In Search of the Zeitgeist: Tea Parties, U.S. Racial Formations, The Economic Crisis, and the Ever-Evolving Present

We are living in tumultuous times. The kinda of times that get only more and more turbulent until some serious change in the nature of society emerges on the other side.

The mainstream media is not connecting the dots to expose the extent of economic devastation in this country (let alone elsewhere in the world). Davey D calls the current economic crisis a terrorist attack from the country's elite on the middle and working classes--an economic bomb and coup--so that maybe the gravity of the situation will sink into our comprehension.

Keeping in mind that there are about 3oo million Americans, David Degraw's Alternet article documents that 50 millions Americans are living in poverty, 1 in 5 U.S. households don't have enough money to buy food, over 50 million Americans don't have healthcare, bankruptcies are skyrocketing (largely due to medical costs for insured people), billions of dollars been lost in retirement funds and home values, 5 million families have lost their homes since 2007 (and another 8 million are projected to in the next four years), 3 million Americans are houseless, 2.3 million Americans are incarcerated (and millions more are subject to the penal system through parole, probation, and family members), over 30 million Americans are un- or under-employed, those with jobs are having to work longer and longer hours, and state governments are rapidly running out of money for increasingly needed unemployment and welfare services. These stats don't even begin to mention the psychological stress this brings to all walks of life, accumulating and spreading like a virus. Nor do they visibilize the racialization and feminization of poverty, how women often end up bearing the majority of the burden--from childcare to securing an income to holding it all together mentally. And never forget that the 12 million residents of this soil are denied the basic rights and opportunities of residency or citizenship. People are stressed and angry! (White dude just suicide bombed the IRS. Profile the whites!!)

Did I mention that the term "jobless recovery" enrages me.

This crisis has given birth to the Tea Party movement, which can most quickly be summed up as a movement of conservative white people freaked out by the economic crisis and the accelerating erosion of whiteness as the dominant culture of the day. Honestly, it's much larger than I understood it to be. It's impossible to pinpoint its size, but Frank Rich guesstimates Sarah Palin's base to be one third of the country, indicating that the Tea Partiers are not an insignificant force. Coastal liberals are quick to write off Tea Parties as a lunatic fringe--i.e. the birthers--but what those of us on the left must remember from our own experiences is that the media loves to the focus on only the looniest elements of social movements. No matter how much we disagree with them, they cannot be paternalistically dismissed. In Rich's Op-Ed he derides the liberal establishment for making fun of Palin's keynote at the recent Tea Party Convention (the cheat-sheet on her hand to be specific), noting that they are playing into her highly strategic anti-elitist posturing. As Rich points out, Palin strikes a chord when she chastises the hundred million dollar bonuses being funneled into the bank accounts of those deeply implicated in the devastation mentioned above. Meanwhile Obama is defending the bonuses and bailouts in what Rich calls his "tone-deaf" interview.

The Tea Party movement is a complex arrangement of factions and ideologies that I don't have the space or time to explore here. I'm not opposed to some of the populist beliefs they superficially espouse, such as the desire to localize and federate power, distrust of federal surveillance, and a deep skepticism of the economic elite, a la the Federal Reserve. Aaron Russo, Alex Jones, and Congressman Ron Paul have kept these libertarian beliefs and right-wing conspiracy theories alive and well on the internet, and they're interesting to check out (Zeitgeist, anyone?). This is what many Tea Partiers in the NY Times article on the movement claim to be "waking up" to.

But at the core of the this movement's ideology is reactionary, racist, xenophobic, WHITE NATIONALISM. This needs to be made clear. This is what right-wing populism is. This is why centralized state power is easier for them to criticize when its figurehead is a multiracial black man.

