The Protests: How We Got Here (The manner of protest)

When Martin Luther King was putting together the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955, he first went to white churches and implored to them that this was not a matter of race, that it was in fact a matter of economics and that poor whites were suffering alongside blacks and the two communities would do well to join forces. To which the white churches responded....no, it's about race.

The 'system' isn't racist. The 'system' is ruthlessly economic and wants everyone to be productive and make money. In fact, the 'system' cannot abide those that don't produce, so having a chunk of population off to the separate-but-equal side that doesn't participate in the larger economy is anathema to the 'system'. Which is why (I contend) that expanded industrial production of WWII demanded that blacks (among others) must participate in the economy in order to reach economic efficiency (which is the inborn desire of any economic system). Blacks must no longer be seen as separate and must in fact actually become equal because anything less makes no sense to the 'system'. MLK saw that black workers needed the buses to get to work and that polite society must honor that simple necessity. And he put it to the test. 

Transportation issues, too, were at the heart of Plessy v Ferguson (1896): separate but equal would imply, in that case, that railroad companies would now need to have a Blacks-only 1st class railroad car for every trip even though hardly any blacks at the time would've been able to afford a ticket. A railroad company carrying around an extra empty car could be ruinously expensive and is at best utterly useless. But the Culture of the South at the time demanded that blacks and whites remain separate. This is bad business but if the customer base makes demands, the corporations are obliged to supply. 

Plessy v Ferguson (1896) reminds us that the working class has the power to bend the Supreme Court and the corporate structures to their demands and at this point the working class demand was still decidedly white. Was it the 'system' that imposed separate but equal? No, this is a warping of the 'system'. It was the People, the illogical People who chose wastefulness and animosity over integrated forms of travel because social change is a hard thing to endure. Seeing someone else prosper gives the feeling of losing ground, even if that isn't the case. And in 1955, MLK was right: the economic circumstances were just as disadvantageous for the whites as it was for the blacks. But that was true in 1896 and the white people bungled justice then, too. In both cases the State, the corporations and the wealthy allowed this injustice to take place because another Civil War would've been worse (for them) than just letting poor people fight each other. 

MLK, echoing Gandhi (who became enlightened when he, like Homer Plessy, was thrown out of a 1st class train compartment in 1895), ushers in a wave of peaceful protests building on the legal victories of Thurgood Marshall before the war and the beloved stardom of Jackie Robinson after the war. He was adamant that the movement be peaceful and (even more to the point) legal. The point was to show that black people were citizens deserving of Constitutional protection and cultural assimilation just like everyone else and that it was their birthright. The notion of separate but equal was never real because it never applied to anyone else--there was no one to be equal to! Brown v Board of Education (1954) stamps this out judicially and even puts forth pronouncements for how it is to spread (namely "at all deliberate speed"). Again, the 'system' is ready to move on from segregation and embrace full economic efficiency, it is the Culture that drags its feet because social change must be forced.

The example of the Civil Rights movement forms the template of ongoing complaints of all stripes for the rest of the 20th century (re: the peaceful righteous fight is co-opted and re-purposed for everyone else's uses). From here the culture of protest takes over in America and, to my mind, has an entirely counter-intuitive effect: it makes people think they're rising up in the streets when increasingly they're just blowing off some steam. They congratulate themselves on speaking truth to power when really they've been given a place to stand and rigid rules of conduct and are mostly just harmlessly absorbed. Protests rarely lead to violence, indeed they are rarely even worth mentioning as they have become so ingrained in the civic culture. Protests have replaced parades: people are getting together to complain rather than celebrate, but the effect isn't wildly different. MLK was fighting for something, most people since have just been trying to look like they're fighting for something.

The turmoil of the 1960s begins an era where the white middle class was tearing itself apart and had no need whatsoever for the poor whites. They would rather magnanimously grant freedom to African-Americans than deal with the white underclass, which is now even more beholden to keeping black people down as a means of deluding themselves into feeling like they are living the American dream, that they are doing things right, that they are in God's good graces, etc. 

For the wealthy 'race' is an illusion. They don't need to pretend to be superior to blacks--they have more money in the bank, which is the only superiority they ever needed. The enlightened whites have discarded 'race', thus they want to treat blacks and other whites the same. This works for the wealthy because since they are in better economic standing (the only thing that matters), everyone else is naturally kinda all the same anyway. 

