Cedar’s Digest

As millions more become politically engaged in these dark times, there has been a fair amount of Columbusing (discovering what was already there). “This is the beginning of a movement” or “first they came for the immigrants and we said not today.”

It is not the beginning, many black, latinx, native, LGBTQIA activists have been here for decades. And we are on at least the third line of that poem, because first they came for (Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Requia Boyd, Eric Garner, Devin Diamond and the many transgender Americans murdered and ignored, the victims of the Burge Chicago torture site, etc) and we didn’t speak, because we didn’t live in Ferguson or Cleveland or Chicago, we weren’t black and trans, we weren’t in prison or jail. We haven’t spoken, we haven’t truly fought, and we are all complicit.

We are not in an alternate timeline, we are in the one you helped create because you didn’t care until you were in danger too.

— Mikki Kendall (@Karnythia) January 31, 2017

Celebrating one’s entry into a house that already existed, as if you built it is erasure of efforts of activists who’ve been building at great personal cost for decades, and those already there have been justifiably upset. The messages sometimes take the form of “What took you so long?” and “We’ve been here for years,” and “I told you so.” While I agree with the content of these messages, I also see that they can be counterproductive. The resistance needs all these people, let’s keep coaxing them to more engagement, more marches, more action, more politics. There is lots of work to be done, and reminding us that we don’t really belong because we just got here is going to make it easy for us to return to apathy at the first sign of victory.

But even as I want us to carefully nurture and develop a new generation of (yes, white) activists, I hope we don’t brush aside these “I told you so’s.” I hope we can see that what may seem like resentment is a defense of a crucial, central tenet of this movement. If we are truly joining a movement, we must recognize what that movement is up against and where our opposition gets its strength.

@JAMyerson @criener Fair, but this could’ve been fixed with 10% of the effort 6 months ago. Now it requires prolonged resistance.

— Matt Ford (@mcford19) January 31, 2017

Just as this cannot just be a movement that starts against Trump, it cannot end with Trump either. Trump is just one radical and extreme success in the long history of another quite successful movement. That movement is not the shady right wing billionaire families, although they have certainly contributed to its new ascendance. That movement is not the Republican Party in Congress, although it has been entirely captured in a way unprecedented in the modern era.

I suppose we could call this movement a lot of different things, but the label I choose is “white supremacy.” And we new (white) activists must recognize that the opposition is not our President or even his administration, but the movement that made his rise possible. Not just his family’s wealth enabled by racist housing policies in the early 20^th century, but his ability to spout racist nonsense conspiracy theories on television for years in the 21^st century. Not just his election but the racist gerrymandering, voter suppression laws and the various structural consequences of the historical victories of white supremacy that gave him an edge for victory.

We must fight not just our President’s dark vision of crime and American carnage, but we must also recognize that our own quiet question on whether that elementary school is really “safe” continues to endorse a separate and unequal society. A short-sighted political focus on the white working class in the Midwest pivoting to Trump ignores the massive disparities that empower white supremacy, not just as a force that fuels and emboldens extremists in the Republican Party, but a force against which the Democratic Party knows it can’t win. For example, differential mortality (black people die sooner) is a result of health disparities. These differential mortality rates affect electoral outcomes. A recent study estimated that differential mortality, but would have resulted in nearly 1 million more Democratic votes in 2004, which would not have changed the Presidential result, but could have changed many local elections. Of course there are other examples for other inequalities (wealth, incarceration), we must realize that just as racist attitudes thrive when people live separately, white supremacist political power thrives in a separate and unequal society.

Let me close with this: Some progress is real. The election of Barack Obama happened and represented progress. But at key moments, Obama, just as Lincoln, had to promise not to fight white supremacy. As Sandy Darity and Tressie McMillan Cottom remind us, he kept that promise. He might protest that the constraints of his job and American electoral politics meant he couldn’t. Whether coincidence or reaction, his rise coincided with a new ascendance of unapologetic public white supremacy and empowering of white nationalists within the Republican Party.

So, as one of my activist heroes @prisonculture often says, we need to pick our lanes and fight, whether it be FightFor15, or Medicare4All, canvassing for your local democratic congressperson or calling to oppose a new abhorrent executive order. But let’s also keep our eyes on the prize: a civil society where the institutions fulfill the promises our well-intentioned white leaders have made in the past, where we American patriots ensure that our republic is not separate, but indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. This can only be done by recognizing and joining to fight the movement that has turned back these enlightened aspirations at every turn: white supremacy.

