!Antiracist reductionism
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agk's phlog
4 June 2021 @ 1225
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written on x61 while Evy sleeps
so she'll be rested for night shift
---
Somebody I've known a long time sent Scot Nakagawa's
newsletter 'Does the U.S. Have a White People
Problem?' to a listserv.
The piece is an odd mash-up. It starts with the
excellent old left-populist line that elites divide
the people with race prejudice, and that prejudiced
white non-elites, despite privilege from racism, are
caged away from post-industrial democracy because they
don't unite en masse with nonwhites against the elite.
So far so good. A. Philip Randolph could get down with
that, and he's my hero.
Scot slaps away red-brown baiters by saying progress-
ive whites should organize conservative whites, and
understand what drives their political affinities
other than the epithets progressives fling at them
(racist, misogynist). Also good.
Then he loses his way in confusing arguments about
white woman voters and hispanic whites vs nonhispanic
whites and demographic change.
I'm a leftist white woman who voted for Trump, and
not (as Scot accuses) because I was throwing in my
lot with a pussy-grabbing husband. I'm a dyke,
partnered at the time I voted and now married to a
woman. Very committed to women and girls. What they
used to call a woman-centered woman.
I'm a white woman who made a huge 30-foot long, 8-foot
tall banner reading "Racism is a Prison" with an
intricate painting of a prison wall and people behind
the wire and organized a contingent to carry it at a
Klan/National Socialist Movement counterprotest at
Stone Mountain, Georgia. I definitely agree with Scot
on some things.
The only candidate I cared about in the primary
was Charles Booker, an enormously popular Senate
candidate across my state, a black legislator with
left-popular policy (Medicare-for-all, $15 minimum
wage, etc). I was notified my mail-in ballot wasn't
counted due to a signature irregularity, in a race
too close to call on primary night. Eventually the
DSCC announced their pick beat Booker by a hair.
My vote in the general didn't matter either. My state
is deep red, not remotely a swing state that could
decide the election. I voted in order to have a stake
in the outcome, not in order to influence it.
But I voted the way I did because Trump pretty
consistently indicated he would do his best to pull
US troops out of Syria and Afghanistan and close as
many military bases as possible. He worked for a while
for a long-overdue rapprochement with a Russia
struggling for independence from US neocolonialism.
The second time around, he had presided over an
improvement in economic well-being, early release of
24,000 Federal prisoners during the pandemic, Operation
Warp Speed's effective development and rollout of
vaccines (I got vaccinated at work in December and
early January, before Biden's inaguration), and the
biggest poverty reduction programs in my lifetime
(CARES checks, expanded unemployment, college debt and
eviction moratoria, programs which disproportionately
benefited people of color but also benefited me). My
spouse and I got to keep our Medicaid and EBT through
his whole term.
He was a sh!tty statesman, but despite the constant
screaming of his opposition, his presidency was a
hopeful time for me.
I don't know if Trump's prison relases remotely counter-
acted the lasting damage to black families of Biden's
1994 crime bill, or if his payouts and moratoria remote-
ly countered the damage of Clinton's welfare reform
act or Obama's bailout of banks that held worthless bets
on garbage mortgages but not black homeowners whose
wealth was illegally expropriated en masse via subprime
forclosures. Trump didn't end any wars, but his was the
first administration in a long time to not start any.
Scot's argument about hispanic vs non-hispanic white
voters went over my head. Maybe he's trying to say
something about why hispanic and black voters as well
as white women moved away from the Democratic party
under Trump. It's not because Trump was awesome. He
was awful. It's because the Democratic party had even
less to offer.
It's important to not use a legitimate critique of
racism to ignore why people make tough political
decisions.
