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| Adolph Reed, Jr. |
Django
Unchained, or The Help
On
reflection, it’s possible to see that Django
Unchained and The
Help are basically different versions of the same movie. Both
dissolve political economy and social relations into individual quests and
interpersonal transactions and thus effectively sanitize, respectively, slavery
and Jim Crow by dehistoricizing them. The problem is not so much that each film invents
cartoonish fictions; it’s that the point of the cartoons is to take the place
of the actual relations of exploitation that anchored the regime it depicts.
In The Help the
buffoonishly bigoted housewife, Hilly, obsessively pushes a pet bill that would
require employers of black domestic servants to provide separate, Jim Crow
toilets for them; in Django
Unchained the
sensibility of 1970s blaxploitation imagines “comfort girls” and “Mandingo
fighters” as representative slave job descriptions. It’s as if Jim Crow had
nothing to do with cheap labor and slavery had nothing to do with making slave
owners rich. And the point here is not just that they get the past
wrong—it’s that the particular way they get it wrong enables them to get the
present just as wrong and so their politics are as misbegotten
as their history.
Thus, for
example, it’s only the dehistoricization that makes each film’s entirely
neoliberal (they could have been scripted by Oprah) happy ending possible. The
Help ends with
Skeeter and the black lead, the maid Aibileen, embarking joyfully on the new,
excitingly uncharted paths their book—an account of the master-servant
relationship told from the perspective of the servants—has opened for them. But
dehistoricization makes it possible not to notice the great distance between
those paths and their likely trajectories. For Skeeter the book from which the
film takes its name opens a career in the fast track of the journalism and
publishing industry. Aibileen’s new path was forced upon her because the book
got her fired from her intrinsically precarious job, more at-whim than at-will,
in one of the few areas of employment available to working-class black women in
the segregationist South—the precise likelihood that had made her and other
maids initially reluctant to warm to Skeeter’s project. Yet Aibileen smiles and
strides ever more confidently as she walks home because she has found and
articulated her voice.
The
implication is that having been fired, rather than portending deeper poverty
and economic insecurity, was a moment of liberation; Aibileen, armed with the
confidence and self-knowledge conferred by knowing her voice, was now free to
venture out into a world of unlimited opportunity and promise. This, of
course, is pure neoliberal bullshit, of the same variety that permits the
odious Michelle Rhee to assert with a straight face that teachers’ defined-benefit
pensions deny them “choice” and thereby undermine the quality of public
education. But who knows? Perhaps Skeeter brought with her from the 2000s an
NGO to arrange microcredit that would enable Aibileen to start up a culturally
authentic pie-making venture or a day spa for harried and stressed domestic
servants. In the Jackson , Mississippi
Django
Unchained ends with the
hero and his lady fair riding happily off into the sunset after he has
vanquished evil slave owners and their henchmen and henchwomen. Django and
Broomhilda—whose name is spelled like that of the 1970s comic strip character,
not the figure in Norse mythology, presumably a pointless Tarantino inside
joke—are free. However, their freedom was not won by his prodigious
bloodletting; it was obtained within the legal framework that accepted and regulated
property rights in slaves. Each had been purchased and manumitted by the
German bounty hunter who, as others have noted, is the only character in the film to
condemn slavery as an institution.
Django is no
insurrectionist. His singular focus from beginning to end is on reclaiming his wife from her slave master.
Presumably, we are to understand this solipsism as indicative of the depth and
intensity of his love, probably also as homage to the borderline sociopathic
style of the spaghetti western/blaxploitation hero. Regardless, Django’s quest
is entirely individualist; he never intends to challenge slavery and never
does. Indeed, for the purpose of buttressing the credibility of their ruse, he
even countermands his bounty hunter partner’s attempt to save—through purchase,
of course—a recalcitrant “Mandingo fighter” from being ripped apart by dogs.
He is essentially indifferent to the handful of slaves who are freed as
incidental byproducts of his actions. The happy ending is that he and Broomhilda
ride off together and free in a slavocracy that is not a whit less secure at
the moment of celebratory resolution than it was when Django set out on his
mission of retrieval and revenge.
In both films
the bogus happy endings are possible only because they characterize their
respective regimes of racial hierarchy in the superficial terms of
interpersonal transactions. InThe
Help segregationism’s
evil was small-minded bigotry and lack of sensitivity; it was more like bad
manners than oppression. In Tarantino’s vision, slavery’s definitive injustice
was its gratuitous and sadistic brutalization and sexualized degradation.
Malevolent, ludicrously arrogant whites owned slaves most conspicuously to
degrade and torture them. Apart from serving a formal dinner in a plantation
house—and Tarantino, the Chance the Gardener of American filmmakers (and Best
Original Screenplay? Really?) seems to draw his images of plantation life from Birth
of a Nation and Gone
With the Wind, as
well as old Warner Brothers cartoons—and
the Mandingo fighters and comfort girls, Tarantino’s slaves do no actual work
at all; they’re present only to be brutalized. In fact, the cavalier sadism
with which owners and traders treat them belies the fact that slaves were,
first and foremost, capital investments. It’s not for nothing that New Orleans
has a monument to the estimated 20,000-30,000 antebellum Irish immigrants
who died constructing the New Basin Canal; slave labor was too valuable for
such lethal work.
The Help trivializes Jim Crow by reducing it
to its most superficial features and irrational extremes. The master-servant
nexus was, and is, a labor relation. And the problem of labor relations
particular to the segregationist regime wasn’t employers’ bigoted lack of
respect or failure to hear the voices of the domestic servants, or even
benighted refusal to recognize their equal humanity. It was that the labor
relation was structured within and sustained by a political and institutional
order that severely impinged on, when it didn’t altogether deny, black
citizens’ avenues for pursuit of grievances and standing before the law. The
crucial lynchpin of that order was neither myopia nor malevolence; it was
suppression of black citizens’ capacities for direct participation in civic and
political life, with racial disfranchisement and the constant threat of terror
intrinsic to substantive denial of equal protection and due process before the
law as its principal mechanisms. And the point of the regime wasn’t racial
hatred or enforced disregard; its roots lay in the much more prosaic concern of
dominant elites to maintain their political and economic hegemony by
suppressing potential opposition and in the linked ideal of maintaining access
to a labor force with no options but to accept employment on whatever terms
employers offered. (Those who liked The Help or found it moving should watch The
Long Walk Home, a 1990 film set in Montgomery, Alabama, around the
bus boycott. I suspect that’s the film you thought you were watching when you
saw The Help.)
Django
Unchained trivializes
slavery by reducing it to its most barbaric and lurid excesses. Slavery also
was fundamentally a labor relation. It was a form of forced labor
regulated—systematized, enforced and sustained—through a political and
institutional order that specified it as a civil relationship granting owners
absolute control over the life, liberty, and fortunes of others defined as
eligible for enslavement, including most of all control of the conditions of
their labor and appropriation of its product. Historian Kenneth M. Stampp
quotes a slaveholder’s succinct explanation: “‘For what purpose does the master
hold the servant?’ asked an ante-bellum Southerner. ‘Is it not that by his
labor, he, the master, may accumulate wealth?’”1
That absolute
control permitted horrible, unthinkable brutality, to be sure, but perpetrating
such brutality was neither the point of slavery nor its essential injustice.
The master-slave relationship could, and did, exist without brutality, and
certainly without sadism and sexual degradation. In Tarantino’s depiction,
however, it is not clear that slavery shorn of its extremes of brutality would
be objectionable. It does not diminish the historical injustice and horror of
slavery to note that it was not the product of sui
generis, transcendent Evil but a terminus on a continuum of bound
labor that was more norm than exception in the Anglo-American world until well
into the eighteenth century, if not later. As legal historian Robert Steinfeld
points out, it is not so much slavery, but the emergence of the notion of free
labor—as the absolute control of a worker over her person—that is the
historical anomaly that needs to be explained.2 Django Unchained sanitizes the
essential injustice of slavery by not problematizing it and by focusing instead
on the extremes of brutality and degradation it permitted, to the extent of
making some of them up, just as does The Help regarding Jim Crow.
The Help could not imagine a more honest and
complex view of segregationist Mississippi partly because it uses the period
ultimately as a prop for human interest cliché, and Django
Unchained’s absurdly
ahistorical view of plantation slavery is only backdrop for the merger of
spaghetti western and blaxploitation hero movie. Neither film is really about the period in which it is set.
Film critic Manohla Dargis, reflecting a decade ago on what she saw as a
growing Hollywood penchant for period films, observed that such films are
typically “stripped of politics and historical fact…and instead will find
meaning in appealing to seemingly timeless ideals and stirring scenes of love,
valor and compassion” and that “the Hollywood professionals who embrace
accuracy most enthusiastically nowadays are costume designers.”3 That
observation applies to both these films, although in Django concern with historically accurate
representation of material culture applies only to the costumes and props of
the 1970s film genres Tarantino wants to recall.