But to the poor whites, they see their world steadily eroding because they can't keep up with the pace of advancing technology and social change. Poor blacks have increasingly imbibed their suffering as race-related and while that may well be true, it is ultimately secondary to what they need to be doing: namely, accumulating capital to escape the misery of economic impoverishment. As the wealthy grow ever-wealthier, they grow further away from the others of their society, while the poor are continually getting pushed together and the racial differences that used to separate them are no longer honored in polite society.

Blacks are not victimized by the 'system', they are victimized by those keeping them from being a part of the 'system'. Blaming the 'system' is missing the true danger, it is the barriers to joining the 'system' that bedevils them. Separate but equal was not the 'system', it was the absence of 'system'. Homer Plessy bought his ticket for the 'system' and was denied; Rosa Parks bought a ticket for the 'system' and was taken to jail.  

The 'system' is color blind--it is completely blind. But we don't experience the 'system' in our day to day lives, we experience each other in what we call 'culture'. But we live in a multiplicity of paradigms with a range of metaphors, tastes and social signals. You might find it easy to know which side you're on, but how to represent that and/or aid your chosen group is not at all plain to see.

With the outgrowth of social media and smart phones in the early 2000s, the culture is now primed on a granular level. This could be dangerous, riotous, but more often than not is petty and minimal and burns out quickly. Social media has a more insidious effect--creepy because it is inside of our homes rather than out there in the streets--but at its best it does at least suggest that the 'bad apples' can be singled out. At its worst, though, it is a replay of the Cultural Revolution: each citizen is now a petty tyrant and the People are a mass of judges, juries and executioners. 

The MLK model of peaceful protest is probably dead. From here the cancel culture will mature and take root.

So far in my reckoning I've basically only dealt with the richest of rich and poorest of poor. This makes up roughly zilch percentage of the population, but establishes the visual template seen by the vastly larger middle class. The middle class watches this all play out on their media screens and they choose sides and they go forth in righteous indignation. Race is just a detail but by now this has created a schism within white rhetoric causing people to choose sides, generally based around either preserving the past or looking to the future. Some of the wealthy may enjoy the new middle class war, some may hate it; some rich are unaffected by it, some rich are in great peril. Some poor folks may be encouraged by the turmoil they see in the streets, some may be horrified by it. Some will see the looting as an unfortunate by-product of so much chaos, some will see it as the point all along. Some will become enlightened to the crimes of local police, some will see those police as more important than ever! These may be entirely different groups of people that think they've chosen the same thing. And they don't understand that they're now in opposition to each other. And a lot of the people who think they disagree with each other may be working side by side, while some who see each other as enemies will be doing all the same shit.

We exist in a multiplicity of paradigms and when a variety of paradigms converge, no one really knows what's going on any more. All of life becomes inchoate and the active people aren't really doing anything while the inactive people may have far more influence than they realize. This is, I believe, what is living in our television sets and smart phones right now.

According to Wikipedia, the violence of the past two weeks is pretty much evenly split: protesters injuring cops, cops injuring protesters, protesters injuring each other at a pretty similar clip. Some cities are perfectly peaceful, some are experiencing all kinds of wanton destruction. Some people just want to fuck shit up, some people truly want to be heard, some people want to publicly grieve, some want to express their anger, some want to keep others from expressing anything at all. And they're all doing what they're doing in the same place at the same time. The tangle of desires and motivations and plans of action threaten to be merely a meaningless jumble. 

As for the 'system', all it wants is money. No Lives have ever mattered to the 'system' because the 'system' is going to outlive us all and therefore does not need us as much as we need it. And the only differentiation it makes between us is the money in our pockets--not the kindness in our hearts, not the color of our skin, not the sweat of our brows. It'll take black money and yellow money and red money and white money, too. (It'll take stolen money, inherited money, gambled money, criminal money, found money....) When your ability to make money has been eclipsed, that's when rioting in the streets becomes the only answer. 

Lives matter to other lives. We should be taking care of each other. The 'system' will help us stay healthy, it will help educate our children and it'll help us feed ourselves and have fun. It isn't going to give our lives worth because that's not what it does. We have to do that for ourselves and each other and if we don't no one else will. The 'system' is built for those who help themselves and the enemies of the 'system' are those that attempt to keep others out. Homer Plessy knew that in 1896...and the Supreme Court buckled under the weight of apartheid instead of doing its job. MLK knew that in 1955....and the white churches blew their opportunity to be on the right side of history. 