Three events which presage the world to come and require us to choose which conflicting values we prioritize. Up to now there has been a building uncomfortable stalemate on some of our social tensions, the Trump/Bannon era will escalate these tensions, and require us to be far more active in how we live our values. I think we will have to actively choose which values are most important.

One: Star Brietbart writer, well-known internet troll and fashionable fascist Milo Y goes on a college speaking tour, invited by a conservative student group. At one stop at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, he bullies an individual transgender student who had fought to be allowed to use the women’s locker room. He used her dead name, showed pictures of her before her transition, and mocked her while the audience laughed. Expecting awfulness, but not that direct and personal,  she was in the audience. The President of the college wrote a bland apology, and she, Adelaide Kramer wrote a blistering reply.

At another stop on his tour, at the University of Washington, an anti-fascist protestor allegedly punched and stole a MAGA hat from a Milo and Trump supporter. This supporter later found and shot that protestor.

On inauguration night, while giving an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Company, white nationalist Richard Spencer was punched by a masked anti-fascist protestor.

The last event (but not the first two) provoked wide debate.  Some argue that it is a bedrock principle of America that free speech should not be met with violence or even threats to violence or giggling at remixes of violence. Other argue that punching Nazis is as American as Captain America and Indiana Jones, and we should celebrate it, honor it and wish for more.

I’ll begin by saying I am generally very supportive of free speech. I think in many cases being uncomfortable can lead to greater learning, and that engaging with people we disagree with, even when they are provocatively extreme. I think arguing with people in good faith makes us both smarter, but also can makes for a better society when we realize our opponent is arguing in good faith with good intentions. And I firmly believe that most of us have good faith. I want my students to confront the best version of the arguments they disagree with (and I want to as well) because it makes for better, smarter arguments and better, stronger democratic society.

Also, I have a hard time with that punching video. I don’t enjoy such violence, and the giddy celebration of it honestly makes me queasy. I have been punched without expecting it on two occasions in my life, once in elementary school, and once from behind in a soccer game in my teens. I find something deeply troubling about sucker punching as political action. I worry about what happens when Nazis are punched, protestors are shot and police escalate violence in order to impose law and order.

But…

I am beginning to be persuaded of the limits of my support of free speech. I am starting to see how free speech has already proven inadequate to protect the vulnerable among us and therefore protect our democracy. Fascist hate speech is a special case, and it demands we recognize the limits of the wonderful self-correcting calculus of free speech. We must deny fascism a platform, punching Nazis is a tactic in service of that goal. This is not a tactic I would normally support, but so many of our normal tactics to contain fascism have failed.

Respect for free speech and engagement doesn’t seem to work with fascism. It doesn’t work when your opponent advocates “peaceful ethnic cleansing” and uses their free speech to bully and harass individual marginalized people and marginalized populations. It doesn’t work when you think you are arguing with an opponent within a framework where you both value the constraints and supports that democratic institutions provide. The proverbial “fire” in a crowded theater is an inadequate metaphor. Insidious fascist free speech is “the type of people in this theater are a unique threat and should be encouraged to leave… these race or religion or sexuality of people who are a danger to our society do not belong in “our” society” … “they are not leaving so we need to take steps to remove them…” This speech uses its platform not to confirm the place of democratic institutions, but to undermine them.

I strongly believe that universities are special places. I believe students should be allowed to say stupid things while they are learning, and that teachers (and guest speakers) should be able to say provocative things and study provocative topics. I often feel that the correct answer to provocative, but misguided free speech is more, well-guided speech. But what about when free speech is not just intolerant individual bullying and harassment, but argues for drastically expanding and energizing discrimination by race, religion or gender? I can’t help but feel that such speech deserves special recognition and a new set of tools to combat it, because blanket support of free speech and tolerance of opposing views fails to contain hate.

