secret de Polichinelle

Or, the danger of reading Derrida.

What is a secret?--Jacques Derrida, On The Name

A secret de Polichinelle is a secret that is a secret for no one. Leave it to the French to have a good phrase for it. Racism is our secret de Polichinelle, in America. Wendell Berry calls it our "hidden wound." But hidden from whom? From Richard Cohen, apparently. From whites in general, certainly. Perhaps the problem is that we don't have a definition of "racism" we can all agree on. Perhaps it is because we "whites" don't want to have a definition of racism.

To "whites" in America, racism is not a secret, it's a sickness; it's a diseased state of mind that doesn't even allow us to say "n---er" in public anymore. (Someone here in Houston likes to call local bookstores and ask if they have Dick Gregory's 1960's memoir, just to get the employee to say the word on the phone.) We prefer to call it the "N" word, to prove we would never harbor even a racist thought. "Racism," after all, is the Ku Klux Klan, and cross-burning, and white supremacy. It is not negligence, incompetence, or simple lack of attention. Racism is worse than that.

Or at least, it's hidden from us. "Us," of course, being the people accused of being racists. It is hidden from us because racism is a meanness we don't possess. It is a cruelty we would never knowingly inflict. And yet, if we intentionally hide from ourselves the results of our actions, if we knowingly choose not to know about the very people we have to exploit for our comfort, are we absolved because we didn't mean to be cruel?

How many of us enjoyed the music and culture and food of the French Quarter, and didn't spare a thought about the people who made it possible? And will we spare them a thought for long, now? How many of us, like George W. Bush, never spared a thought for people kept conveniently on the other side of the highway, the river, the railroad tracks, the boundaries of the neighborhoods that attraced the tourists? Did we think about how they had to suffer, to sing the blues? Or did we just admire the music and the culture and the food, and never stop to think where it came from, the lives the people led who gave us a place for our tourism, our curiosity. Twenty years ago I saw a young boy play jazz trumpet next to St. Louis Cathedral, a boy no more than 10 playing to make Wynton Marsalis weep with envy. He played for coins. I wonder where he is now.

Is racism really all that different from negligence? Is it only our intent that makes us good, not our actions? If I don't think I'm a racist, can I not be one? What is racism anyway, except an attitude, or a system, or a morality, that depends on, or exploits, or accepts, "race" as a determining factor of another person's worth? Was it racism when FEMA didn't begin to get aid to New Orleans until 5 days after the hurricane destroyed the levees? Or was it just incompetence? Was it racism when FEMA handed out $21 million in recovery funds to people in Miami after a hurricane struck Florida in an election year? When no one in Miami suffered damage from the storm, because it didn't strike Miami? Was it incompetence, or negligence?

We want racism to be all about intent, because then we let ourselves off the hook. We want racism to be all about what we mean, because then we can absolve ourselves from fault. Was it racism that made us enjoy New Orleans as tourists, but overlook the squalor and the despair that made the city Phalaris' bull? As we roasted them over the fire of our indifference and the capitalist system that served us so well and them so poorly, was it racism that made us enjoy the sweet music that came from their lips? If it was, we still cannot acknowledge it.

Racism is our secret de Polichinelle, but one we pretend no one even knows exists. Michael Brown and George W. Bush are not racists; they are, instead, incompetent. Much better to be incompetent than racist. Racism is the adjective we cannot stand to be attached to. Gretna, Louisiana was not racist; it was protecting its property. When 700 guests at a Hyatt were rescued by FEMA, it wasn't racism: it was your government at work, or perhaps it was just incompetence. As "white" people, we see a clear and identifiable difference. Because we never defend racism; it is the indefensible, the unforgivable, sin. But incompetence, well, that can be forgiven; that is, at least, understandable, and certainly not really anyone's fault. And so our racism is hidden; so we keep it secret. But it is a secret that is no secret; and it is hidden, only because we refuse to see it, even when it stares at us out of the national mirror of our TV.

