“You can be angry, you an be outraged, but you need to stop being surprised.” That is what a retired coworker said to me one day when I was debriefing with her about a particularly frustrating discussion about racial equity in our classrooms. I had told her I was just so surprised how often so us white people changed the subject, refused even to engage.
So I’m thinking a lot about her words as I watch the United States fumble through this great public health crisis. Because I think there’s a group of us – lets say, “white liberal progressives” (in which I count myself) who really are continually surprised by Donald Trump’s utterly ignorant, amoral, racist, sexist evil leadership, and then also that the Republican Party, and their voters after them, will go along with it. “This has to be the breaking point!” we have been saying for 4 years. When he mocked the (disabled) reporter; when he attacked the (Middle Eastern) family of a soldier who had died in the service of his country when he was caught on tape bragging about grabbing women because he can, when he said a lot of (black and brown) immigrants come from “shithole countries”… and now, when to all reasonable appearances, he is doing about the worst job anyone in his position possibly could to coordinating the US’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. A few days ago he speculated about the use of disinfectants and UV light as possible solutions created by a “possibly brilliant” man he had just met with.
Look – stop being surprised. None of this is going to bring about his demise. None of this self-evidently racist, sexist, ignorant, anti-science chicanery will ever cause his supporters to “snap out of it.” They support him not in spite of all of this, but because of it. No one is fixing this problem for us. We – liberal progressives – are part of the problem, not outside of it.
So what’s going to happen? Not what should happen but what is? I think it’s depressingly clear. The starting point to me is two very obvious facts.
Fact #1: COVID-19 is disproportionately killing black people
As Charles Blow has very forthrightly argued, it’s already an easily disproved cliche that “the virus doesn’t discriminate.” No – biologically, it does not, but look at the published death-tolls. In Chicago, according to the Chicago Tribune, “About 68% of the city’s deaths have involved African Americans, who make up only about 30% of Chicago’s total population.” Structural racism is real, and that simple fact will mean this disease is and will continue to do much more of its damage to black people and other people of color, pretty much whatever is done at this point. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor begins “The Black Plague” with an aphorism: “When white America catches a cold, black America gets pneumonia.”
Now even though this is a catastrophe that is striking black communities much harder than white, I guarantee you “this virus doesn’t discriminate” is what the Democrats will run on in the fall. It’s what they’re using now to garner the kind of solidarity they think will get them where they need to get. That sort of colorblind blandness centrism is what modern Democrats reach for in times of crisis – and then get mad and “surprised” that “minority turnout” didn’t happen at the levels they needed.
So of course a lot of them were SURPRISED when Mitch McConnell declared recently that he saw no need to help the states. Surely this can’t be? Surely they wouldn’t be so base as to do THAT? Surely no one would let them get away with THAT? 45,000 people have died and here, it seems, we have the “let them eat cake” moment that precedes the guillotine.
Here’s is part of Andrew Cuomo’s response:
Just think of what [McConnell’s] saying. People died. 15,000 people died in New York, but they were predominately Democrats, so why should we help them? I mean for crying out loud. If there was ever a time for you to put aside your pettiness and your partisanship … that’s not who we are.”
Let’s change the wording just slightly. Imagine if he had replied “people died… but they were predominately Black and Latino, so why should we help them? That’s not who we are.” OF COURSE IT’S WHO WE ARE. Cuomo and the rest of the white Democratic establishment never says that out loud (except very obliquely when they go to Black churches, and never when they go to White ones), can’t even admit it about themselves, much less the history of the country. You could say what Andrew Cuomo said about any number of large-scale social problem in the United States since its inception. This is exactly who we are. When the victims are black and Latino, our country does little to help, but in fact usually exacerbates the problem. Nothing new there whatsoever.
McConnell is more or less announcing the GOP strategy going forward. We are not going to help the urban areas impacted by this. They don’t vote for us, they don’t want us in charge, and we don’t care about them.