I think the critical missing link in our dialogue about free speech (and punching Nazis) is the rise of hate speech and our lack of realization that society does not simply need to protect free speech, but to specifically and positively protect the vulnerable. Nazi-punchers and protestor-shooters (there will be more, how could there not?) are not merely bad actors to ignore and trust the system to address. This escalation of the stakes of free speech debate is a reminder of the consequences of our collective failure to deny hate a platform as it was building it. Now that the head of Brietbart, Stephen Bannon, is a top White House advisor, we are witnessing what happens when we allow fascists to hijack free speech.

I find Milo’s speech at that University of Wisconsin rally and the email from Adelaide Kramer alternately both chilling and inspiring. First, chilling. This is specifically targeting an individual vulnerable student for embarrassment, ridicule and worse from someone who is known to specialize in such harassment in the past. Adelaide Kramer did not need “#UWMStandsTogether” as the UW-M President Mone wrote. She needed her community to realize that to protect the legitimacy and viability of their institution, they needed to deny fascism a platform. They needed to realize that their responsibility to protect the vulnerable members of their community needed to overwhelm their understandable devotion to free speech. “Celebrating diversity” (as the President’s letter advises) invites fascists like Milo in, and will prove to be wholly inadequate for fighting the incredible power our country has granted them especially if we treat their speech as equal and protected.

Let me pause for a second and offer some evidence to my claim that transgender Americans are vulnerable and need protection. To some this may be self-evident, but let’s look hard at what it means to be marginalized in our society. A survey of transgender Americans was released in December. 27,715 people completed it. For a group that is a relatively small percentage of the US population, this is an incredibly large number of respondents. One in ten reported that a family member was violent towards them because of their transgender status. Forty percent report having attempted suicide. Roughly one in three reported having experienced homelessness. Another report estimated that 1 in 2600 young black trans women are murdered, more than 10 times the overall rate for that age. Milo uses a slur to identify Adelaide and mentions that this makes him politically incorrect, but this survey shows that his casual disgust of transgender Americans is not about hurt feelings, but represents a callousness about people’s safety and their very lives.  These people do not need more free speech, they need a society that accepts them as full citizens and protects their access to public goods and public laws. This survey is a reminder that this is not the case.

So, here’s my worry, and my prediction: if we continue to value free speech so absolutely that it overwhelms other values, such as protecting the vulnerable, many people who have experienced their misery being ignored, will now see it openly mocked and celebrated. More of them, and their supporters, will start to think it is time to punch the fascists who have taken this next step. This will leave the rest of us (the well-intentioned neglecters) with a choice, do we decide to protect the vulnerable and their allies, who have lashed out violently? Or do we opt for law and order in the empty hopes that justice will come later? I don’t think there is any doubt which path the current government will take. Many have already said “it is much too early to punch fascists.” After all, we are not at war (yet). But when that side treats advocates of a tolerant, civil and democratic society as the enemy, I worry it might be too late.

Let me close with the inspiring part. The kind of bravery that I want to celebrate, the kind of bravery I want us to stand up and notice, is in Adelaide Kramer’s email to the Chancellor of UW-Milwaukee (and cc’ing hundreds). In all her cussing fury, she is fighting for her rights, but also fighting for a just and equitable society which grants equal citizenship to all its members, recognizing when some need protection. But we need to deserve her bravery. We need to deserve her hope. We must do so by fighting for her, and when we do so, we are fighting to preserve the very institutions that support the free speech we claim to value.

I started with a provocative headline, but I have come to believe that this is a necessary approach if we want to design policies and systems that bend the arc of our moral universe towards justice.

Let me start with a thought experiment. Say you have a large building which, for some weird historical reason, needs its electrical system updated on the eastern half of the building. This will be a long and inconvenient process for many of the building’s denizens. One of the unfortunate consequences of this update will be that even though it is winter, all of the bathrooms in the eastern half of the building will be without heat for weeks at a time.  Bummer! As a manager in such a building, you would of course apologize and ask for people’s understanding. It is still possible to use the bathrooms, they will just be quite cold. All of us building citizens are in this together, and this completely arbitrary east-west distinction means some of us are unlucky. Our eastern colleagues can exit the building and use the bathrooms in the portable trailer (taking about 15 minutes), or they can also walk across the building to use the bathrooms on the western half of the building (taking about 10 minutes). Ok, so far so good. But out of the blue, some troublemaker calls this poor building manager sexist! How could this be? As it turns out, again, through some sort of weird historical accident, (maybe back in the 50s the secretarial pool was on the eastern half and the manager’s offices were on the western half, not such a strange thing) all of the women’s bathrooms are on the eastern half of the building and the men’s bathrooms on the western half. Through no ill intent on behalf of the manager (who could in fact be a woman herself) this perfectly normal maintenance procedure is all of a sudden bogged down in controversy.