To make sense
of how Django Unchained has received so much warmer a
reception among black and leftoid commentators than did The
Help, it is
useful to recall Margaret Thatcher’s 1981 dictum that “economics are the
method: the object is to change the soul.”4 Simply
put, she and her element have won. Few observers—among opponents and boosters
alike—have noted how deeply and thoroughly both films are embedded in the
practical ontology of neoliberalism, the complex of unarticulated assumptions
and unexamined first premises that provide its common sense, its lifeworld.
Objection to The
Help has been
largely of the shooting fish in a barrel variety: complaints about the film’s
paternalistic treatment of the maids, which generally have boiled down to an
objection that the master-servant relation is thematized at all, as well as the
standard, predictable litany of anti-racist charges about whites speaking for
blacks, the film’s inattentiveness to the fact that at that time in Mississippi
black people were busily engaged in liberating themselves, etc. An illustration
of this tendency that conveniently refers to several other variants of it is
Akiba Solomon, “Why I’m Just Saying No to ‘The Help’ and Its Historical
Whitewash” in Color Lines,August 10, 2011,
available at:http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/08/why_im_just_saying_no_to_the_help.html.
Defenses of Django
Unchained pivot
on claims about the social significance of the narrative of a black hero. One
node of this argument emphasizes the need to validate a history of autonomous
black agency and “resistance” as a politico-existential desideratum. It
accommodates a view that stresses the importance of recognition of rebellious
or militant individuals and revolts in black American history. Another centers
on a notion that exposure to fictional black heroes can inculcate the sense of
personal efficacy necessary to overcome the psychological effects of inequality
and to facilitate upward mobility and may undermine some whites’ negative
stereotypes about black people. In either register assignment of social or
political importance to depictions of black heroes rests on presumptions about
the nexus of mass cultural representation, social commentary, and racial
justice that are more significant politically than the controversy about the
film itself.
In both
versions, this argument casts political and economic problems in psychological
terms. Injustice appears as a matter of disrespect and denial of due
recognition, and the remedies proposed—which are all about images projected and
the distribution of jobs associated with their projection—look a lot like
self-esteem engineering. Moreover, nothing could indicate more strikingly the
extent of neoliberal ideological hegemony than the idea that the mass culture
industry and its representational practices constitute a meaningful terrain for
struggle to advance egalitarian interests. It is possible to entertain that view
seriously only by ignoring the fact that the production and consumption of mass
culture is thoroughly embedded in capitalist material and ideological
imperatives.
That,
incidentally, is why I prefer the usage “mass culture” to describe this
industry and its products and processes, although I recognize that it may seem
archaic to some readers. The mass culture v. popular culture debate dates at
least from the 1950s and has continued with occasional crescendos ever since.5 For
two decades or more, instructively in line with the retreat of possibilities
for concerted left political action outside the academy, the popular culture
side of that debate has been dominant, along with its view that the products of
this precinct of mass consumption capitalism are somehow capable of
transcending or subverting their material identity as commodities, if not
avoiding that identity altogether. Despite the dogged commitment of several
generations of American Studies and cultural studies graduate students who want
to valorize watching television and immersion in hip-hop or other specialty
market niches centered on youth recreation and the most ephemeral fads as both
intellectually avant-garde and politically “resistive,” it should be time to
admit that that earnest disposition is intellectually shallow and an ersatz
politics. The idea of “popular” culture posits a spurious autonomy and
organicism that actually affirm mass industrial processes by effacing them,
especially in the putatively rebel, fringe, or underground market niches that
depend on the fiction of the authentic to announce the birth of new product
cycles.
The power of
the hero is a cathartic trope that connects mainly with the sensibility of
adolescent boys—of whatever nominal age. Tarantino has allowed as much,
responding to black critics’ complaints about the violence and copious use of
“nigger” by proclaiming “Even for the film’s biggest detractors, I think their
children will grow up and love this movie. I think it could become a rite of
passage for young black males.”6 This
response stems no doubt from Tarantino’s arrogance and opportunism, and some
critics have denounced it as no better than racially presumptuous. But he is
hardly alone in defending the film with an assertion that it gives black youth
heroes, is generically inspirational or both. Similarly, in a January 9, 2012
interview on the Daily Show, George Lucas adduced this line
to promote his even more execrable race-oriented live-action cartoon, Red
Tails, which,
incidentally, trivializes segregation in the military by reducing it to a
matter of bad or outmoded attitudes. The ironic effect is significant
understatement of both the obstacles the Tuskegee airmen faced and their actual
accomplishments by rendering them as backdrop for a blackface, slapped-together
remake ofTop Gun. (Norman Jewison’s 1984 film, A
Soldier’s Story, adapted
from Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play, is a much more sensitive and
thought-provoking rumination on the complexities of race and racism in the Jim
Crow U.S. Army—an army mobilized, as my father, a veteran of the Normandy
invasion, never tired of remarking sardonically, to fight the racist Nazis.)
Lucas characterized his film as “patriotic, even jingoistic” and was explicit
that he wanted to create a film that would feature “real heroes” and would be
“inspirational for teenage boys.” Much asDjango
Unchained’s defenders compare it on those terms favorably to Lincoln,
Lucas hyped Red Tails as being a genuine hero story
unlike “Glory, where you have a lot of white
officers running those guys into cannon fodder.”
Of course,
the film industry is sharply tilted toward the youth market, as Lucas and
Tarantino are acutely aware. But Lucas, unlike Tarantino, was not being
defensive in asserting his desire to inspire the young; he offered it more as a
boast. As he has said often, he’d wanted for years to make a film about the
Tuskegee airmen, and he reports that he always intended telling their story as
a feel-good, crossover inspirational tale. Telling it that way also fits in
principle (though in this instance not in practice, as Red
Tails bombed
at the box office) with the commercial imperatives of increasingly degraded
mass entertainment.
Dargis
observed that the ahistoricism of the recent period films is influenced by
market imperatives in a global film industry. The more a film is tied to
historically specific contexts, the more difficult it is to sell elsewhere.
That logic selects for special effects-driven products as well as standardized,
decontextualized and simplistic—“universal”—story lines, preferably set in
fantasy worlds of the filmmakers’ design. As Dargis notes, these films find
their meaning in shopworn clichés puffed up as timeless verities, including
uplifting and inspirational messages for youth. But something else underlies
the stress on inspiration in the black-interest films, which shows up in
critical discussion of them as well.
All these
films—The Help, Red Tails, Django
Unchained, even Lincoln and Glory—make
a claim to public attention based partly on their social significance beyond
entertainment or art, and they do so because they engage with significant
moments in the history of the nexus of race and politics in the United States.
There would not be so much discussion and debate and no Golden Globe, NAACP
Image, or Academy Award nominations for The Help, Red Tails, or Django
Unchained if
those films weren’t defined partly by thematizing that nexus of race and
politics in some way.
The
pretensions to social significance that fit these films into their particular
market niche don’t conflict with the mass-market film industry’s imperative of
infantilization because those pretensions are only part of the show; they are
little more than empty bromides, product differentiation in the patter of
“seemingly timeless ideals” which the mass entertainment industry constantly
recycles.
(Andrew
O’Hehir observes as much about Django Unchained,which he
describes as “a three-hour trailer for a movie that never happens.”7) That comes through in the
defense of these films, in the face of evidence of their failings, that, after
all, they are “just entertainment.” Their substantive content is ideological;
it is their contribution to the naturalization of neoliberalism’s ontology as
they propagandize its universalization across spatial, temporal, and social
contexts.
Purportedly
in the interest of popular education cum entertainment, Django
Unchained and The Help, and Red Tails for that matter, read the
sensibilities of the present into the past by divesting the latter of its
specific historicity. They reinforce the sense of the past as generic old-timey
times distinguishable from the present by superficial inadequacies—outmoded
fashion, technology, commodities and ideas—since overcome. In The
Help Hilly’s
obsession with her pet project marks segregation’s petty apartheid as
irrational in part because of the expense rigorously enforcing it would
require; the breadwinning husbands express their frustration with it as
financially impractical. Hilly is a mean-spirited, narrow-minded person whose
rigid and tone-deaf commitment to segregationist consistency not only reflects
her limitations of character but also is economically unsound, a fact that
further defines her, and the cartoon version of Jim Crow she represents, as
irrational.
The deeper
message of these films, insofar as they deny the integrity of the past, is that
there is no thinkable alternative to the ideological order under which we live.
This message is reproduced throughout the mass entertainment industry; it
shapes the normative reality even of the fantasy worlds that masquerade as escapism.