If outrage were enough to change matters, the outrages of the response to Katrina, of the black faces crowded into the Superdome and the New Orleans convention center, of Michael Brown blaming the victims for their misery, or Michael Chertoff being "unaware" that there were any problems at the Convention Center even as CNN broadcast pictures of corpses there, would have been enough already to provoke a national wrath that would have brought down the whole sorry house of cards on every politician responsible for this nightmare. But then the responsibility would come back to us; and we don't like for that to happen. We understand that power brings responsibility, but we don't want responsibility; we only want the power. We want to be free to wield our national will in the world, and never to be accountable for the consequences. We still grieve our foolishness in Vietnam, but we don't accept responsibility for being there. In our national life, we blame anyone but ourselves. We grieve the unforgivable sin of slavery, not because we were slave holders once, but because our slave holding was based on race. Because we decided the value of a person based not on our conquest of them, but merely on our ability to hold power over them, and merely because of skin color, of pigmentation. No one else in history had committed a sin quite like that; no one else had built a country on it quite like that. No one else in modern history continues to sustain their country on that. Our nation is racist to the core. That is our secret de Polinichelle. That is why it is so disgusting we cannot bear to name it.

We cannot bear the truth.

If words were enough to change matters, Maureen Dowd (also here, and again here) and Anne Rice and Harold Meyerson would have already made the earth stand still. In fact, to just wander back through my own archives for this month is to renew the anger and disbelief and be amazed at how much has already gone cold, turned to ashes, plunged us into Lent without benefit of Mardi Gras. Thje Economist called it "The Shaming of America." But can we be shamed? Wouldn't that require accepting responsibility, first? Are we ready for that?

What it all comes down to
Is that I haven't got it all figured out just yet
I've got one hand in my pocket
And the other one is giving the peace
sign
--Alanis Morissette

Maybe that's the best we can do, right now, with our dirty little secret.

"But...Muh States Rights!"

I'm going to come back to this, because I scanned just the comments by John Quincy Adams and knew I had to slow down and read it very carefully, and now (I mean in this moment, for me) is not the time for that.   

Well, here; you can see what I mean:

But if it so be so, as to the mere question of the right between master and slave, it is of tremendous concern to you that this little cluster of slave owners should possess, besides their own share in the representative hall of the nation the exclusive privilege of appointing two fifths of the whole number to the representatives of the people.  

This is now your condition, under the delusive ambiguity of language and of principles, which begins by declaring the representation of the popular branch of the legislature a representation of persons, and then provides that one class of persons shall have neither part nor lot in the choice of their representatives;  but their elective franchise shall be transferred to their masters,  and the oppressors shall represent the oppressed.  

The same perversions of the representative principle pollutes the composition of the colleges of electors of President and Vice President of the United States, and every department of the government of the Union is thus tainted at its source by the gangrene of slavery.

This is the "hidden wound" Wendell Berry writes of, in American history; our secret de Polichinelle.  And still we insist on hiding it from ourselves.  And are surprised when it bursts open again, and denounce attention to it as "woke," turning the word into an euphemism for our own racism and fear of a brown planet and of the "other" we have treated so brutally, fear mostly that what goes around comes around, and "justice" means we face the fate we dealt to them for so long.

And why Greg Abbott is making so much noise about an "invasion" and protecting his state from the brown people that white people took it away from (upon establishing the Republic, Texans quickly set about ejecting, eradicating, and removing all non-white person, except slaves, from the premises.  The beat goes on. Does Abbott really fear an "invasion"? No; but he knows a good political scare when he sees one.).

You can see why I need to read it carefully myself; the whole post, not just the quotes. 

And one more thing...

Scout Prime is right:

We went to great pains to recover every little bit of human remains at Ground Zero but in Black America we won't even bother to pick up bodies. This is an outrage. That practically no one is saying so is even more outrageous. How quickly we forget.

