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Of course. From conquest, to slavery, to colonialism and Jim Crow, racism and the system of white supremacy has been and is implicated in every breath and heartbeat of the United States. At least since the late 1600's, when whiteness as a concept and mark of automatic advantage was developed by the elite so as to divide poor whites from the people of color (black and American Indian) with whom they had substantially more in common, the battle lines have been drawn in an explicitly racial way. And today, we're still held hostage to this system.
So when we talk about "the healthiest economy in a generation," whiteness is implicated, because the reference point is clearly a white one: for millions of blacks, Latino/as, Native Americans, and recent Asian/Pacific immigrants, the recession never ended. They're still facing double-digit employment, crushing poverty, and wage stagnation at far higher rates than their white counterparts. Trickle-down Lite—a la Clinton—is no more effective than trickle-down Heavy was. The booming stock market doesn't mean shit to those on the bottom: in fact, it often means bad news, since it typically reflects a higher share of profit-taking by owners and investors, rather than workers.
When we talk about education, crime, the deficit, really anything, race is never too far below the surface, and whiteness is most definitely implicated, because the perspectives on all these issues which are considered normative are white perspectives. This is not to say there is an inherent "white perspective," but simply that whites experience America far differently, and more positively, than persons of color, and this shades our perception. Of course, the fact that whiteness is usually invisible, precisely because it is the "normative" and dominant perspective, makes what I just said incomprehensible to many people. That's why it has to be made visible.
Let's talk about a specific example. Sometimes it's difficult to clearly understand how race and class relate to each other, particularly—for me, anyway —with issues like urban migration and displacement. Cabrini Green, a housing project close to downtown Chicago, is being torn down. The residents of Cabrini Green, most of whom are black, are being forced to move, although the city has made no real plans to find affordable housing for them. Developers have been building up all around Cabrini Green for years now, attracting middle- to upper-class, predominantly white residents. So there's an obvious economic and apparently racist push to kick these people out of their homes. How do you see race and class interacting in a place and situation like Cabrini Green?
Well, this is consistent with the whole history of urbanization and the development of the U.S. housing market. Originally, the reason places like Cabrini Green were created the way they were—isolated, concentrated, high-rise complexes—was because city planners and the feds capitulated to the demands of whites who didn't want low-income persons of color living amongst them. So "the projects" were stuck in the heart of the city, while whites took FHA loans that were pretty much off limits to non-whites and hustled it out to the suburbs, all subsidized of course by the taxpayers.
Now that many of these well-off white folks recognize that the suburbs can be pretty stale and lifeless, devoid of any real culture in many cases—unless one considers Wal-Mart and strip-malls to be significant cultural icons—they want to come back to the cities. Only they still don't want to be around the folks they forced to stay in the cities in the first place—namely the poor and people of color—so they push them out through gentrification and a new round of "urban renewal," or whatever. Of course, the developers behind this, or the white folks moving back, or the politicians encouraging and even helping to finance this process, would deny to their death that such developments were racist. They would no doubt claim that unless a "better class of people" come to live in the cities, the urban areas will continue to crumble, and they would claim that they would welcome anyone in that "better class," irrespective of color.
But two points need to be made: first, given the historic and contemporary overlap between racial caste and class status, those who will be moving in to these new luxury apartments will be pretty melanin-challenged; and second, that such a "better class of people" is needed to save the cities is only true to the extent that the politicians have refused to provide the resources needed to lift up those living there now. Had the cities not been de-funded consistently since the late '70's, or had powerful folks cut loose with even a fraction of the money they'll now spend to attract business, commerce, and middle-class yuppies, much of the crisis could have been averted.
Ultimately, there's nothing wrong with tearing down Cabrini Green, or Robert Taylor, or any other "project" in any other city. They should be torn down. They should never have existed in the first place. But unless we're ready to do as much to subsidize housing for the poor as we do for the middle-class and wealthy through the mortgage interest-deduction, for example, then tearing these places down, and leaving people with no place to go, isn't just cruel, it's barbaric. It is the moral equivalent of "forced removal" in Apartheid South Africa, or Israel taking Palestinian land and homes, in 1948, 1967, and still today, to make room for new settlements and pushing the victims of these policies further and further out of sight.
One of the bios I read of yours, in the Speak Out! Speakers Bureau literature, said that you've "squared off against white supremacists, religious fundamentalists and noted conservatives..." What are some of your more memorable discussions or debates?
I guess the most memorable would be a 1992 confrontation on national TV against a Klan leader from Wisconsin. I was on stage, along with a former Klan family—Jan and Gary Ralston—who had left the Klan and now speak out against hatred and bigotry. And the Klan leader and his wife were beamed in by satellite. The show itself wasn't particularly memorable, but a few months after it aired, the Klansman hung up his robes, so to speak, and I later found out that a few dozen skinheads had quit the movement as well, at least in part because of the way the Ralstons and I had dismantled their arguments on that show. We didn't call these folks names, or yell at them; we simply discussed the way that whites have been tricked into buying into this mindset, and how it really makes most all whites worse off. This experience really made an impression on me: first off, that pretty much anyone is redeemable if you can try and reconnect them with their humanity; and secondly, that it was particularly important for me as a white person to do this work, since obviously racists aren't going to listen to the same arguments from a person of color.
Of course, there are times when I haven't the patience or the desire to try and help someone reconnect to their humanity, and so I just let 'em have it. Like recently, I was on the radio in Colorado Springs—which is pretty much the nerve center for the far right it seems—and this Nazi shit wanted to debate the Holocaust, or the Jewish Conspiracy, or whatever. And he obviously wasn't going to listen to anything constructive, so I just figured, screw it. And so I used the one weapon which can at least defuse an asshole like that and discredit him to other listeners; and that weapon is ridicule. He had started off by saying that he wasn't "some uneducated hick," because he was actually a successful accountant, so naturally, I asked him why, if he was such a good accountant, not to mention a hardworking member of the master race, did he seem to have so much time to spend sitting on the telephone, spewing nonsense over the radio? The show was in mid-March, and it seemed to me that with less than a month to go before tax day, he should be busy. Where was his work ethic? I also asked him if he could give me the local number for the Colorado Springs branch office of the Jewish Conspiracy, since I hadn't gotten my weekly royalty check for all the good work I do on their behalf.
Now you might think, O.K., that's funny, but what good did it do? Well, I'll tell you: caller after caller responded to say, thank God someone finally decided to take that guy on without playing his game. Apparently he calls in all the time, and baits people to respond to him intellectually, as if he had anything legitimate to say. For people of color who listen to his racist diatribes, and even whites of conscience, this puts them on the defensive and is quite disempowering. But by reversing the terms of the debate, and taking control of the discourse, we can use constructive ridicule to further the cause of social justice. Alinsky realized this fifty years ago and it's still true.
You live and work in the South. Do you think there are any differences in race relations in the South versus the North?