Even among those who laud the supposedly cathartic effects of Django’s
insurgent violence as reflecting a greater truth of abolition than passage of
the Thirteenth Amendment, few commentators notice that he and Broomhilda
attained their freedom through a market transaction.8 This
reflects an ideological hegemony in which students all too commonly wonder why
planters would deny slaves or sharecroppers education because education would
have made them more productive as workers. And, tellingly, in a glowing
rumination in the Daily Kos, Ryan Brooke
inadvertently thrusts mass culture’s destruction of historicity into bold
relief by declaiming on “the segregated society presented” inDjango Unchained and babbling on—with the absurdly
ill-informed and pontifical self-righteousness that the blogosphere
enables—about our need to take “responsibility for preserving racial divides”
if we are “to put segregation in the past and fully fulfill Dr. King’s dream.”9 It’s all an indistinguishable mush of
bad stuff about racial injustice in the old-timey days. Decoupled from its
moorings in a historically specific political economy, slavery becomes at
bottom a problem of race relations, and, as historian Michael R. West argues
forcefully, “race relations” emerged as and has remained a discourse that
substitutes etiquette for equality.10
This is the
context in which we should take account of what “inspiring the young” means as
a justification for those films. In part, the claim to inspire is a simple
platitude, more filler than substance. It is, as I’ve already noted, both an
excuse for films that are cartoons made for an infantilized, generic market and
an assertion of a claim to a particular niche within that market. More
insidiously, though, the ease with which “inspiration of youth” rolls out in
this context resonates with three related and disturbing themes: 1) underclass
ideology’s narratives—now all Americans’ common sense—that link poverty and
inequality most crucially to (racialized) cultural inadequacy and psychological
damage; 2) the belief that racial inequality stems from prejudice, bad ideas
and ignorance, and 3) the cognate of both: the neoliberal rendering of social
justice as equality of opportunity, with an aspiration of creating “competitive
individual minority agents who might stand a better fighting chance in the
neoliberal rat race rather than a positive alternative vision of a society that
eliminates the need to fight constantly against disruptive market whims in the
first place.”11
This politics
seeps through in the chatter about Django Unchained in particular. Erin Aubry
Kaplan, in the Los Angeles Times article in which Tarantino
asserts his appeal to youth, remarks that the “most disturbing detail [about
slavery] is the emotional violence and degradation directed at blacks that
effectively keeps them at the bottom of the social order, a place they still
occupy today.” Writing on the Institute of the Black World blog, one Dr. Kwa
David Whitaker, a 1960s-style cultural nationalist, declaims on Django’s testament to the sources of
degradation and “unending servitude [that] has rendered [black Americans]
almost incapable of making sound evaluations of our current situations or the
kind of steps we must take to improve our condition.”12 In
its blindness to political economy, this notion of black cultural or
psychological damage as either a legacy of slavery or of more indirect recent
origin—e.g., urban migration, crack epidemic, matriarchy, babies making
babies—comports well with the reduction of slavery and Jim Crow to interpersonal
dynamics and bad attitudes. It substitutes a “politics of recognition” and a
patter of racial uplift for politics and underwrites a conflation of political
action and therapy.
With respect
to the nexus of race and inequality, this discourse supports victim-blaming
programs of personal rehabilitation and self-esteem engineering—inspiration—as
easily as it does multiculturalist respect for difference, which, by the way,
also feeds back to self-esteem engineering and inspiration as nodes within a
larger political economy of race relations. Either way, this is a discourse
that displaces a politics challenging social structures that reproduce
inequality with concern for the feelings and characteristics of individuals and
of categories of population statistics reified as singular groups that are
equivalent to individuals. This discourse has made it possible (again, but more
sanctimoniously this time) to characterize destruction of low-income housing as
an uplift strategy for poor people; curtailment of access to public education
as “choice”; being cut adrift from essential social wage protections as
“empowerment”; and individual material success as socially important role
modeling.
Neoliberalism’s
triumph is affirmed with unselfconscious clarity in the ostensibly leftist
defenses of Django Unchained that center on the theme of slaves’
having liberated themselves. Trotskyists, would-be anarchists, and
psychobabbling identitarians have their respective sectarian garnishes:
Trotskyists see everywhere the bugbear of “bureaucratism” and mystify
“self-activity;” anarchists similarly fetishize direct action and voluntarism
and oppose large-scale public institutions on principle, and identitarians
romanticize essentialist notions of organic, folkish authenticity under constant
threat from institutions. However, all are indistinguishable from the nominally
libertarian right in their disdain for government and institutionally based
political action, which their common reflex is to disparage as inauthentic or
corrupt.
The previous
year’s version of the socially significant film bearing on race (sort of), Benh
Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild,
which also received startlingly positive responses from nominal progressives,13 marks
the reactionary vector onto which those several interpretive strains converge.
It lays out an exoticizing narrative of quaint, closer-to-nature primitives
living in an area outside the south Louisiana levee system called the Bathtub,
who simply don’t want and actively resist the oppressive
intrusions—specifically, medical care and hurricane evacuation, though, in
fairness, they also mark their superiority by tut-tutting at the presence of
oil refineries—of a civilization that is out of touch with their way of life
and is destroying nature to boot. The film validates their spiritually rich if
economically impoverished culture and their right to it. (Actually, the
Bathtub’s material infrastructure seems to derive mainly from scavenging, which
should suggest a problem at the core of this bullshit allegory for all except
those who imagine dumpster-diving, back-to-nature-in-the-city squatterism as a
politics.) Especially given its setting in south Louisiana and the hype touting
the authenticity of its New Orleans-based crew and cast, Beasts most immediately evokes a warm and
fuzzy rendition of the retrograde post-Katrina line that those odd people down
there wouldn’t evacuate because they’re so intensely committed to place. It
also brings to mind Leni Riefenstahl’s post-prison photo essays on the Nilotic
groups whose beautiful primitiveness she imagined herself capturing for
posterity before they vanished under a superior civilization’s advance.14
Beasts of the
Southern Wild stands out
also as a pure exemplar of the debasement of the notion of a social cause
through absorption into the commercial imperative, the next logical step from
fun-run or buy-a-tee-shirt activism. The film’s website, has a “get involved”
link, a ploy clearly intended to generate an affective identification and to
define watching and liking the film as a form of social engagement. There’s
nothing to “get involved” with except propagandizing for the film. But the
injunction to get involved pumps the idea that going to see a movie, and
spending money to do so, is participating in a social movement. (I happened to
be on a flight from Hartford, Connecticut, to Chicago with Oprah’s BFF and my
local news anchor, Gayle King, on the premiere weekend of Oprah’s film
adaptation of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Gayle intimated in a
stage whisper to the gaggle of gushing Oprah fans seated around her that it was veryimportant
to see the film on opening weekend in order to build the all-important box
office count.
I hadn’t
realized theretofore that making yet more money for Oprah ranks as a social
responsibility.) In this device Zeitlin repeats a technique employed by Davis
Guggenheim’sWaiting for Superman, the corporate school
privatization movement’s Triumph of the Will,speaking of
Leni Riefenstahl, and its fictional counterpart Daniel Barnz’s Won’t
Back Down, that
movement’s Birth of a Nation. It is a minor cause for
optimism that, to put it mildly, neither of those abominations came anywhere
near its predecessor’s commercial or cultural success.
In addition
to knee-jerk anti-statism, the objection that the slaves freed themselves, as
it shows up in favorable comparison of Django Unchained to Lincoln, stems from a racial pietism
that issued from the unholy union of cultural studies and black studies in the
university. More than twenty years of “resistance” studies that find again and
again, at this point ritualistically, that oppressed people have and express
agency have contributed to undermining the idea of politics as a discrete
sphere of activity directed toward the outward-looking project of affecting the
social order, most effectively through creating, challenging or redefining
institutions that anchor collective action with the objective of developing and
wielding power. Instead, the notion has been largely evacuated of specific
content at all. “Politics” can refer to whatever one wants it to; all that’s
required is an act of will in making a claim.
The fact that
there has been no serious left presence with any political capacity in this
country for at least a generation has exacerbated this problem. In the absence
of dynamic movements that cohere around affirmative visions for making the
society better, on the order of, say, Franklin Roosevelt’s 1944 “Second Bill of
Rights,” and that organize and agitate around programs instrumental to pursuit
of such visions, what remains is the fossil record of past movements—the still
photo legacies of their public events, postures, and outcomes. Over time, the
idea that a “left” is defined by commitment to a vision of social
transformation and substantive program for realizing it has receded from
cultural memory. Being on the left has become instead a posture, an identity,
utterly disconnected from any specific practical commitments.
Thus star
Maggie Gyllenhaal and director Daniel Barnz defended themselves against
complaints about their complicity in the hideously anti-union propaganda film Won’t
Back Down by
adducing their identities as progressives. Gyllenhaal insisted that the movie
couldn’t be anti-union because “There’s no world in which I would ever, EVER
make an anti-union movie. My parents are left of Trotsky.”15 Barnz
took a similar tack: “I’m a liberal Democrat, very pro-union, a member of two
unions. I marched with my union a couple of years ago when we were on strike.”16 And
Kathryn Bigelow similarly has countered criticism that her Zero
Dark Thirtyjustifies torture and American militarism more broadly
by invoking her identity as “a lifelong pacifist.”17 Being
a progressive is now more a matter of how one thinks about oneself than what
one stands for or does in the world. The best that can be said for that
perspective is that it registers acquiescence in defeat. It amounts to an
effort to salvage an idea of a left by reformulating it as a sensibility within neoliberalism rather than a challenge
to it.
Gyllenhaal,
Barnz, and Bigelow exemplify the power of ideology as a mechanism that
harmonizes the principles one likes to believe one holds with what advances
one’s material interests; they also attest to the fact that the transmutation
of leftism into pure self-image exponentially increases the potential power of
that function of ideology. Upton Sinclair’s quip—“It is difficult to get a man
to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding
it”—takes on all the more force when applied not merely to actions or
interpretations of an external world but to devoutly savored self-perception as
well.