Hopefully you would stop me and say, “Cedar, no competent building manager would be ignorant of that last fact, that the women’s bathroom are all on the eastern half. Their intent might be good, but they would know which bathrooms are which and act accordingly. For example, they wouldn’t suggest walking across the building if all of the restrooms on the other half were mens’ bathrooms.”

And I would agree. But it doesn’t affect the big message of my story.

Let’s recap just to make the dimensions of my metaphor clear: The building manager has no sexist intent, indeed, has good intentions, just wants to update the building. The building is designed (as every building is) incorporating seemingly weird historical accidents. But, despite this good intent, the outcome of this update (based on the weird historical accident, not the building manager’s intent) will be extreme inconvenience (40 degree toilet seats or a 15 minute walk) for a specific subpopulation of the building (women) who also just happened to have historically struggled for equal consideration, both in this very building as well as society at large.

Moral: When the discriminatory outcomes of our policies are known or even knowable, we should pay attention to the outcomes, and make particular efforts to address these outcomes.

So, to return to my provocative title, I see no benefit in restricting the incendiary term “racist” to the unknowable intentions and motivations of leaders and great benefit to identifying racism (and discrimination) in knowable outcomes and effects. We need to recognize identity politics because we have always had it.

When the discriminatory effects of what we now treat as weird historical accidents are knowable, taking an approach which ignores those outcomes and ignores that history is worthy of being labeled as discrimination and addressed as such.

Because in fact, our history is not as full of accidents as a colorblind approach would lead us to believe. Huh, all the black people just happen to live on the side of town with fewer municipal services, weird. Huh, the school that the black children go to has a crumbling building and doesn’t have money for books, weird. The white leaders of 100 years ago, of 80 years ago, of 60 years ago designed this society. The white male executives of those buildings approved those plans and even changed them. Our society, like that building, did not just happen but had choices and architects.

Returning to our unrealistically ignorant building manager, you would no doubt agree that being unaware of which bathrooms were men’s and which were women’s would not qualify as simple even-handed naivete: “I don’t see gender.” No, that would be willful ignorance. But the same is now true for many of our policies. We know that raising the retirement age to 69 would have a disparate impact. We know our schools are separate and unequal. With a President who avoids intelligence briefings, denies science, and appoints Ben Carson for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and Rick Perry for Secretary of Energy, we are entering an age of willful ignorance.

It is time we recognized that colorblindness is not a form of fairness, but a form of ignorance. The opposite of colorblindness is not “special treatment” but awareness of history and awareness of the outcomes of our rules and policies. I am not sure what consequences this awareness will have. Is that 15-minute walk to the outside trailer an acceptable and adequate step? Should men’s bathrooms be temporarily reclassified? But the first step is acknowledging that the burdens of these changes will be borne unequally. Just as this history wasn’t blind to this, if we want to make our future more just, we need to design policies that counteract racism (and other forms of discrimination), not those that ignore it.

In other words, if we want justice, we need identity politics. If we want liberty, we need identity politics, because limits to liberty have never been colorblind. For a thorough extension of this point with regards to the causes and outcomes of the current election, read this great post by Jacob T. Levy.  Levy is no Bernie Sanders liberal, but a libertarian who was a vocal Gary Johnson supporter before the election. I’d love to quote more, but here is a good paragraph:

If you think—as I think any liberal who cares about liberty, whether classical, market, neo-, welfarist, Rawlsian, or whatever, must—that the combination of mass incarceration and aggressive policing amounts to a grave injustice, then you need to be able to think in race-conscious terms. What brought about this crisis? The war on drugs and police militarization, some readers will say. Okay, but what brought about the war on drugs and police militarization? The answer isn’t some simple intellectual mistake. The answer is deeply tied up in American racial politics.

This is not a partisan issue, if we want to design good policy with fair and positive outcomes, we need to acknowledge that to a country with our history, colorblindness is racism.