The secret de Polichinelle. The wound that is hidden only because we hide it from ourselves.

Not Only the Poor will always be with you....

I was going to respond to jane's comment below, but decided it was leading to something larger.

Yesterday I went to a luncheon of a local business group to hear our parish's disaster-preparedness manager give a talk. The man is our local voice in the wilderness about preparedness, and some folks don't believe his dire warnings about the possiblities for a catastrophic flooding situation in our town. I believe him. He says, "Get the hell out," and that's what I plan to do.

I asked if anyone had thought of a plan similar to the WPA after the depression of the thirties, putting local people to work on recovery projects or a program like the Marshall Plan after WWII. One man piped up, "Those people won't work." I have heard many, many racist remarks recently.

My sister sent me an email with a picture titled "Why There Was No Looting in Texas". It's a picture of about a dozen smiling, white guys with their guns holding a sign which reads, "Drunks With Guns; U Loot; We Shoot." Really funny.

The reason I asked the question below, is because this is an issue of race and class, two things we are supposed to "ignore" in America.

Much of the violence in New Orleans, we now know, was grossly exaggerated, and not all of it due to the conditions or the panic of the people trapped in the city at the time:

A week after the floodwaters poured into the city, an Arkansas National Guardsman told The Times-Picayune of New Orleans that soldiers had discovered 30 to 40 bodies inside a freezer in the convention center's food area. Guardsman Mikel Brooks told the newspaper that some of the dead appeared to have met violent ends, including "a 7-year-old with her throat cut."

When the convention center was swept, however, no such pile of bodies was found.

Per Amy Goodman, the Wall Street Journal has reported that much of the looting apparently occurred under the auspices of police seeking much-needed supplies from flooded stores, and the District Attorney of Orleans Parish says two bodies were recovered, one apiece, from the Superdome and the Convention Center (despite reports the Superdome was so violent even the National Guard troops there fled in terror). It is still our secret de Polichinelle (is it really an accident that the National Guardsman who reported that false horror were from Arkansas, while most of those trapped in the city were black?). We are still circling it, like water circling a drain. We are still facing it, and still hoping it will go away. We are still determined to put more energy into protecting what we "own," than in taking care of those we are responsible for.

Atrios brings us to the issue of Bill Bennett, and the fact that we still talk about racism in coded terms. New Orleans exposes the source of our racism, and, as ever, it has to do with property: with who owns what, and why. Basil named it rightly, although the word has so much sting we don't like to use it now: it is avarice. It is as American as racism and apple pie, and it seems we can't pay enough attention to it. But is is greed, pure and simple:

THEY say: whom do I wrong by keeping my property? What, tell me, is your property? Where did you find it and brought it to your life? Just like someone in the theatre, who had a seat and then stopped those who entered, judging that what lies common in front of everyone to use, was his own: rich men are of the same kind. They first took possession of the common property, and then they keep it as their own because they were the first to take it. If one had taken what is necessary to cover one's needs and had left the rest to those who are in need, no one would be rich, no one would be poor, no one would be in need.

Isn't it true, that you fell off the womb naked? Isn't it true, that naked you shall return to the earth? Where is your present property from? If you think that it came to you by itself, you don't believe in God, you don't acknowledge the creator and you are not thankful to Him who gave it to you. But if you agree and confess that you have it from God, tell us the reason why He gave it to you.

Is God unjust, dividing unequally the goods of our life? Why are you rich, while the other is poor? Isn't it, if not for any other reason, in order for you to gain a reward for your kindness and faithful providence, and for him to be honored with the great awards of patience? But you, having gathered everything inside the bosom of avarice which is always empty, do you think that you wrong no one, while you strip so many people?

Who is the greedy person? It's him, who doesn't content himself with what he has. And who strips? He who steals what belongs to the others. And you think that you are not greedy, and that you do not strip the others? What was granted to you, in order for you to take care of the others, you took it and you made it your own. What do you think?