That left
political imagination now operates unself-consciously within the practical
ontology of neoliberalism is also the most important lesson to be drawn from
progressives’ discussion ofDjango
Unchained and,
especially, the move to compare it with Lincoln. Jon Wiener, writing inThe Nation, renders the following
comparisons: “In Spielberg’s film, the leading black female character is a
humble seamstress in the White House whose eyes fill with tears of gratitude
when Congress votes to abolish slavery. In Tarantino’s film, the leading female
character (Kerry Washington) is a defiant slave who has been branded on the
face as a punishment for running away, and is forced—by Leonardo DiCaprio—to
work as a prostitute. In Spielberg’s film, old white men make history, and
black people thank them for giving them their freedom. In Tarantino’s, a black
gunslinger goes after the white slavemaster with homicidal vengeance.”18
Never mind
that, for what it’s worth, Kerry Washington’s character, as she actually
appears in the film, is mainly a cipher, a simpering damsel in distress more
reminiscent of Fay Wray in the original King Kong than heroines of the
blaxploitation era’s eponymous vehicles Coffy or Foxy Brown. More problematically, Wiener’s
juxtapositions reproduce the elevation of private, voluntarist action as a
politics—somehow more truly true or authentic, or at least more appealing
emotionally—over the machinations of government and institutional actors. That
is a default presumption of the identitarian/culturalist left and is also a
cornerstone of neoliberalism’s practical ontology.
In an essay
on Lincoln published
a month earlier, Wiener identifies as the central failing of the film its
dedication “to the proposition that Lincoln freed the slaves” and concludes,
after considerable meandering and nit-picking ambivalence that brings the term
pettifoggery to mind, “slavery died as a result of the actions of former
slaves.”19 This
either/or construct is both historically false and wrong-headed, and it is
especially surprising that a professional historian like Wiener embraces it.
The claim that slaves’ actions were responsible for the death of slavery is not
only inaccurate; it is a pointless and counterproductive misrepresentation.
What purpose is served by denying the significance of the four years of war and
actions of the national government of the United States in ending slavery? Besides,
it was indeed the Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery.
Slaves’ mass
departure from plantations was self-emancipation, by definition. Their doing so
weakened the southern economy and undermined the secessionists’ capacity to
fight, and the related infusion of black troops into the Union army provided a
tremendous lift both on the battlefield and for northern morale. How does
noting that proximity of Union troops greatly emboldened that self-emancipation
diminish the import of their actions? But it was nonetheless the Thirteenth
Amendment that finally outlawed slavery once and for all in the United States
and provided a legal basis for preempting efforts to reinstate it in effect.
Moreover, for all the debate concerning Lincoln’s motives, the sincerity of his
commitment to emancipation, and his personal views of blacks, and
notwithstanding its technical limits with respect to enforceability, the
Emancipation Proclamation emboldened black people, slave and free, and
encouraged all slavery’s opponents. And, as Wiener notes himself, the
proclamation tied the war explicitly to the elimination of slavery as a system.
Firefly, or
The Road to Serfdom
So why is a
tale about a manumitted slave/homicidal black gunslinger more palatable to a
contemporary leftoid sensibility than either a similarly cartoonish one about
black maids and their white employers or one that thematizes Lincoln’s effort
to push the Thirteenth Amendment through the House of Representatives? The
answer is, to quote the saccharine 1970s ballad, “Feelings, nothing more than
feelings.” Wiener’s juxtapositions reflect the political common sense that
gives pride of place to demonstrations of respect for the “voices” of the
oppressed and recognition of their suffering, agency, and accomplishments. That
common sense informs the proposition that providing inspiration has social or
political significance. But it equally shapes the generic human-interest
“message” of films like The Help that represent injustice as an
issue of human relations—the alchemy that promises to reconcile social justice
and capitalist class power as a win/win for everyone by means of attitude
adjustments and deepened mutual understanding.
That common
sense underwrites the tendency to reduce the past to a storehouse of encouraging
post-it messages for the present. It must, because the presumption that the
crucial stakes of political action concern recognition and respect for the
oppressed’s voices is a presentist view, and mining the past to reinforce it
requires anachronism. The large struggles against slavery and Jim Crow were
directed toward altering structured patterns of social relations anchored in
law and state power, but stories of that sort are incompatible with both global
marketing imperatives and the ideological predilections of neoliberalism and
its identitarian loyal opposition. One can only shudder at the prospect of how
Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film, The Battle of Algiers, or Costa-Gavras’s State
of Siege (1972) would be remade today. (Guy
Ritchie’s and Madonna’s execrable 2002 remake of Lina Wertmüller’s 1974 film Swept
Away may
provide a clue; their abomination completely erases the original film’s complex
class and political content and replaces it with a banal—aka “universal”—story
of an encounter between an older woman and a younger man, while at the same
time meticulously, almost eerily, reproducing, scene by scene, the visual
structure of Wertmüller’s film.)
Particularly
as those messages strive for “universality” as well as inspiration, their least
common denominator tends toward the generic story of individual triumph over
adversity. But the imagery of the individual overcoming odds to achieve fame,
success, or recognition also maps onto the fantasy of limitless upward mobility
for enterprising and persistent individuals who persevere and remain true to
their dreams. As such, it is neoliberalism’s version of an ideal of social
justice, legitimizing both success and failure as products of individual
character. When combined with a multiculturalist rhetoric of “difference” that
reifies as autonomous cultures—in effect racializes—what are actually
contingent modes of life reproduced by structural inequalities, this fantasy
crowds inequality as a metric of injustice out of the picture entirely. This
accounts for the popularity of reactionary dreck like Beasts
of the Southern Wild among
people who should know better. The denizens of the Bathtub actively, even
militantly, choose their poverty and cherish it and should be respected and
appreciated for doing so. But no one ever supposed that Leni Riefenstahl was on
the left.
The tale type
of individual overcoming has become a script into which the great social
struggles of the last century and a half have commonly been reformulated to fit
the requirements of a wan, gestural multiculturalism. Those movements have been
condensed into the personae of Great Men and Great Women—Booker T. Washington,
W. E. B. Du Bois, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, George Washington Carver, Martin
Luther King, Jr., Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou
Hamer and others—who seem to have changed the society apparently by virtue of
manifesting their own greatness. The different jacket photos adorning the 1982
and 1999 editions of Doug McAdam’s well known sociological study of the civil rights
movement,Political Process and the
Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970, exemplify the shift. The first
edition’s cover was a photo of an anonymous group of marching protesters; the
second edition featured the (staged) photo—made iconic by its use in an Apple
advertising campaign—of a dignified Rosa Parks sitting alone on the front seat
of a bus looking pensively out the window.20
Ironically,
the scholarly turn away from organizations and institutional processes to
valorize instead the local and everyday dimensions of those movements may have
exacerbated this tendency by encouraging a focus on previously unrecognized
individual figures and celebrating their lives and “contributions.” Rather than
challenging the presumption that consequential social change is made by the
will of extraordinary individuals, however, this scholarship in effect validates
it by inflating the currency of Greatness so much that it can be found any and
everywhere. Giving props to the unrecognized or underappreciated has
become a feature particularly of that scholarship that defines scholarly
production as a terrain of political action in itself and aspires to the
function of the “public intellectual.” A perusal of the rosters of African
American History Month and Martin Luther King, Jr. Day speakers at any random
sample of colleges and universities attests to how closely this
scholar/activist turn harmonizes with the reductionist individualism of
prosperity religion and the varieties of latter-day mind cure through which
much of the professional-managerial stratum of all races, genders, and sexual
orientations, narrates its understandings of the world.
There is
another, more mundane factor at play in the desire for “black heroes.” It stems
from a view that Hollywood is resistant to depiction of black heroes and that,
therefore, any film with a bona fide black hero is the equivalent of a civil
rights victory. Minister J. Kojo Livingston, writing in the Louisiana
Weekly put his
appreciation of Django Unchained succinctly: “I liked the Black
guy winning in the end.”21 That’s
fair enough, so far as it goes, particularly when consideration is given to how
recently it has become possible to expect the black guy to win in the end. I
was quite impressed and gratified at the time that Keith David’s character made
it along with Kurt Russell’s to the end of John Carpenter’s 1982 remake of The
Thing and that
in the 1979 Alien Yaphet Kotto’s character was
the penultimate one killed and only then because of the ineptitude of another
crewmember who blocked his line of attack on the creature. When we watched the
1982 Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, my then twelve year-old son
remarked that he’d want to leave the theater if the black starship captain
(played by Paul Winfield) killed himself to save Captain Kirk, which of course
happened moments later. (As Minister Livingston continued, “Heck, I liked the
Black guy even living to see the end of a movie.”) But, understandable as that
impulse is, it is problematic as a basis for making claims about films’ social
significance at this point in American history. Black characters or
characters played by black actors now routinely survive to the end of films in
which most characters die, and black actors commonly enough play leading roles.