Kil Ja Kim is one of the most important writers I've read, and I intend to address her essay "Connecting the Dots: Michael Moore, White Nationalism, and the Mulit-Racial Left" later in this piece, but for now, I would like to borrow her and Kenyon Farrow's definition of white nationalism, which they use to describe Michael Moore's leftist politics:

"Some will be confused by our use of white nationalism since it’s a term usually reserved for “extremist” organizations. To the contrary, we consider white nationalism to be normalized in US social relations since by white nationalism we mean the project of nation building that is driven by the experiences and history of white people White nationalism, however, is more than just being white-centric, per se. Rather, white nationalism is the project of maintaining or expanding the white nation—whether established along state lines or as socially created communities or both—in ways that reflect the anxieties, fears, dread and aspirations of white people. "

"As such, in a white nationalist discourse, whiteness and US civil society as well as the racialized and sexualized project of citizenship that maintains both are not confronted. Instead the point of departure for a white nationalist approach is: what stands in white people’s way of being able to claim the nation as rightfully theirs? A white nationalist project therefore is fixated with what government forces, “subversiveness” from below or shifts in the global economy threaten the rights of the white citizenry."

Now, I'd like to turn to the likes of Jeff Chang, Hua Hsu, and Kai Wright, who remind us that our country is rapidly becoming what is called "MAJORITY-MINORITY"--which is sort of an obscure way of saying, "people of color are taking over and whites better learn to live in racially plural society or else flee to another planet." In "Glenn Beck’s worst nightmare: An America without minorities," Kai Wright elucidates right-wing populist ideology: "Sarah Palin’s 'real Americans,' Lou Dobbs’ birther madness, Glenn Beck’s conviction that President Obama 'hates' white people: All of this is best understood in context of the hard, cold reality of demographics. The Times’ Frank Rich said it best after the White House beer summit: 'Beer won’t cool the fury of those who can’t accept the reality that America’s racial profile will no longer reflect their own.'"

In "Retreat Into Whiteness," Jeff Chang writes, "Sheryll Cashin found that during the 1990s more than half of America's biggest cities became majority-minority" as white families continued to flee the cities for the suburbs, a government-facilitated tradition of racial apartheid since the 1940's. Furthermore, Chang writes, "While the left was fighting over identity in the 1980s and 1990s, what Rich Benjamin calls the 'democracy gap' emerged. This divide between young browning majorities and aging white electorates fired the slash-and-burn domestic agendas of the Reagan-Bush right and Clinton's 'centrism.'"

These recent decades of "post-Black Liberation" neoliberalization and "post-Racial Integration" suburban white flight have occurred hand-in-hand with the rise of hip-hop as an emphatically young, brown, and urban cultural movement, as documented in Chang's first book Can't Stop Won't Stop. Hip-hop's explosion into contemporary cultural dominance--and the constant tension between it's potential co-optation or subversion--mirrors the racial and generation shift Chang, Hsu, and Wright have been writing about. The concurrent "flight into whiteness," both geographically and culturally, is an important trend in understanding the Tea Party movement.

But that's not to let progressive (predominantly white) middle-class people off the hook so easily. Among whites, a "love" of hip-hop culture and the championing of leftist politics, certainly does not ensure an automatic alliance with the multiracial or explicitly Black left. In fact the divisions leave one wondering, as a friend points out, which is the more important ideological polarity in our country: left vs. right or black vs. white? In "Connecting the Dots: Michael Moore, White Nationalism, and the Mulit-Racial Left," Kim and Farrow criticize the white nationalism exemplified by Michael Moore and argue that his "investment in citizenship and democracy doesn’t question how, as Joy James puts it, in racialized societies such as the US, the 'plague of criminality, deviancy, immorality, and corruption is embodied in the black' and 'the dreams and desires of a society and state will be centered on the control of the black body.'” Deeply historicizing their argument, they write that "Blackness functions as anti-citizen to give coherence to the project of multiracial American citizenship...While there are differences between Moore and the multiracial left that he lends support to, the two share similar tendencies. Most of today’s progressive movements, themselves critical of “stupid white men” in power, are also driven by the same fear of blackness, which put simply, is a lack of concern for Black people and instead more of an anxiety of being treated like them." (I encourage everyone to read their essay for a more comprehensive understanding of their argument.) It forces the questions not just about the nature of the white left but even the "multiracial" left: Will anti-blackness continue to undergird the "colorization" of America or will this shift truly be transformational?