He who strips the clothed is to be called a thief. How should we name him, who is able to dress the naked and doesn't do it, does he deserve some other name? The bread that you possess belongs to the hungry. The clothes that you store in boxes, belong to the naked. The shoes rotting by you, belong to the bare-foot. The money that you hide belongs to anyone in need. You wrong as many people as you [are] able to help.

Do you know what it means...?

By the way, if this is true:

Louisiana's top hurricane experts have rejected the official explanations for the floodwall collapses that inundated much of New Orleans, concluding that Hurricane Katrina's storm surges were much smaller than authorities have suggested and that the city's flood- protection system should have kept most of the city dry.

...[W]ith the help of complex computer models and stark visual evidence, scientists and engineers at Louisiana State University's Hurricane Center have concluded that Katrina's surges did not come close to overtopping those barriers. That would make faulty design, inadequate construction or some combination of the two the likely cause of the breaching of the floodwalls along the 17th Street and London Avenue canals -- and the flooding of most of New Orleans.

In the weeks since Katrina drowned this low-lying city, there has been an intense focus on the chaotic government response to the flood. But Ivor van Heerden, the Hurricane Center's deputy director, said the real scandal of Katrina is the "catastrophic structural failure" of barriers that should have handled the hurricane with relative ease.

"We are absolutely convinced that those floodwalls were never overtopped," said van Heerden, who also runs LSU's Center for the Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes.

...[T]the researchers have strong evidence that Katrina's subsequent surge from the north was several feet shy of the height that would have been necessary to overtop the 17th Street and London Avenue floodwalls. It was the failures of those floodwalls that emptied the lake into the rest of the city, filling most of New Orleans like a soup bowl.

Then New Orleans died because it was poor, and because it had no political clout. Unable to pay for levees itself, unable to muster the political clout for "pork-barrel" funding for flood control or even to influence preservation of wetlands in southern Louisiana, New Orleans died because of the "American system." Because we believe in "every man for himself" and we are comfortable tolerating third-world conditions in our own national backyard if it means we who have the power are taken care of. New Orleans died because Chief Sitting Bull pegged us: "The love of possession is a disease with them."

Or maybe it was just indifference; or incompetence; but surely, certainly, absolutely: it wasn't racism.

Because we all liked what New Orleans had to offer. We just didn't want to pay the real cost of it. We may be cheap. But we are compassionate.

That's our secret de Polichinelle.

Points for a Discussion

Following from the preceding post, Mr. Coates' argument deserves careful consideration beyond the question of "who will save us from this troublesome sin?"

For Trump, it almost seems that the fact of Obama, the fact of a black president, insulted him personally. The insult intensified when Obama and Seth Meyers publicly humiliated him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011. But the bloody heirloom ensures the last laugh. Replacing Obama is not enough—Trump has made the negation of Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own. And this too is whiteness. “Race is an idea, not a fact,” the historian Nell Irvin Painter has written, and essential to the construct of a “white race” is the idea of not being a nigger. Before Barack Obama, niggers could be manufactured out of Sister Souljahs, Willie Hortons, and Dusky Sallys. But Donald Trump arrived in the wake of something more potent—an entire nigger presidency with nigger health care, nigger climate accords, and nigger justice reform, all of which could be targeted for destruction or redemption, thus reifying the idea of being white. Trump truly is something new—the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president. And so it will not suffice to say that Trump is a white man like all the others who rose to become president. He must be called by his rightful honorific—America’s first white president.

This interests me for one particular reason:

“The most explosive charge in the Steele document was the claim that Trump hired prostitutes to defile a bed slept in by former President Obama,” Sipher wrote. “The important factor to consider is that Trump did not engage with the prostitutes himself, but instead allegedly sought to denigrate Obama.”

The former CIA station chief said those actions were consistent with Russian efforts to cultivate compromising material, and with Trump’s attitude toward his predecessor.