Literature
scholar Kenneth Warren has suggested that objections to films like Lincoln on the basis of what they don’t do
often rest on a premise that mass-market films depicting themes that bear on
black American history are so rare that each of them is under pressure to
address everything that could be addressed. So a film that focuses on a
particular legislative initiative in a brief period at the end of 1864 and
early months of 1865 has sparked objections that it does not address issues
outside its scope, such as Lincoln’s evolving views of blacks, the role of
black abolitionists and black troops in creating the climate that made the
Thirteenth Amendment possible. But the sense that everything must be said at
once sets an expectation that no film could ever satisfy even minimally. And,
as Warren notes, the notion that occasions for such films are extremely rare is
also problematic. That belief, like the premise that Hollywood refuses black
heroes, is sustained largely by reference to a past—although, as I indicate
above, a not very distant one—when it was clearly true.
Of course
stereotypical representations of black characters remain. I had exactly the
same reaction as Armond White to Hushpuppy, Quvenzhané Wallis’s character in Beasts
of the Southern Wild. When
the two-bit magical realism and lame ponderousness of the dialogue are boiled
off, she is, down to her name, a contemporary pickaninny and a window into the
racial fantasy life of the hipster carpetbaggers who have flocked to New
Orleans post-Katrina searching for authenticity and careers. Like all good
satire, the “Black Acting School” in Robert Townsend’s 1987 Hollywood
Shuffle had a
foundation in material reality. Viola Davis seems to be a quite accomplished
actor, but not only did she do basically the same performance in The
Help and Won’t
Back Down; both
characters are all too evocative of a stock figure—the quietly strong,
long-suffering black woman depicted over the years by a string of actors from
Joanna Moore and Claudia McNeil to Mary Alice, Beah Richards, Cicely Tyson, and
now, woe be unto those with low tolerance for overacting, Angela Bassett.
And it is not unreasonable to contend that double standards persist for black
and white actors, directors, and thematic matter. Denzel Washington, after
turning in basically the same sort of performance in a spate of films since the
1990s, finally won the best actor Academy Award for the version of it that was
in the character of a corrupt, murderous cop, and he was nominated again in
2013 for a role as another ethically and morally flawed character, this time an
alcoholic airline pilot.
Nevertheless,
racial stereotypes and morally compromised characters are not the totality of
black representation in films any more, nor even the preponderance. What made Hollywood
Shuffle possible,
and more significantly what made it successful, was the extent to which the
conditions it satirized were already under critical scrutiny if not retreat.
And a debate over whether there are enough starring roles for black
characters, black actors cast in leading roles that may not be racially
specified, or films with black subject matter is a much more complicated and
ambiguous matter—enough according to what standard of expectation, after all?—than
whether there are any.
The more
interesting issue is the inclination to see the racial limitations of the
present through the lens of the exclusion of the past. This habit of mind
shapes the claim that Django Unchainedbreaks a
convention of sanitizing slavery in both films and American culture in general.
Harvard sociologist Lawrence D. Bobo rests his proclamation of Django’s cinematic and cultural
significance, which belies his nearly simultaneous articulation of the “just
entertainment” defense, on an assertion that “For too long American cinema has
presented—and American audiences have accepted, digested and largely tacitly
embraced—a hopelessly sanitized version of slavery in the South.” He goes on to
declaim on a “collective memory” in which the “defining image, of course, is
that of Scarlett O’Hara and family enjoying the ‘good life’ before ‘the War.’
Slavery has been often rendered just a benign backdrop to the beauty, elegance
and, indeed, virtue of the plantation elite.”22 Bobo
is hardly alone in asserting that claim. It is a standard refrain, even
including references to Gone With the Wind and Birth
of a Nation, in
defenses of Tarantino’s film.23
Are we really
to believe that, notwithstanding the massive sea change in the society since
the end of World War II, Hollywood’s depictions and the baseline of most
Americans’ presumptions about slavery are unchanged since 1915 or even 1939? In
his defense of Django Adam Serwer at least limits the
domain of persistent “lionization of the Lost Cause and the Confederacy” to the
genre of the “revenge Western,” but that qualification takes all the starch out
of the claim. Redemption of the genre of the revenge Western seems like a low
stakes, even lower reward undertaking. It would hardly be a notable victory for
racial justice or any other significant social interest. I take Serwer’s point
that the “trope of the wronged former Confederate” is visible, albeit “excised
from its historical context” in the sci-fi television program Firefly and its 2005 adaptation to
feature-length film, Serenity. However, that excision from
social context means more than he suggests.
Firefly’s superficial parallels with the
ex-Confederate hero trope are strong enough to have provoked discussion among
devotees and adjustments in dialogue to have leading characters denounce
slavery off the cuff.24 The
central characters are a crew of defeated insurgents operating as renegade
traders who remain hostile to the oppressive and corrupt central authority that
defeated them, and that makes the parallel to the wronged Confederate trope
seem especially, even disturbingly, strong. I had an immediate and
intensely negative reaction to it, even though the defeated rebels and those in
league with them are a racially diverse lot, and neither the settings nor plot
devices in any way evoke the slave South. Jeff Hart, in an essay on the theme
of the brooding ex-Confederate hero in AMC’s period drama Hell
on Wheels, contends
that Firefly “masterfully
extracts all the cool stuff about being a Confederate that we love in our
outlaws without any of the bad stuff (like slavery!).”25
However, that
observation begs the question whether the “cool stuff about being a Confederate”
can reasonably be seen as evoking the 1861 secessionist insurrection at all if
it comes without that “bad stuff,” without which there would have been no
secessionist movement at all. Slavery, as Confederate Vice-President Alexander
Stephens characterized it weeks after Lincoln’s inauguration, in the midst of
the secessionist frenzy, was the “cornerstone” of the southern order that he
and his confreres considered in jeopardy.26
I recognize
the impulse to treat the disconnected trope as though it has an essential
meaning fixed by that distinctive context because that connection has such a
lengthy, and more recently a charged, history. It has been around, after all,
at least since the romance of the James brothers. As I remark above, that
impulse affected my own reception of Firefly. It may be that Joss Whedon’s appropriation of the trope of
the brooding ex-Confederate outlaw hero for a setting that has nothing at all,
even allegorically, to do with the nineteenth-century South in some way works
backward to sanitize it in its more familiar context, but that seems
far-fetched. There are, however, two ways in which that impulse is problematic.
First, the view that the trope of the
emotionally damaged renegade outlaw of a Lost Cause is necessarily Confederate,
even when disconnected entirely from racial subordination and slavery, may in
effect validate apologists’ argument that the secessionist treason rested on
motives besides defense of slavery. The Lost Cause narrative emerged out of the
consolidation of planter-merchant class hegemony in the South at the onset of
the twentieth century. Films like Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind were instrumental in
propagating this discourse, which sought to preempt non-southern opposition to
racial disfranchisement and Jim Crow. Rhetorically, in an era in which the
secessionist insurrection was within two generations of living memory for many
Americans (as many as 10,000 veterans of the hostilities were still alive as
late as 1938), that project involved defusing slavery’s legacy as a point of
contention by representing it as a benign natural order in the antebellum era and
by asserting that secessionism’s objective wasn’t protecting the institution of
slavery but defending a conveniently evanescent “way of life.”27
Second,
giving in to that impulse directs attention away from the political vision Firefly actually does articulate, which
says more about the character of our historical moment. Firefly’snarrative
conceit resonates much more clearly with contemporary anti-statist conventions
than it evokes the Lost Cause line. The trope of resistance to a brutal and
insensitive central authority is what today corrals social imagination in that
perverse ratification of inequality and bourgeois class power commonly
euphemized as an abstract “freedom” or “liberty.” This conceit permeates mass
entertainment from The Matrix series to The
Hunger Games and a
line of dystopian fantasy that stretches back at least to Norman Jewison’s
original Rollerball in 1975.28 It
is recycled endlessly in the melodramatic cult of the maverick cop or physician
who bristles under the corrupting and defeatist constraints of bureaucratic
oversight—what otherwise might be described as accountability to the public
trust. It has been a dominant theme in the genre of the disaster film and the
lineage of sci-fi horrors in space spawned by Alien.
That the evil
central authority is often cast as direct rule by corporations, as in Rollerball andAlien (where
it may reflect these stories’ roots in the still politically contested 1970s), is by now more a misdirection than a mitigation
of the anti-government narrative; that plot device collapses the distinction
between public and private and serves as a naïve counter to criticisms that the
films purvey right-wing politics. However, the overarching narrative
framework pits the local, familial/gemeinschaftlich and individual against the central,
distant, and bureaucratic, which are invariably villainous. That device is only
a step away rhetorically from the crypto-fascist, stab-in-the-back Vietnam
vigilante films like the Rambo series and Missing
In Action.29
But the
ideological patron saints of these films are Friedrich Hayek or Gary Becker
more than Julius Streicher or Ted Nugent. It is the trials and torments,
and the glorification of the individual, often even The One, that drive their
narrative arcs—even when they imagine themselves doing otherwise. The priority
of individual will is a thread connecting fantasy, fiction and “faction” alike. Cold
Mountain reduces the
southern elites’ treason to a thin backdrop for a puerile love story, barely
leavened with a couple of trite “war is hell” references and a dash or two of
Clarissa Pinkola Estés-style cultural feminism about how it’s the women who reallysuffer
from the wars that y’all men make. (As Dargis noted, however, the period
artifacts nearly all pass muster for authenticity.) For all its bullshit,
dorm-room philosophy, geeky double and triple reversals, and purported critique
of authoritarianism, The Matrix films pivot on Neo as The One.