Fact #2: We are not paying for testing
The government has very quickly and largely on a bipartisan basis spent about $3 trillion to combat COVID-19. Of that, a small, small fraction has been set aside for the development of testing infrastructure, even though a robust investment in testing is on every expert’s list of Things That Must Happen. Those in charge are preventing the full extent of the problem from being revealed – Why? Because they have a readily available narrative that works much better in the absence of any sort of reality-based examination – to whit: they have racism.
As DuBois said about reconstruction, “the landholders had one recourse, and that was to draw the color line and convince the native-born white voter that his interests lay with the planter-class and were opposed to those of the Northern interloper and the Negro.” This is perhaps THE fundamental truth about politics in the United States – always has been and perhaps always will be.
The way that happens here is really simple. This is a tremendously taxing psychic moment we are living through. Right now, the way a lot of the white population is reacting is with what seems to me to be honest, human concern. They support the shelter-in-place orders, by large numbers, and have not “rallied around the flag” because Trump is doing a uniformly shitty job of capitalizing on that humanity and channeling it into action.
So far so good, but behold, right on cue: raving, ignorant MAGA-hat-wearing mobs showing up in swing state capitals. The media reassures us that they are not a representative sample, and I’m sure their not. But what are they? A friend of mine used to say that bohemians are the shock-troops of urban gentrification. Well, the MAGA crowd are the shock-troops of the Republican electoral strategy. They look selfish and shortsighted, acting in foolish unison. But there’s a little bit of those MAGA crowds in the psyche of every white person in the United States, in every person who has ever decided to move to the suburbs, or reside “safely” in a expensive urban neighborhood with “good schools,” or greedily traded up in houses, apartments, home-equity loans, refinancings, foreclosure purchases, moved to lower-taxed jurisdictions, and so on and so forth. They just look uglier than us doing it, with their signs with spelling errors, and missing teeth. They know the secret of whiteness just as much as we do: we’re first, and if we’re not, we’re out.
See, the more the word gets out, based on limited testing data, about where this virus is, and who’s getting it (black and brown people) the more impatient America’s white suburban and rural and upper-class urban population will get to let “what the science tells us” actually dictate our response. Right now, there is widespread confusion about who is and is not at risk. As the months drag on, and we see more black and brown people dying, different parts of the white population will each, for different reasons, begin to lose their genuine human concern. Or better – that concern will acquiesce into its more familiar racist forms. Whiteness has trained us to rationalize social problems and see our self-interest amid them. And there’s nothing hugely different about COVID-19, when it comes down to it. For now, there’s the noteworthy national cases of rich and famous people getting it, but in the aggregate, we are not the victims, and this will gradually grow more and more tempting a fact for our self-interest-conditioned selves to act upon.
I predict we will start to hear more of all of the following (or even feel it, even if we don’t say it out loud):
“I live in a rural area, and COVID is not a problem here, one size does not fit all.”
“I’m just going to go to my summer home until this all blows over.”
“I can work from home, sure, but it just becomes too much after a point. My anxiety is real and that has to mean something.”
“If people can’t obey social distancing rules, then who do they have to blame but themselves?”
“If I lose my job what will all this have really helped?”
“We can’t go on forever like this.”
The Republican party knows where our hearts are. They know most white folk in this country are not built for sacrifice. They know that when the going gets tough, the white folk get going – the way Fitzgerald so memorably put it of Tom and Daisy, “They were careless people… they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” Tom and Daisy? They are us.
Now, I’m not saying that Trump is going to use that reality to win some overwhelming majority. Many of us will remain fixed in our essentially correct judgment that the Republican party is evil, and that its leader is irredeemable and we should mobilize against him. But how much really will be mobilize? How much can we while we dutifully ‘shelter in place’?”
While we shake our heads at the MAGA crowd, we distance ourselves from our own temptations towards whiteness. We eagerly eye our bank accounts to await the stimulus money that many of us do not need. We watch HGTV and otherwise look for “escapes” from our mental situation. We wonder “how bad could it really be” to go to the beach? To rent an airbnb somewhere? Instead of mobilizing to defeat this awful beast, we sit back and convince ourselves that somehow they’ll all come to their senses, surely this will be a bridge too far?