“If there is anything consistent in what we have learned about President Trump, it seems that his policies are almost exclusively about overturning and eradicating anything related to President Obama’s tenure,” Sipher wrote. “In this sense, he is akin to the ancient Pharaohs, Byzantine and Roman Emperors like Caligula, who sought to obliterate the existence of their predecessors, even destroying and defacing their images. Is it inconceivable that he would get some satisfaction from a private shaming of the former president?”

I don't mean to justify the Steele dossier in any way.  I just want to point to the obvious, to a fact so clear only fools would deny it (by which I mean writers for the Washington Post who wish to be "fair and balanced."  Or NPR reporters shocked, shocked, to find there is racism in this establishment!).  Did Trump pay prostitutes to urinate on a motel bed allegedly once slept in by Obama?  I have no way of knowing; but it wouldn't surprise me in the least if he did.  And that's the point.  Mr. Coates is right; Donald Trump is our first white President.  He wasn't elected on the back of economic anxiety or fear of a rising non-white majority; he was elected to repudiate the black man who preceded him.  And he's working hard to undo everything Obama did.

That is truly his political ideology.  It is, as Mr. Coates points out, the ideology of white supremacy.  An ideology that runs deep in American culture.  Mr. Coates has more to say on the "economic argument" regarding whites (never blacks, Latinos, Hispanics, etc.), but two paragraphs will suffice to give you the idea:

When David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, shocked the country in 1990 by almost winning one of Louisiana’s seats in the U.S. Senate, the apologists came out once again. They elided the obvious—that Duke had appealed to the racist instincts of a state whose schools are, at this very moment, still desegregating—and instead decided that something else was afoot. “There is a tremendous amount of anger and frustration among working-class whites, particularly where there is an economic downturn,” a researcher told the Los Angeles Times. “These people feel left out; they feel government is not responsive to them.” By this logic, postwar America—with its booming economy and low unemployment—should have been an egalitarian utopia and not the violently segregated country it actually was.

But this was the past made present. It was not important to the apologists that a large swath of Louisiana’s white population thought it was a good idea to send a white supremacist who once fronted a terrorist organization to the nation’s capital. Nor was it important that blacks in Louisiana had long felt left out. What was important was the fraying of an ancient bargain, and the potential degradation of white workers to the level of “negers.” “A viable left must find a way to differentiate itself strongly from such analysis,” David Roediger, the University of Kansas professor, has written. 

Our national secret de Polichinelle, the secret that is a secret to no one, but that we must keep to keep the truth hidden from ourselves.  Mr. Coates goes on to point out we use this economic argument to discuss our politics:  the problem of class is the root problem of America; if we solve that, a la Bernie Sanders or even Hillary Clinton, then all will be well.

This notion—raceless antiracism—marks the modern left, from the New Democrat Bill Clinton to the socialist Bernie Sanders. Few national liberal politicians have shown any recognition that there is something systemic and particular in the relationship between black people and their country that might require specific policy solutions.

My own analysis, that even specific policy solutions won't solve the problem, that the approach of Dr. King, an approach based in Christianity, is more sanguine, more wise, more likely to produce the change we need, makes me agree and disagree with Mr. Coates.  But certainly the solutions we are being offered by politicians are not radical, even if we are told they are (too radical, usually, because "radical" means "crazy and unworkable" rather than getting to the root of the matter), because the root of the matter is in us; not even in the government we allow to exist.  The root of the problem is in our hearts and minds.  Dr. King made his appeal there, and took what legislation he could get as help along the way.  But he didn't rest after the Civil Rights Act, or the Voting Rights Act, or any of the other legislation of the "Great Society."  We did, though, and wondered why that wasn't enough, and a few of us, like Mr. Coates, wonder what more government, which works in policies, can do.

I think we have to reach people; and Dr. King's sense of ministry, of mission, of working with God, of being part of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, shouldn't be discarded, but should be upheld.  Mr. Coates probably wouldn't agree with me on that; but it could be points for a discussion.