In fact, apparently the only hope for combatting the ubiquitous threats in any
given post-apocalyptic world is to wait for the arrival of the Chosen One. The
Iron Lady reduces
even Margaret Thatcher to a bourgeois feminist story of Woman Overcoming.
No wonder
Maggie Gyllenhaal couldn’t tell the difference between her union-busting, ditzy
zealot Jamie Fitzpatrick and Norma Rae or Karen Silkwood. Never mind that both
those characters were modeled on real union activists: Norma Rae’s inspiration
was Crystal Lee Sutton, a member/organizer of the Amalgamated Clothing and
Textile Workers Union, now part of UNITE HERE, and Silkwood lost her life as an
activist in the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union, now part
of the United Steel Workers. That’s all pointless detail, TMI; it’s really all
about individual working-class women fighting for what they believe in and
Overcoming. (It may be a marker of the changed era that, twenty-eight years
after she played the lead in Silkwood, Meryl Streep starred
as Thatcher.)
Forget about
possible evocations of the Confederacy; this is Firefly’s ideological milieu. Its vision
is anti-government, punto, a multiculturalist, and thus
left-seeming, anti-statism. The main expression of the central authority’s
oppressiveness that affronts Serenity’s band of inter-planetary smugglers is
its exorbitant taxation and arbitrary, corrupt regulation of trade. The captain
and central character, also the most given to political declamation, is a
committed free-trader. Firefly’s defenders describe its politics
as libertarian. That is not only compatible with its multiculturalist
egalitarianism; the two can fit organically. But, as Hayek, Ludwig von Mises,
and Milton Friedman—as well as their acolyte, Thatcher—all were very much
aware, there is no such thing as a left libertarianism. The belief that there
is reflects the wishful thinking, or disingenuousness, of those who don’t want
to have to square their politics with their desired self-perception.
Libertarianism
is a shuck, more an aesthetics than a politics. Libertarians don’t want the
state to do anything other than what they want the state to do. And, as its
founding icons understood, it is fundamentally about property rights über
alles. Mises
and Hayek made clear in theory, and Thatcher and Friedman as Pinochet’s muse in
Chile did in practice, that a libertarian society requires an anti-popular,
authoritarian government to make sure that property rights are kept sacrosanct.
That’s why it’s so common that a few bad days, some sweet nothings, and a
couple of snazzy epaulets will turn a libertarian into an open fascist.
Whether or
not Firefly contains
more or less abstruse secessionist allegory, the fact that that issue is the
basis of concern about its politics is a window onto a core problem of the
current political situation. It reflects a critical perspective that accepts
neoliberal ideological hegemony as nature and finds its own standard of justice
in the rearview mirror. To the extent that Fireflyembraces a libertarian
politics, what it would share with the slave South isn’t racism but something
more fundamental. Insofar as the “freedom” the heroes yearn for includes destruction
of the regulatory apparatus of the state in favor of a market-fundamentalist
idea of freedom or liberty, no matter how racially diverse and egalitarian that
world would be, it would be closer than one might think to the essential
normative premise of the social order of which slavery was the cornerstone, the
conviction that individual property rights are absolute and inviolable.
The southern
political economy didn’t become grounded on slavery because it was racist; it
became racist because it was grounded on slavery.30 That
is, it was grounded on the absolute right of property-owners to define and control
their property—including property in other human beings—as they wished without
any interference or regulation, except, of course, reliance on the police
powers of the state to enforce their rights to and in such property. This takes
us back to the necessity for authoritarian government, about which there was
little disagreement within the dominant planter class.
Prominent
pro-slavery ideologist George Fitzhugh was resolutely antagonistic to
free-market, especially free-labor, liberalism and would hardly be considered a
philosophical libertarian. But neither would Hayek or Ron Paul have been when
describing the authoritarian regime essential for realizing property-based
Liberty. As one of the most vocal proponents of the argument that slavery was a
positive good for all involved, Fitzhugh doubled down on the matter of holding
property rights in people as the sectional crisis intensified. His 1854 book, Sociology
for the South, or, the Failure of a Free Society, argued for enslavement of poor whites
as well as blacks. James Henry Hammond, U.S. Senator and former governor
of South Carolina, memorialized this perspective in what came to be known as
his “Mudsill Speech” on the floor of the U.S. Senate in 1858 (also Django’s big
year). Speaking in
Congress as a member of a party that counted northern free white workers among
its core constituencies, Hammond was politic enough not to propose enslaving
them. However, he did underscore the essential reduction of freedom to property
rights, describing the slave South as enjoying “an extent of political freedom,
combined with entire security, such as no other people ever enjoyed upon the
face of the earth.” And he argued that, in effect, freedom was more complete
and more secure in the South because slavery permitted suppression and absolute
exclusion from civic voice of its “mud-sills” —the stratum necessary “to do the
menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life [without which] you would not
have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement.”
That’s what made the South more effectively free than the North. Freedom, or
liberty, meant the unbridled license of the propertied class.
The rhetoric
of antebellum fire-eaters and the ordinances of secession they crafted stand
out for the vehemence of their protests that their essential liberties were under attack.
The secessionists framed their extravagant denunciations of the national
government for its potential infringement of their right to hold property in
human beings in language that from our historical location seems Freudian in
the blatancy with which they declared themselves as literally fearing
enslavement by the United States. But it wasn’t psychological projection or
reaction formation. They considered any potential infringement on absolute
property rights as indeed tantamount to enslavement. For them property is the
only real right; therefore, property-holders are the only people in the society
with rights that count for anything, and their rights trump all else.
This is a
perspective that can provide some badly needed clarity on debates in
contemporary politics regarding the relation of race, racism and inequality.
For example, Ron and Rand Paul, libertarians of the highest order, do not
oppose the 1964 Civil Rights Law because they hate, or even don’t like, black
people. (And, for the record, whenever one finds oneself agreeing at all with
Kanye West about anything, it’s time to take a step back, breathe deeply and
reassess.) They oppose it, as they’ve made clear, because it infringes on property
rights. They dislike black people because they understand, correctly, that
black people are very likely to be prominent among those committed to pursuing
greater equality. They oppose black people’s demands and all others intended to
mitigate inequality because any efforts to do so would necessarily impinge on
the absolute sanctity of property rights. I don’t mean to suggest that the
Pauls aren’t racist; I’m pretty confident they are, no matter how much they
might protest the assessment. My point is that determining whether
they’re racist, then exposing and denouncing them for it, doesn’t reach to what
is most consequentially wrong and dangerous about them or for that matter what
makes their racism something more significant than that of the random bigot who
lives around the corner on disability.
Returning to Firefly, we don’t ever have to confront
Captain Mal’s and his crew’s libertarianism beyond platitudes and the sort of
errant patter of an adolescent irked at being told to clean up her room. We don’t
because they aren’t in a position to demonstrate what their libertarianism
would look like in practice. What they do perform regularly is liberal
multiculturalism, which no doubt reinforces a sense that the show’s gestural
anti-statism is at least consonant with an egalitarian politics. And that is a
quality that makes multiculturalist egalitarianism, or identitarianism, and its
various strategic programs—anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-heteronormativity,
etc.—neoliberalism’s loyal opposition. Their focus is on making neoliberalism
more just and, often enough, more truly efficient. Their objective is that,
however costs and benefits are distributed, the distribution should not
disproportionately harm or disadvantage the populations for which they advocate.
But what if
neoliberalism really can’t be made more just? (And, to be clear, when I say
neoliberalism, I mean capitalism with the gloves off and back on the
offensive.) What if the historical truth of capitalist class power is that,
without direct, explicit and relentless, zero-sum challenge to its foundations
in a social order built on its priority and dominance in the social division of
labor, we will never be able to win more than a shifting around of the material
burdens of inequality, reallocating them and recalibrating their incidence
among different populations? And what if creation of such populations as given,
natural-seeming entities—first as differentially valued pools of labor, in the
ideological equivalent of an evolving game of musical chairs, then eventually
also as ostensibly discrete market niches within the mass consumption regime—is
a crucial element in capitalism’s logic of social reproduction? To the extent
that is the case, multiculturalist egalitarianism and the political programs that
follow from it reinforce a key mystification that legitimizes the systemic
foundation of the inequalities to which those programs object.
Regimes of
class hierarchy depend for their stability on ideologies that legitimize
inequalities by representing them as the result of natural differences—where
you (or they) are in the society is where you (or they) deserve to be. Folk
taxonomies define and sort populations into putatively distinctive groups on
the basis of characteristics ascribed to them. Such taxonomies rely on circular
self-validation in explaining the positions groups occupy in the social order
as suited to the essential, inherent characteristics, capabilities and
limitations posited in the taxonomy’s just-so stories. These ideological
constructions and the social processes through which they are reproduced,
including the common sense that arises from self-fulfilling prophecy, are what
Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields call “racecraft.”31 An
implication of the racecraft notion is that the ideology, or taxonomy, of race
is always as much the cover story as the source of even the inequalities most
explicitly linked to race.