Right now, the 'system' is trying to repair itself from the corona virus lock downs. The 'system' will be going through a major overhaul in the next 12 months or so and these protests are about (hopefully) positively positioning the Culture to get it right this time. I don't think things are different, I think the Culture has evolved to where they always should've been: namely by realizing that the problem isn't the 'system', it is the lack of 'system'.

The Protests: How We Got Here (A selection of American history)

Many years ago while killing time in the basement of a college library, I saw a graph in a giant book of gov't data. The graph always stayed with me (though I have no clue how to find it again now): it ran from 1870-1930 and showed a perfect inverse relationship between the price of cotton and the lynchings of black people. When the price of cotton was up, lynchings were down and when the price of cotton was not good, then the target minority of American society became terrorized even more than usual.

That chart still sums up well in my mind the nature of life for black people in America to this day. When times are good, they're given a little more room to breathe, when times are bad black folks are made to suffer the worst of it. The unequal lives of blacks in America is cultural and at the heart of it, I'd say that's what these ongoing protests are about: cultural togetherness. But beware: the pointless nonsense of politics (which is not gov't, by the way) always lurks in American culture and how the citizenry interprets what it sees varies wildly.

I've recently developed a whole new understanding of the importance of separating church from state in the early days of the Republic. The church was largely where the anti-British revolutionary fervor came from because of the inborn fear that the Church of England would seek to dominate religious expression in the colonies. But once the Revolution was won, the fears of Anglicization were assuaged and the Republic was in place, it was necessary for the founding fathers to cut that shit off in a hurry. By separating the church in a bold and public fashion, it removed all hint that the churches were being oppressed, thus their message of oppression was now neutered and the gains of the white colonists would not be mingled with ongoing talk of the abolition of slavery. The abolitionist movement in the early 19th century largely existed among the church-y types, who were now free (eh, free-ish) to keep the revolutionary fervor going but in a decidedly watered down context, where every church was free to interpret the ills of slavery in their own way rather than in a singular voice. By removing the gov't from church oversight, it set the churches against each other and kept a unified message from ringing out from the pulpits.

Legally speaking, slavery was a bargain the North were stuck with since before the Revolution (*) so they had to continue to endure it. The economic downturn of the 1830s and the great territorial expansion that followed war with Mexico in the 1840s kept the politics of the North engaged in other areas but slavery steadily pulled at the fabric of the nation. To my mind it was the Dred Scott decision (1857) that finally broke the whole system because the judiciary could no longer figure out how to incorporate slavery into the legal structure any more. It just didn't make sense, it spooked the population, the fugitive slave laws weakened northern governors and the component of slave labor infiltrates all markets making them at the very least unrealistic. Slavery had to go because by this point it pervaded the lives of people who didn't care about slavery--that's when social change becomes unavoidable.

Civil War...Emancipation Proclamation...Lincoln is assassinated...the Reconstruction....

And here we come back to the graph I mentioned above. During the period between the Civil War and World War II life is okay for black people in the good economic years and utterly terrifying in the bad years. In the post-Civil War economy 'good' periods and 'bad' periods were more pronounced than ever before (this is the large scale introduction of boom-and-bust into American economic cycles). Existing largely at the bottom of the economic scale, they would've felt the bad years worse than everybody else while feeling the good years the least. After the Civil War the North is more interested in controlling the political and economic paradigm shifts (such as the Credit Mobilier Scandal of 1872) than it is in properly enforcing the re-born Constitution in the South. It is the newly freed slaves that bear the brunt of that inattention, for though they were the bedrock of the new changes in American politics and culture, once the slaves were freed they no longer served any political purpose. The 'system' is newly re-built with a 'culture' that is not welcoming to the newly freed blacks.

During this time we see the birth of Ku Klux Klan, the Black Codes and the steady extension of Jim Crow laws specifically aimed at keeping blacks from voting and otherwise participating in the culture. One could point out that the subsequent sharecropper system (pretty much the only option for most of the freed slaves in the south) and the work farm prison structure were at least somewhat egalitarian in that whites would've been forced into these structures just as blacks were. This suggests that the social 'demonization' (for lack of a better term) is of the poor rather than any specific group of the poor while the legislation suggests that it  is specifically designed to keep blacks in a state of permanent poverty. The State is reinforcing the Culture and while this is entirely un-Constitutional, the favored classes are cool with letting this slide as long as they are untouched by those living at the bottom of the scale. But we see quickly: the scourge of slavery has been replaced by the scourge of poverty.

