Are We All Black Americans Now?
Melissa Harris-Perry
The Nation: March 30, 2011
In the months following September 11, my colleague Cornel West offered this
insight: national political elites used the devastating attacks to promote
the "niggerization of the American people." West understood that long before
9/11, African-Americans were intimately familiar with terrorism. Through the
Jim Crow century, they were routinely and randomly brutalized and murdered
by well-organized groups of whites acting beyond the confines of the
official state but with the tacit consent of their society. Under the shadow
of lynching, black Americans learned what it meant to feel, as West
describes, "unsafe, unprotected, subject to random violence, and hated for
who they are." After 9/11 far too many Americans, unaccustomed to this sense
of collective intimidation, felt helpless to halt an unjustified war or the
erosion of civil liberties. Thus, whether or not they were black, Americans
were "niggerized" by the attacks.
In recent months, I have been reminded of Professor West's analysis because
one way to read our current moment is as a blackening of America. The
social, economic and political conditions that have long defined
African-American life have descended onto a broader population, and it has
been instructive to watch how the nation has responded.
Initially, conservatives argued that Tea Party activists had every right to
be disgusted with national leadership and to demand swift economic
intervention to combat the near 10 percent unemployment rate. Since the
mid-1970s, except for a brief dip between 1998 and 2002, unemployment among
African-Americans has routinely exceeded 10 percent, yet African-Americans
were rarely encouraged to blame systems or organize collectively. Instead
blacks were stereotyped as lazy and undeserving. This characterization has
been an effective ideological tool for politicians intent on limiting social
programs, cutting welfare, ignoring cities, slashing job training and
neglecting housing.
Within months, the Tea Party shifted its focus to the deficit. As it did,
policy debates about the poor and unemployed came to mirror decades of
discourse about black Americans. Extensions of unemployment insurance were
decried as "creeping socialism." Echoing theories of dependency leveled
against African-Americans for decades, one conservative blogger suggested
that extending unemployment benefits would create "a permanent entitlement
and would perpetuate unemployment." Perhaps, in this moment, Americans
understood how dangerously corrosive the characterization of the poor as
"idle" is for black people.
This past November the TSA introduced screening procedures that many
Americans-liberals and conservatives alike-deemed intrusive, random and
demeaning. But for decades urban police forces have regularly employed
race-based traffic stops and pedestrian stop-and-frisks in African-American
communities. These policing practices have done little to make neighborhoods
safer, but they have contributed to massive incarceration rates for black
men. Justifying their racially punitive behavior as a reasonable response to
potential crime, police forces have acted largely with the consent of white
Americans, some of whom later decried the TSA's new procedures. Perhaps, for
a moment, they felt the stinging humiliation that routinely accompanies
black life.
Few events more clearly demonstrated the blackening of America than the
standoff in Wisconsin. Like the nineteenth-century leaders of Southern
states who stripped black citizens of voting rights, public accommodation
and civic associations, Wisconsin's Republican majority dismantled the
hard-won basic rights of Wisconsin workers. Like those Confederate leaders,
the Wisconsin GOP used intimidation, threats and even the police against
demonstrators and rival officials. As the saga unfolded, many Wisconsin
citizens felt stunned that their once-secure rights might be eliminated. For
a moment, perhaps, they glimpsed the experience of black men and women who
watched the shadow of Jim Crow blot out the promises of emancipation.
The 1880s were also the decade when efforts to create corporate personhood
were initiated by wealthy railroad barons. In a 2010 article, James and
Tomilea Allison (psych professor at Indiana University and former mayor of
Bloomington, respectively) traced how these corporate interests
misrepresented past cases so that the Supreme Court eventually relied on
nonexistent precedent to twist Fourteenth Amendment protections intended for
newly freed slaves to instead offer shelter for profiteering corporations.
More than a century later, these arguments were crucial to the *Citizens
United* decision, which putatively endowed extraordinarily wealthy
corporations with an "equal" right to electoral influence but in practice
gave them breathtakingly unequal representation. Perhaps, as they are
reduced to a fraction of a citizen, other Americans now catch a glimpse of
what it means to be codified as only three-fifths of a person.
Today corporate greed, conservative ideology, manufactured right-wing
populism and progressive complicity are making more and more Americans into,
as Professor West might characterize them, "niggers." Rather than try to
escape the pain of experiencing some small familiarity with blackness,
Americans could choose to learn from generations of African-Americans who
resisted dehumanizing processes of domination and inequality. During the
2008 election Obama's detractors tried to smear him by suggesting that
"Hussein" was a terrorist's moniker. As a demonstration of solidarity,
thousands of Americans informally declared that they too would be known by
the middle name Hussein. It was purely symbolic, but it rested on a belief
in the power to change meaning by embracing rather than eschewing that which
is labeled subordinate, alien, dangerous and shameful. By embracing our
collective blackness, perhaps we can find the fortitude and creativity
necessary to face the continuing erosion of our national social safety net
in the face of a persistent economic crisis.
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