James Henry
Hammond’s mudsill theory is instructive. The southern system was superior and
afforded greater freedom, he argued, because its mudsills were held to belong
to an ascriptively distinct and naturally subordinate population. The North was
a less secure and stable society because its mudsills were “of your own race;
you are brothers of one blood. They are your equals in natural endowment or
intellect, and they feel galled by their degradation. Our slaves do not vote.
We give them no political power. Yours do vote, and, being the majority, they
are the depositaries of all your political power.” He in effect judged the
North’s ruling class to be more unstable than the South’s because it hadn’t
been able to turn its mudsills into a sufficiently different ascriptive
population. (Fitzhugh, the theorist, proposed a remedy for that problem;
Hammond, the politician, understood that was easier said than done.)
Hammond was
no doubt sincere in his conviction that blacks were by nature fit to be slaves,
“of another and inferior race.” But notwithstanding his sincerity, that view
was relatively new as a defense of slavery. Alexander Stephens indicated as
much in the “Cornerstone Speech” and noted that the dominant perspective of the
Founding generation was that “enslavement of the African was in violation of
the laws of nature.” Of course, Stephens insisted that that perspective was
“fundamentally wrong” in that it “rested upon the assumption of the equality of
the races.” The defense of slavery that he and Hammond articulated dated only
from the 1830s, when the combined pressures of a surge in abolitionist activism
and articulations of free labor ideology outside the South called for a more
robust defense of the “peculiar institution” than the fundamentally apologetic
contention that it was a “necessary evil” economically. South Carolina’s father
of the secessionist treason, John C. Calhoun, gave the new argument its
systematic expression in “Slavery a Positive Good,” an 1837 speech to the U. S.
Senate.32
That argument
aligned with the emergent race science that would provide the basic folk taxonomy
through which Americans apprehend race and categories of racial classification
to this day. A central text of that nascent race science was the 1854 tome Types
of Mankind, co-authored
by George R. Gliddon, a British-born Egyptologist, and Josiah C. Nott, a native
South Carolinian and wealthy slave-holding physician in Mobile, Alabama.33 In
1851 Samuel A. Cartwright, a plantation physician and pioneer in the science of
racial medicine, published in De Bow’s Review a paper, “Diseases and
Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” which he had initially presented at a
Louisiana medical convention and in which he examined, among other racial
particularities, a condition he called “drapetomania”—a “disease of the mind”
that induced slaves to “run away from service.”34 Race
theory, that is, took shape as a defense of slavery only in the last decades of
the institution’s life; it was the expression of a beleaguered slavocracy
doubling down to protect its property rights in human beings.
Hammond may
have believed that he’d always believed the positive good argument and that
black slavery was nature’s racial decree. If he did, he would only have been
demonstrating the power of ascriptive ideologies to impose themselves as
reality. Marxist theorist Harry Chang thus analogized race to Marx’s
characterization of the fetish character of money. Just as money is the
material condensation of “the reification of a relation called value” and “a
function-turned-into-an-object,” race is also a function—a relation in the
capitalist division of labor—turned into an object.35
Race and
gender are the ascriptive hierarchies most familiar to us because they have
been most successfully challenged since the second half of the last century;
ideologies of ascriptive difference are most powerful when they are simply
taken as nature and don’t require defense. The significant and lasting
institutional victories that have been won against racial and gender
subordination and discrimination, as well as the cultural victories against
racism and sexism as ideologies, have rendered those taxonomies less potent as justifications
for ascriptive inequality than they had been. As capitalism has evolved new
articulations of the social division of labor, and as the victories against
racial and gender hierarchy have been consolidated, the causal connections
between those ideologies and manifest inequality have become still more
attenuated.
Race and
gender don’t exhaust the genus of ascriptive hierarchies. Other taxonomies do
and have done the same sort of work as those we understand as race. The
feebleminded and the born criminal, for example, were equivalent to racial taxa
as ideologies of ascriptive hierarchy but did not hinge on the phenotypical
narratives that have anchored the race idea. Victorian British elites ascribed
essential, race-like difference to the English working class. The culture of
poverty and the underclass overlap racially disparaged populations but aren’t
exactly reducible to familiar racial taxonomies. Some—like super predators and
crack babies—have had more fleeting life spans. Their common sense explanatory
power hinges significantly on the extent to which they comport with the
perspectives and interests of the social order’s dominant, opinion-shaping
strata; as Marx and Engels observed in 1845, “the class which is the ruling materialforce
of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”36
Hell on
Wheels, or the Tea Party
In addition,
the exact sort of work that given taxonomies, or categories within one, will do
is linked to historically specific regimes of hierarchy. A taxonomy’s
ideological significance and material impact, that is, can vary widely. “Race”
was an ideology of essential difference in 1820, as it was in the 1850s. Yet it
didn’t do the same work in the earlier period’s defenses of slavery as a
necessary evil that it did in later defenses of it as a positive good, like
those articulated by Fitzhugh and Hammond. Nor does gender do the same work in
the early twenty-first century that it did at the beginning, or even the
middle, of the twentieth.
Once
established, stereotypes and the folk taxonomies that legitimize them may die
hard, but their significance as props for a regime of class hierarchy can
change along with the political-economic foundations of the class order.
Persistence of familiar narratives of hierarchy can evoke the earlier
associations, but that evocation can be misleading and counterproductive for
making sense of social relations in both past and present. In particular the
“just like slavery” or “just like Jim Crow” proclamations that are intended as
powerful criticism of current injustices are more likely to undermine
understanding of injustice in the past as well as the present than to enable
new insight. Another version of the trope of the damaged ex-Confederate is
illustrative.
Unlike Firefly, the television drama Hell
on Wheels constructs
the wounded ex-Confederate much nearer its original form but with revisions
that underscore the contemporary period drama’s problematic and ideological
relation to history. Adam Serwer adduces Hell on Wheels,which is set in
1865 in a mobile railroad town, as
another illustration of the persistence of the trope of the vengeful former
Confederate brooding hero/sociopath, albeit in a “hilariously rationalized”
form. Its version of the character, Cullen Bohannan, had been a large
Mississippi planter who freed his slaves a year before the treasonous
insurrection in deference to his northern, anti-slavery wife who—true to tale
type—was later martyred by marauding Union soldiers, now the targets of his
quest. Serwer is correct to say that the preposterous device of separating the
hero’s Confederate loyalties from commitment to slave-holding is a transparent
effort to sanitize the hero’s secessionism.
However, the
difference in historical context is crucial in this regard as well. The old
Lost Cause tropes, originating in the early twentieth-century southern
ideological campaign for sectional reconciliation on white supremacist terms,
don’t do the same cultural and ideological work in a society in which Glenn
Beck appropriates Martin Luther King, Jr. to accuse President Barack Obama of
racism that they did in a society in which racial subordination was supported
explicitly by the force of law and custom. This is not to imply that there’s
nothing politically disturbing and reactionary about the conceits of Hell
on Wheels. On
the contrary, going beyond the superficial rehearsal of hoary tropes to
consider the program’s representations in their actual historical context
discloses its more insidious work in legitimizing inequality.
The conceit
that Bohannan had freed his slaves before he fought for secession does more
than separate the treason from its foundational commitment to slavery. That
conceit also replaces slavery as an institution with slaveholding as a matter
of individual morality, as in Django Unchained. That Bohannan
manumitted his slaves as a gesture of love for his wife folds into another
trope of the genre, the pedestalizing, “I love her so much I’d change my
raffish ways for her” fantasy. That’s the happy face of adolescent patriarchy,
its expression that doesn’t usually involve a restraining order, though it’s
probably best that the brooding loner hero’s sainted wife is nearly always a
martyr and thus motivation for, instead of the object of, his sadistic violence
and mayhem. But in Hell on Wheels that device also reinforces the
reduction of slavery to slaveholding as an individual act, a consumer
preference to be negotiated within a marriage—like owning a motorcycle, going
to the strip club with the guys every weekend, or painting the living room
magenta.
From the
standpoint of claims to social significance, a deeper problem with period
vehicles likeDjango Unchained, The
Help, and Hell
on Wheels is
their denial of historicity. By this I do not mean historical accuracy as
faithfulness to facts about the past. The manumission themes inHell on Wheels and Django
Unchained are instructive.
Voluntary manumission was all but impossible in Mississippi as the sectional
crisis intensified on the eve of secession. By 1860 even Maryland with a
relatively large free black population and Arkansas, which had comparatively
small slave population, had outlawed the practice; the states with the largest
black populations had done so much earlier—South Carolina in 1820 and
Mississippi in 1822. Considering its relatively incidental place in each story
line, though, the historical inaccuracy on which those bits hinge is within the
boundaries of acceptable artistic license. The problem is with the ideological
character of the larger story lines that preclude even wondering whether
manumission would have been possible.