So when the Supreme Court delivers Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, the under girding laws and social mores are in place such that the doctrine of 'separate but equal' must've seemed an elegant legal remedy as opposed to the twisted logic necessary for the Dred Scott Decision some four decades (what Lincoln might've referred to as 'two score') earlier. Thinking the black people could be free within their pocket of the law is something that smart people probably patted themselves on the back for because it gives the appearance that the wretched underclass possesses the chance to grow on their own....except that it doesn't. In fact, it reinforces the inability of that underclass to participate in the larger society, while allowing the leisure classes to think they've done a good thing.

And again we come back to the aforementioned graph: in good times blacks may have luxuriated in their separateness, free from the attacks of aggressive mobs of people who felt themselves left out of the prosperity of the larger economy; but in the bad times, there was only, as Ida B. Wells famously suggested, the Winchester rifle separating black people from that collective (misplaced) anger. 'Separate but equal' was never equal and, actually, never even separate because the deprived population was always available as a target minority when times were bad--a circumstance willingly allowed by politicians who would rather feed Christians to lions than take any of the blame for a bad economy.

It is easy to paint this arrangement in the most harrowing of Biblical terms. But there is one thing still offered to the black population of USA: the economy. Economic growth lifts all boats--which is a phrase that ignores that all boats will still maintain the same relation to each other, such that when the poorest people are richer, they are still the poorest. But within the segregationist framework of the post-Reconstruction USA, there is still economic growth that allows for a hint of social mobility. So in the early 20th century there is the establishment of the NAACP and the faint stirrings of change in the form of the legal fund that finally found some success in the 1930s. Notice the fight for black people to be included in polite society with access to proper legal remedies and the larger economy takes decades of finding legal loopholes.

I've been watching films of the 1930s lately and one thing I've noticed is the seeming explosion of ethnic voices: Greta Garbo, Adolphe Menjou, Charles Boyer, Emil Jannings, Marlene Dietrich, Bela Lugosi, just to mention a few. The pre-code years of cinema were a place where people who had largely been left out of the upper crust were able to find a footing and popularity in the American culture. (Morris Dickstein reinforces this observation in the novels, poetry and theater of the time, as well, in his book Dancing in the Dark) However, this clearly does not include black people. Sure, there are a handful of notable Hollywood titles with prominent black characters (Imitation of Life, for example), but blacks are certainly not a part of the new inclusion that Italians, Jews and other Europeans experience. Part of the reason would've been Plessy v Ferguson: since the movie theaters were segregated, it meant that blacks got their own movies, so there were 'race pictures' and other representations of art just for them. (**) White society didn't have to do anything for black people because they had their own 'equal' culture.

I bring this up to mention one of the few black images I've noticed so far from this time: I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932). There is one telling montage of this white man's descent into the horrors of work farm life: shots of men staring off in despair inter cut such that the white men and black men are equal in their despair. A moment of 'equality' that is actually quite the inverse: the white man's despair is that he is now equal to a black man. The black despair is normal, the white despair is horrific and that they are equal is the chill meant to run down your spine. And though we are to feel the injustice the white protagonist feels, it isn't meant to transfer to the blacks; indeed, the blacks are there to show just how horrible life can be even for whites. This is a specific image in a specific film but couldn't this have extended to how white Americans generally felt during the Great Depression of the 1930s?

December 7, 1941: the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor. The next day Congress declared war on Japan and in the spring of 1942 began building up the military (***). In order to do this USA had to vastly increase the production of electricity (namely by damming every river west of the Mississippi for hydroelectric power).

I mention this because it is my contention that once the power is created, it is not turned off. And the subsequent economic growth after WWII came from this excess industrial production and that the social changes of the Civil Rights era were necessitated by this change in the supply of electricity. (Changes in the means of production yield changes in the relations of society...or something like that)

Soon after the war, Major League Baseball integrates with the appearance of Jackie Robinson in 1947. I would suggest the reason for integrating baseball earlier than pretty much everything else in America was purely economic. During the war baseball's biggest stars went off to fight in Europe and in their absence the Negro Leagues actually became quite popular. While the Negro Leagues weren't the only game in town, for a while there they were the best. After the war, when the white stars came back home, they were still struggling at the box office compared to the Negro Leagues. Black stars had been born, black talent had been identified and the white audiences didn't mind coming to their games. Major League Baseball was in crisis and the only solution was integration. The audience demanded the best talent and for the first time Major League Baseball was obliged to give it to them, as opposed to just the best white talent.