A professor of mine who teaches about U.S. racial formations once mentioned that popular consciousness in the U.S. tends to associates white and Asian populations as privileged and black and Latino populations as subordinated, but she points out that contemporary scholarship shows that actually Latino and Asian groups tend to have the most in common with each other. This is why George Yancey writes that this demographic shift is really only the "colorization" of whiteness and still predicated on the dehumanization, isolation, and oppression of blackness.

Amidst the trends of transnational neoliberal urbanization and immigration, white self-segregation, hip-hop as cultural and political resistance, and the "colorization" of America, I am also interested in (because I am involved in) the rise of progressive young white people confused about their racial identities as they attempt a "flight from whiteness," a conversation started by Vassar professor Hua Hsu in the third section of his essay, "The End of White America." How can we understand, for example, the subject-positions and identities of progressive white youth in an emerging majority-minority nation? A friend reminds me that since the Beat Generation (and probably before) young whites have attempted a flight from whiteness into "more authentic" cultures. So the consumption of hip-hop in the white suburbs is nothing new. But what about an attempted political flight from whiteness, as evidence in whiteness studies and white anti-racism workshops? I find this a positive and necessary thing, but not without a critical eye. In The White Anti-Racist is an Oxymoron: An Open Letter to All 'White Anti-Racist," Kim offers a very compelling (constructive) critique of white "anti-racism." She reminds us that whiteness, and the pain it causes people of color, is not something white people cannot simply escape or deny, even when confronting it.

To be explored at a later date: the convergence and tensions between the youth cultural hegemonies of Hipsterdom and Hip-Hop (and Hippies?)

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Hsu notifies us of the official projected demographic tipping points: "According to an August 2008 report by the U.S. Census Bureau, those groups currently categorized as racial minorities—blacks and Hispanics, East Asians and South Asians—will account for a majority of the U.S. population by the year 2042. Among Americans under the age of 18, this shift is projected to take place in 2023, which means that every child born in the United States from here on out will belong to the first post-white generation." Or as Dr. Irizarry (just) said (at Wesleyan), "It's gonna happen about twenty years earlier in our schools."

Of course, the exact dates aren't important. What is important is that this significant shift in the racial demographics of America, which is propelled mostly by rapidly growing Latin@ communities, is largely generational and that we are in the midst of this transition. But as Hua Hsu reminds his readers, "The coming white minority does not mean that the racial hierarchy of American culture will suddenly become inverted." Numerical majorities and minorities aren't necessarily related to who has social and political power, which is why Shirley Wilcher (who spoke at Wesleyan on Wednesday on the state of Affirmative Action today) reminds us of South Africa, where the black population has always been a majority numerically, but not politically. This is why many school are nearly 100% people of color, yet run by white structures of power. The democracy gap won't close by itself: the prison-industrial complex, the immigrant police state, and the dismantling of welfare and affirmative action are working hard to hold that gap in place. But people will and are forcing it close. Many argue that the election of Obama (though not necessarily his policies) marks the beginning of this political shift on a massive level.

What and where are the racial, social, and economic justice movements on the left? The list is too long to name--everything from environmental justice to prison abolition, urban agriculture to immigrant rights, green jobs to student of color-centric school reform, universal healthcare to universal welfare. And Russell Simmons just decided to take on the banks. The more pertinent question is how organized and visible is this countervailing power? The first--organization--is on the people. The second--visibility--is on the media. But the difference between the two is rapidly shrinking. Just think about how much media participation contributes to social movement organization--it's what riles up and connects people, what hails people as fed-up and powerful subjects. It's what protects people! (From state repression). This is the power of "New Media": Twitter, YouTube, blogs, Facebook, Google, and even old-fashioned email. The Tea Partier's are (somewhat) organized and visible in the mainstream media--no doubt because of white privilege. But where are the multiracial Block Partiers and House Partiers? Let's get those into the mainstream media. Let's get those more organized.

