differences–differences in birth weight, in infant mortality rates, in school quality, in closeness to environmental waste dumps–we’d definitely see racial differences, putting to rest Michaels’ conception of racism purely as racial discrimination. But if we were to solely look at black populations, we’d see very stark differences here as well. Differences that blacks consistently blame on black lower class inferiority rather than on structural inequality.
Yes, blacks are no longer lynched. But it took OJ Simpson thirteen years to get sent to prison…and not for the crime that he was at least involved in. What we think of as a conspiracy to imprison black men is really a conspiracy to imprison black working class and poor men. And where is Obama here? He hasn’t even been elected, and already we see black attempts to juxtapose Obama against 50 Cent, as if electing Obama gives us another vision of black manhood that will separate from political actionsomehow raise our status both in the eyes of “the black community” and among Americans in general. I believe the neoliberal turn in black politics to be a greater threat to our existence than any other, in as much as our attempt to organize politically is shaped by our ability to form an intra-racial consensus. And arguing that race is still a fundamental factor without acknowledging the way that class structures our lives inevitably reproduces this turn.
Now with all that said, how could Michaels have dodged Prometheus6’s critique? Simple really. For Michaels, class is the real thing, while race and gender are both social fictions. He couldn’t be more wrongheaded (empirically and politically) here if he tried. Race and gender are modes in which class is lived. Support for welfare drops like a rock not because support for the poor diminishes, but rather because support for the black poor diminishes. In fact, “poor” and “black” become synonymous. Welfare mother becomes synonymous with “black welfare mother.” Poverty is racialized. Whites (and blacks I think) don’t support welfare because they associate the policy with populations that actually deserve to be poor. Whites support punitive crime measures because they associate crime with young black men, an incorrigible population that deserves punishment. This step isn’t a big one to take…but for some reason Michaels and most of the other left anti-race scholars aren’t willing to take it. But doing so will not only provide some clarity, but a real opportunity for political mobilization and consciousness raising.
Very briefly, I wonder quite honestly why any social scientist bothers to put wage-earners on the same scale with the wealthy if not to exaggerate their claims of inequality. Under what provision or premise is social mobility expected to span beyond three or four promotions in a lifetime of work?
I happen to know an opthomologist who works at a teaching hospital who does many surgeries in a week. That guy makes on the order of half a million dollars a year, lives in an extraordinarily large house which is yet common in his Brentwood neighborhood. I don't even THINK about making that kind of dough, and there is nothing I could do to convert what I have learned in 20 of computing to do the first thing in eye surgery. It is an insurmountable gap in 'equality'.
If you or anyone could provide social mobility statistics across more reasonably segmented distributions of income, it would be appreciated. It seems to me that what matters are the marginal efforts at the barriers that make the most sense to deal with via tax or education policy. Not all that goes into the lamentations about how horrible it is to be poor or black or female in the US as compared to Warren Buffett and all those who will manage through this recession without difficulty.
Putting them on different scales makes absolutely no sense to me. It isn't about exaggerating claims but figuring out how big of a gap there is between different strata, and then figuring out whether the size of this gap exacerbates other domestic problems. I don't have the social mobility data handy but i know it exists.
That step would require Benn Michaels to give up his whole argument. An argument against neoliberalism that doesn't require lying about the impact of race in America is pretty straightforward to assemble. Benn Michaels wants to deny racism has any impact at all, or any important impact. You saw the comment the tourist left on P6…”what has anti-racism gotten us?”
No sane Black person can ask that question. Only a person unimpacted by racism (who, ipso facto, is unqualified to speak authoritatively on racism) could seriously claim no improvement in economic inequality since Jim Crow.
I didn't see that comment.
What really struck me sometime ago that drove me to pursue this second project on neoliberalism was the conversation about class politics within black space. I remember reading early King, right after the Montgomery Bus Boycott. To him the country was perfect, with the exception of its segregationist practices. Once we got rid of segregation, America would be as close to perfect as we could get. He woke up, after being knocked in the head a few times, but I feel as if that's where we are now in black politics–both its study and its practice. We acknowledge the existence of institutional racism as intellectually being connected to class (and gender) but our practices–particularly those attached to even the DISCUSSION of Obama's election–don't reflect an interest in ending institutional racism. What the Jack and Jill folks do is ignore class in favor of pursuing race. What Michaels does is ignore race in favor of pursuing class. I've got the race thing down pat, which is why I'm now more drawn to class politics within black spaces.
The Fiddy/Obama comparison seems pretty fair to me.
If Obama were elected, he would still only have less than 1% of Curtis' net estimated wealth.
But Fiddy would still be considered ghetto while Obama would be seen as bourgeois by some and upper class by others.
Could Michaels be right for the wrong reason? could electing Obama not make any difference because the Presidency is merely a figurehead position, and Obama will be just as constrained and controlled as some have claimed GWB to be?
On another note, is your position that class trumps race, or that race trumps class? I'm not sure if I got it (or for that matter if you said one way or the other).
Answer to the first question? Obama's power to draft executive orders alone make him extremely powerful. Recall that until this year, Bush pretty much got everything he asked for. He lost on Social Security…but that's about it. We argue that Bush is a figurehead because he doesn't exhibit traditional markers of intelligence. I don't think this viewpoint is correct though. Obama won't be able to do everything he wants, but he'll have the power to do a helluva lot.
The second question is also a good one. I suggest that race and class are both important. However within black spaces by focusing on race we implicitly support intra-group class warfare.
REgarding P6 contention that no sane person could argue that there have been no improvements in economic inequalities, I believe Dr. Claud Anderson makes a very good argument for that very idea in Powernomics (or perhaps it was the other book). His position is that Blacks owned less than 1% of the nation's wealth at the end of the Civil War, and today we are at virtually the same, if not a lower level than 150 years ago. Relatively speaking the idea has some merit, although it is also clear to the plain view that many of us are doing much better than our ancestors ever dared hope we would be.
There's a way to make this argument that is extremely counterproductive. I would never make the claim that nothing has changed. But once we control for the changed context (that itself comes from black activism), the relationships between different groups appear to be the same. And looking at the gini coefficients, one could argue that–again within the group–the numbers have gotten worse.
“In 1947, the bottom fifth of wage-earners got 5 per cent of total income; today it gets 3.4 per cent.”
Makes perfect sense. Sixty years ago, anyone with a strong back could make a good living at manual labor. In today's high tech society, brainpower is required. Lefthand edge of the BellCurve takes a bigger hit…
no. middle income families take the hit as well, as their wages are decreasing even as overall productivity increases.
Race vs. Class pt 1000022 http://t.co/s6cDOYDb