Even though the African-American community between the Civil War and WWII wasn't allowed to do much, it still managed to produce a number of fascinating writers, activists and artists; I would suggest this is due to the overwhelming economic growth in the late 19th century, which would've provided opportunities even to the lowest on the social scale. But Jackie Robinson was the first true black celebrity, the first to be able to shine in his chosen field in front of a nationwide audience. all because the economic opportunities in the black community were finally allowing for the ability to compete with white society: the price of cotton was no longer the key to social existence.



(*) In short: the North needed the Revolution, the South did not. The colonies were not able to develop their own international trade pacts because England held a monopoly on all colonial production. This hampered the northern colonies, which more or less produced all the same stuff England did; but this was no hindrance to the southern colonies that produced a variety of goods otherwise unavailable in England. If the northern colonies revolt and are successful, then they are just surrounded on all sides by still-British colonies (recall that the War of 1812 just a few decades later is a war with Canada, a group the northern colonies were unable to convince to join their revolutionary effort). The northern colonies needed allies, they needed the southern colonies to come along. The northern colonies had steadily removed slavery and disliked the practice but they needed the southern colonies, so they agreed to keep slavery in place.

(**) As a 21st century movie nerd, I ask the question: where are those race pictures now? Hardly any of them survive--for there surely must've been a lot more than are currently available. We've gotten loving restorations of Ernst Lubitsch and Josef von Sternberg, but where are the restorations of Oscar Micheaux and....well, I don't know any others (Micheaux being the exception that proves the rule)? What exactly did that parallel (separate but certainly not equal) representation of black entertainment look like? And where is it now?

(***) Which never stopped.

A modest proposal to African-Americans

In the midst of the George Floyd protests, one of the recurring images is the forcible removal of statues of Confederate commemoration all across America. These statues have been slowly disappearing over the last ten years or so and recently this process has been sped up. (Good)

Allow me to suggest: African-American groups (the NAACP, for example, or perhaps a new group dedicated to this mission) should be buying these statues and preserving them. A site should be founded where all of these statues can be collected in a large open-air display where people can gather to remember what has past in American culture. Plaques could be laid noting not only the history of these mutinous awful people but of the statues themselves, a lot of which would bear the names George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, in whose honor they would have come to reside at this new museum. 

Ending slavery is just as much a part of America's history as slavery itself. And if African-Americans control this reminiscence, it can become the cornerstone of their contribution to ending the scourge of forced labor all over the world as well as here in our homeland. Imagine annual Juneteenth and Independence Day pilgrimages to this site where African-Americans can gather and remember not only what was lost but how instrumental their community was in eradicating the evils and surviving the hardships. Let the outdoor display be a long walk up to an African-American history museum, a row of vanquished enemies before seeing the displays on Frederick Douglass and Howard Thurman and Alain Locke and Harriett Tubman.  

Yes, I realize a shame museum is perhaps a negative realization, a negative actualization, but history demands shining a light on the worst of our behaviors just as much as our best (USA is perhaps the world's leader in both!). For African-Americans it would show that they were a part of this community all along, even through the centuries when they weren't allowed to participate. And it would be a reminder that this land of the free was never free and it would give embodied examples of the people who fought to keep it un-free.

And, yes, at first undoubtedly you would have protests: White Lives Matter banners would appear, perhaps even angry white hands trying to destroy these statues or lay waste to the site. I think pretty quickly that would melt away and if not, the irony of a police department forced to protect these monuments would be telling--every protest would simply reaffirm the museum's mission. Would this movement become a new strain of white supremacy in America? If so, I think it would only be the pale gasp of a pathetic and desperate few who would quickly and clearly be outed.

You could start with that statue of King Leopold II recently toppled in Belgium because that man enslaved more people than all the American presidents combined. And Christopher Columbus, who discovered a world of people and immediately enslaved them (and if it arrives headless, well headless it should stay). As a student of history I believe it is important to remember all of the past, even the bad shit--and perhaps the bad shit most of all! 

I understand the urge to destroy the parts of history no one likes, but that's not how you learn from history. Don't cancel the past. If these relics inspire anger now, they will inspire pride in the future. If this sounds like a collection of failure, it will be a collection of successes to future generations.

Just a thought.