Because that MAGA crowd lets us see ourselves as the “good white folk.” As Robin DiAngelo has argued, good white folk benefit just as much, if not more, from racism than the screaming MAGA hordes. Just like the plantation owners DuBois references, who pitted the overseers (whom they looked down their noses at) against the slaves (whom they saw as less than human), we do the same. Those overseers’ descendants are “the base.” We may not be “the planters,” we’re sure of a piece with the northern manufacturing interests in whose communities white abolitionism arose and achieved no great effect throughout the period of slavery and beyond. We can be outraged at Trump’s press-conference circuses, but what do we really do about it beyond that outrage?
The specter of the MAGA supporters blinds us to our own inability to actually confront our own privilege and – the fragility and hollowness of “we’re all in this together” doesn’t get us much further than “love Trumps hate” got “the Resistance” at the end of the day. We are not all in this together, and the longer this lasts, the more of us will be peeled off. Economic anxiety will do the trick in a lot of instances, as it always has in America, to separate white folks from black.
Trump does not need us all to support him. He needs a few tens of thousands of Wisconsinites, Michiganders, and Pennsylvanians to see things his way for a few weeks in November. I see the GOP strategy playing out this way:
- Refuse to help cities beyond some token gestures that play well for swing state voters (or at least let them say – “see, he tried, he’s not racist like they said”) – McConnell already said as much
- Demand lifting of the social distancing orders (this began, not insigificantly, in Georgia and South Carolina – both places where black population centers lack state-level power and in coming weeks continues in many more states). Like with Obamacare, even if they’re not lifted, they become great rhetorical hooks to speak to racial rage.
- Modulate their dog-whistling about how there really is nothing to do for “Chicago and New York and Los Angeles and San Francisco” into a COVID register – this means taking jabs at elected officials, especially those who are black, Jewish, Latino, female, or all of the above.
- Let black and Latino folks die in larger numbers. The less testing we do, the more those accumulated numbers become invisible.
This will not solve the pandemic. It will make it worse. But it will solve the problem of motivating the 2016 coalition. And that’s even true if more of them start dying of the disease. Because they are more than willing to blame the victims here – the Instacart worker who sneezed on them, the worker at the food plant who went to work sick, and so on. We will glorify “essential workers” of a certain sort – most notably, highly-educated medical workers, at the same time shaking our heads in disavowal at the black house party we saw a story about in our feeds, all the while ignoring that economic necessity and our own well-being depends on the work that those folks at that house party are doing, and that makes “social distancing” a reality for us. All these “Thank Yous” are really so much construction of the Model Minority – like Jews in the 50’s and Asians in the 80’s. The more those sorts of narratives take root, it will not matter how many people die, even if they are white. It will not shake their faith in Trump. As James Baldwin epitomizes this attitude: “No curtain under heaven is heavier than that curtain of guilt and lies behind which white Americans hide.”
Where does this leave the Democrats? It’s a really familiar dilemma. They can either (a) go what will be immediately characterized as “hard left” – that is, actually argue that we actually must declare medical emergencies in America’s largest cities and use the full force of the federal government to build hospitals, testing facilities, distribute unemployment money, waive rents and credit card debt until that’s dealt with, or (b) go for GOP-light, that is, keep talking about how “we’re all in this together” but in reality just pitch their message for the suburban-moderate coalition that showed up in 2018. They’ll immediately decide (a) is too radical, and they’re so tempted by (b), they’ll continue to think, these people will come to their senses, you can’t possibly accept all of this, this is America – and on and on and on…
Now it’s not altogether clear to me who will win, but I do believe the democrats will pick B. They basically already have. And even if they do win the white house, the chances of winning the senate are pretty slim, and absent more radical action towards ending the filibuster (or the senate itself), neither of which Joe Biden has ever even considered – none of this gets better for the black and brown folks who are dying of COVID-19. It just becomes another sad chapter, another clear instantiation of what DuBois saw way back when.
Original Positions 