But who am I to talk about how organized the movements are? I'm just sitting here at on a liberal art college campus trying to stay warm and finish my homework. It'd be worth it to remember that, as one of my professors last year told me, the "surprise" immigrants rights protests of mostly "undocumented" immigrants in May 2006 was the largest one-day mobilization in U.S. history--AKA the vibrancy of Latin American social movements has arrived.

Yet the future remains to unfold. And current trends unfortunately indicate that the ruling class has no intention of de-escalating an increasingly repressive and militarized state.

What we must be keen to is that much of political organizing turns on the question of race. The Tea Party movement is a reactionary movement that is largely ahistorical (the key, I have learned, to sustaining racist, imperialist, capitalist, heteropatriarchal ideologies) which means it has the potential to be swept into a fascist fervor. Indeed, Tea Partiers in the NY Times article (albeit biased) claimed that until very recently they hadn't been paying attention to politics, let alone history! Many of them also seemed to obtain most of their daily news from the Goebbels-esque Fox News. Contrast this to the racial justice movement that has been fighting for dignity and justice ever since Europeans decided to go "exploring" over five centuries ago. Or for a more contemporary example: the housing crisis only became a national issue (this includes both Tea Partiers and the white left) when the it spilled over into the white middle class. For poor people of color, "housing crisis" might better describe the norm.

At the end of his essay, Chang writes, "What could happen if the emerging majority were joined by the white working class?" The answer is "a lot." But as Kim makes us aware, racial divisions are entrenched deeper than we might hope, even within the left. Nonetheless, this dialogue, Chang asserts, is "one of the few conversations really worth having."

Cross-racial alliance building within the left is the first step, and as an ever-dynamic process, a project worthy of more engagement. The white left needs to look more towards the movements and leadership of people of color. For more on this, I hope that audio from "Art, Hip Hop, Sports and Culture in the Obama Age," a panel discussion by Jeff Chang, Davey D, Dave Zirin, and Favianna Rodriguez at the San Francisco Socialism 2009 conference, will be posted here. In it, Rodriguez recounts a telling anecdote of a (white) anarchist current events blog that failed to mention, even once, Michael Jackson's passing. Where's the desire for alliance making in that?

EDIT: Dave Zirin video from conference.

In the social sciences, we talk a lot about the dialectic between personal (or group) agency and larger structural constraints. The vector we forget to think about, I think, is time. Structures of power--and people's positions and identities within them--would only be rigid if their were no such thing as an ever-evolving present. Change is indeed the only thing we can predict. Systemic ruptures happen.

The more optimistic among us hope that a racially pluralistic society would be something to strive for in and of itself, but the emerging "majority minority" America brings the necessity of actively engaging in a racially plural society--talkin' to my fellow white people here--to a whole new level. Issues of race will become increasingly impossible for white America to run away from or suppress.

Kai Wright concludes his essay by stating that, "Since Reconstruction, we have talked about race and opportunity in America as though it’s a problem for some of us only: Black people are poor; what should good white folks do to help them? That construction has always offered false comfort to a country that leverages deep inequality to fuel massive growth. But as we barrel toward the point where blacks and Latinos can no longer be dismissed as 'minority' populations, it’s a fantasy Americans cannot continue to indulge."

Recently, Henry Louis Gates Jr. said, "I’m looking forward to the time when we all look like Polynesians." In response, Jeff Chang candidly tweeted, "Meet my family. Word." Yet this day, if it is in store for us, it still far off. Until then, we must continue to ask the question, will blackness still function, as Kim and Farrow write, as the other against which multiracial democratic ideals are imagined and fought for? Or will the colorization of America usher in real social and political transformation?

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Post thoughts and comments! What do you think are the major political-social movement trends of the day?? What did I say that you question or disagree with? What did I leave out?

P.S. Look out for Jeff Chang's new book, Who We Be: The Colorization of America, whenever it comes out. This dude knows how to get the pulse of a generation.