Sasha Abramsky's American Carnage (whose title turns the phrase from Trump's first inauguration speech back on the fascist criminal himself) tells the story of several highly trained and experienced but recently hired or promoted government employees whose probationary employment status made them vulnerable in the early months of 2025 to the illegal decimation of the Federal government's workforce by the Administration's agents of chaos DOGE in the early days of Trump 2.0 at the behest of the Project 2025 architects setting the agenda of the Trump second term. Abramsky also reminds us of the obsession of Trump, his enablers and staff and the sympathetic punditry that lubricated America's nethers for another round of MAGA with DEI (on which Trump was quick to gratuitously blame the crash of an army helicopter and a commercial air liner over the Potomac in the early days of the admin-- a harbinger of the rough days to come), CRT, wokism and in particular the galling advancement of black women. One of DOGE's casualties featured by Abramsky was Adrian M, a career public health worker who had only recently gotten her dream job with the CDC when she was summarily fired with a canned, baseless probably AI generated letter informing her she was a poor fit for her position.
“I’m being called a poor performer, and my knowledge and skills don’t meet the needs of the agency,” she said, incredulously. “My knowledge and skills came from the agency. I wouldn’t have had my job if my skills weren’t good.”
The idea that she, as a Black woman from the South, had somehow had it easy in life because of her skin color made her laugh, it was so absurd.
The contemporary normalization of the Trump orbit's thinly veiled racism attempting to masquerade as an issue of free-speech and reverse civil rights for the white and privileged is case in point that 160 years after the abolition of slavery, white America still has it in for black people. To a great extent, the denial of universal healthcare, the stinginess of public spending on childcare, education and home ownership-- deficiencies that hurt everyone-- have their root in America's pathology against black well-being.
All redounds to the thesis of Dorothy Brown's recent book, Getting to Reparations, that America has yet to pay not only for the crime against humanity of its recalcitrant reluctance to break its habit of slavery only after Civil War in 1865, but for its continued punishment of descendants of slaves and others Americans of African descent for the crime of being black-- from post Reconstruction era Jim Crow to enshrined and hallowed practices of financial redlining to keep black people out of white neighborhoods and schools, down to our own era of mass incarceration and police brutality. Brown knows what she's talking about. Her previous book, The Whiteness of Wealth exposed ways in which our taxation laws have been designed to keep black people poor without a single mention of race in the code. Brown advocates for reparations as partly some form of financial compensation to individuals (amounts, population and logistics to be determined by a healthily diverse, deeply informed and soul searching council of citizens) and most importantly by investment in black neighborhoods, schools, communities and businesses.
Before I read Brown's Getting to Reparations, I was undecided on the basis of what I knew I didn't know. Brown, whose book provides a test case for persuasion, describes late in the book an exercise she uses in workshops on reparation, in which the participant, before hearing the arguments assesses their own feelings about whether reparations should be paid on a scale of 0 for complete agreement to 10 for absolute disagreement, with the same exercise repeated for a post-assessment. I would say that having once been a 6 (based partly on the class-based reasoning of Adolph Reed as well as a pessimistic assessment of the feasibility of reparations by Matt Bruenig), I was talked down to a 3 by Marianne Williamson's impassioned case for making reparations a large part of her policy platform in 2020 and 2024. But even before learning of Brown's self-assessment scale, half-way through her introduction to Getting to Reparations, I was converted to a 0. I only needed to hear Brown's argument that the debt that America owes blacks has only deepened since 1865, and that reparations have been paid by the United States many times over to several groups, among them the families of Japanese internees in World War II, the Italian American victims of anti-Sicilian lynchings in Louisiana in the early part of the 20th century, and to some extent (and naturally sparingly and with great reluctance) to First Nations tribes. The clincher was learning that while Andrew Johnson saw to it that the floated promise of 40 acres and a mule to former slaves was broken before a single person was recompensed, the government paid reparations of up to $300 per lost slave to slave holders.
This was more than enough information to convince me that there was something pathological about America's unfinished business of repairing the harm of slavery and its lingering legacy to black people. Moreover, Brown reminds us that black people are not the only ones broken by this unpaid debt. My family on both sides came to America only after slavery was abolished, and yet to a person we have undoubtedly benefited from our whiteness. I have relatives whose first generation racism contributed to the carnage while they were able to parlay their whiteness into a comfortable life of privilege. But even my own bleeding heart immediate family has received advantages from the color of our skin through no particular effort of our own. I don't live in fear of me or anyone in my family being murdered by the police for driving while European. I have the luxury of ignoring my complexion when I walk through a new neighborhood or enter a store or apply for a college education or a job. (Affirmative action as Brown points out has never been for blacks only and in fact has demonstrably benefited white women the most.) These are the privileges of whiteness I'm aware of, but it stands to reason there are many more that I'm not.
The point is not that whiteness is a crime, but rather that American society in particular by the entrenchment of this difference in the way whites and blacks experience their lives is an indication that something is broken. The resentment that so many whites feel toward blacks stems to a great extent from this brokenness itself. Brown makes an excellent case that repairing the festering wound of white privilege by finally compensating blacks for the harms of slavery and post abolition racist policies will be a balm for the all too common proclivity of some (such as our current racist in chief) to evade the issue of this unfinished business by redirecting the butt hurt of their unacknowledged debt into anti-wokeness, anti-DEI and the suppression of Critical Race Theory as a way of avoidance of ownership of the melanin tax on their black brothers and sisters.
It's time, America. It's time.
No comments:
Post a Comment