Both tales
trifle with slavery. For Hell on Wheels it’s an unfortunate artifact of
the genre, baggage that threatens to sully the appeal of the hero as wronged
Confederate. Producers Joe and Tony Gayton (a former production assistant for
political reactionary John Milius and co-writer with his brother Joe of the
Vietnam POW rescue fantasy film Uncommon Valor) may also have
been concerned to preempt sharp criticism for romanticizing the institution
indirectly through their hero’s secessionist loyalties. For Tarantino
slavery is a prop for a claim to social significance and a hook to connect
spaghetti western and blaxploitation. In both vehicles it is a generic bad
thing, an especially virulent species of racism, though slavery’s pastness—not
only was Bohannan no longer a slave owner; but the series is set in 1865—keeps
it peripheral in Hell on Wheels. And once again
the central thread is the individual quest. Even the principal ex-slave in Hell
on Wheels, Elam Ferguson (played by the rapper Common), is depicted
as “coming to terms with the risks and responsibilities of his newly-acquired
freedom,” and, because he had a “white father and a slave mother,” apparently
he is therefore “a man with no true home or people he can call his own.”
And he and Bohannan, also a disconnected individual, engage in an exchange
about the need to “let go of the past.” Even though that exchange seems
intended partly as a comment on the impossibility of either man’s doing so, the
punch line remains the individual quest, leavened with the unshakable personal
demons that are the banal melodrama’s yeast. (And I can anticipate the
contention that Hell on Wheels is somehow critical of
capitalism. It’s not. It’s critical of big capitalism and once again the
capital/government nexus and their running roughshod over beleaguered
individuals. That’s the critical standpoint of a reactionary populism that’s as
likely to support Tea Party style fascism as any other politics, and it would
be good for us all to be clearer in recognizing that for what it is.)
Effacement of
historicity and the social in favor of the timeless—that is,
presentist—narrative of individual Overcoming is the deep politics and social
commentary propounded in these products of the mass entertainment industry.
They differ from other such products only because they ostensibly apply the
standard formulae to socially important topics. They don’t, however. They do
exactly the reverse; they revise historically and politically significant
moments to fit within the formula. In doing so they are nodes in the constitution
of neoliberalism’s ideological hegemony.
And the
extent of that hegemony is attested by claims from the likes of Lawrence Bobo,
Jon Wiener and others who should know better than to think that a film like Django
Unchainedsomehow captures the essential truth of American slavery.
That truth is apparently, as Bobo condenses it, “brutality, inescapable
violence and absolutely thorough moral degradation.” But those features were
neither essential nor exclusive to slavery; they were behavioral artifacts
enabled by the institution because it conferred, with support of law and
custom, a property right—absolute control of life and livelihood—of some
individuals over others. That property
rightwas the essential evil and injustice that defined slavery, not the
extremes of brutality and degradation it could encourage and abet. No
effort is required to understand why mass-market films go for the dramatic
excesses, but what about the scholars and other nominal leftists who also
embrace that view of slavery?
In part, the
inclination may stem from a corrosive legacy of Malcolm X. Malcolm was an
important cultural figure for most of the 1960s, before and perhaps even more
so after his death. He was not, however, an historian, and few formulations
have done more to misinform, distort and pre-empt popular understanding of
American slavery than his rhetorically very effective but historically facile
“house Negro/field Negro” parable. It doesn’t map onto how even plantation
slavery—which accounted for only about half of slaves by 1850—operated. Not
only was working in the house no major plum; it hardly fit with the Uncle Tom
stereotype, such as Tarantino’s self-hating caricature, Stephen. The well-known
slave rebels Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey and Robert Smalls all gainsay
that image. Anyway, the Uncle Tom notion is not a useful category for
political analysis. It is only a denunciation; no one ever identifies under
that label. Yet its emptiness may be the source of its attractiveness. In
disconnecting critique from any discrete social practice and locating it
instead in imputed pathological psychology—“Why, that house Negro loved the
master more than the master loved himself,” pace Malcolm—the notion
individualizes political criticism on the (non-existent) racially self-hating
caricature, and, of course, anyone a demagogue chooses to denounce. Because it
centers on motives rather than concrete actions and stances, it leaves infinite
room both for making and deflecting ad hominem charges and, of course,
inscribes racial authenticity as the key category of political judgment.
That sort of
Malcolm X/blaxploitation narrative, including the insistence that Birth
of a Nationand Gone With the Wind continue to shape Americans’
understandings of slavery, also is of a piece with a line of anti-racist
argument and mobilization that asserts powerful continuities between current
racial inequalities and either slavery of the Jim Crow regime. This line of
argument has been most popularly condensed recently in Michelle Alexander’s The
New Jim Crow, which
analogizes contemporary mass incarceration to the segregationist regime. But even she, after much
huffing and puffing and asserting the relation gesturally throughout the book,
ultimately acknowledges that the analogy fails.37 And
it would have to fail because the segregationist regime was the artifact of a
particular historical and political moment in a particular social order.
Moreover, the rhetorical force of the analogy with Jim Crow or slavery derives
from the fact that those regimes are associated symbolically with strong
negative sanctions in the general culture because they have been vanquished. In
that sense all versions of the lament that “it’s as if nothing has changed”
give themselves the lie. They are effective only to the extent that things have changed significantly.
The tendency
to craft political critique by demanding that we fix our gaze in the rearview
mirror appeals to an intellectual laziness. Marking superficial similarities
with familiar images of oppression is less mentally taxing than attempting to
parse the multifarious, often contradictory dynamics and relations that shape
racial inequality in particular and politics in general in the current moment.
Assertions that phenomena like the Jena, Louisiana, incident, the killings of
James Craig Anderson and Trayvon Martin, and racial disparities in
incarceration demonstrate persistence of old-school, white supremacist racism
and charges that the sensibilities of Thomas Dixon and Margaret Mitchell
continue to shape most Americans’ understandings of slavery do important,
obfuscatory ideological work. They lay claim to a moral urgency that, as
Mahmood Mamdani argues concerning the rhetorical use of charges of genocide,
enables disparaging efforts to differentiate discrete inequalities and
appropriate to generate historically specific causal accounts of them as
irresponsible dodges that abet injustice by temporizing in its face.38 But
more is at work here as well.
Insistence on
the transhistorical primacy of racism as a source of inequality is a class
politics. It’s the politics of a stratum of the professional-managerial class
whose material location and interests, and thus whose ideological commitments,
are bound up with parsing, interpreting and administering inequality defined in
terms of disparities among ascriptively defined populations reified as groups
or even cultures. In fact, much of the intellectual life of this stratum is
devoted to “shoehorning into the rubric of racism all manner of inequalities
that may appear statistically as racial disparities.”39 And that project shares capitalism’s
ideological tendency to obscure race’s foundations, as well as the foundations
of all such ascriptive hierarchies, in historically specific political economy.
This felicitous convergence may help explain why proponents of “cultural
politics” are so inclined to treat the products and production processes of the
mass entertainment industry as a terrain for political struggle and debate.
They don’t see the industry’s imperatives as fundamentally incompatible with
the notions of a just society they seek to advance. In fact, they share its
fetishization of heroes and penchant for inspirational stories of individual
Overcoming. This sort of “politics of representation” is no more than an
image-management discourse within neoliberalism. That strains of an ersatz left
imagine it to be something more marks the extent of our defeat. And then, of
course, there’s that Upton Sinclair point.
REFERENCES
1. Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Random House, 1956), 5.↑
2. Robert Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350-1870 (Chapel Hill, N.C., and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2002) and Contract, Coercion and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).↑
3. Manohla Dargis, “War Is Heaven,” Los Angeles Times, December 28, 2003, available at:http://articles.latimes.com/2003/dec/28/entertainment/ca-dargis28 ↑
4. Ronald Butt, “Margaret Thatcher: Interview for Sunday Times,” London Times, May 3, 1981.↑
5. A key early compendium illustrating the basic fault lines in the debate is Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, eds., Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1956).↑
6. Erin Aubry Kaplan, “Django an Unsettling Experience for Many Blacks,” Los Angeles Times,December 28, 2012, available at: http://articles.latimes.com/2012/dec/28/entertainment/la-et-django-reax-2-20121228 ↑
7. Andrew O’Hehir, “Tarantino’s Incoherent Three-Hour Bloodbath,” Salon, December 26, 2012, available at:http://www.salon.com/2012/12/26/tarantinos_incoherent_three_hour_bloodbath/↑
8. Omali Yeshitela, “Django Unchained, Or, ‘Killing White While Protecting White Power’: A Review,” Black Agenda Report, January 30, 2013, available at: http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/django-unchained-or-“killing-whitey-while-protecting-white-power”-review is one of the few commentaries I’ve encountered that makes that observation, although otherwise the essay shows the limits of a racial critique of capitalism.↑
9. Ryan Brooke, “The Truth About ‘Django Unchained,’” Daily Kos, January 10, 2013, available at: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/01/10/1177813/-The-Truth-About-Django-Unchained.↑
10. Michael Rudolph West, The Education of Booker T. Washington: Black Leadership in the Age of Jim Crow (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 2008).↑
11. Adolph Reed, Jr. and Merlin Chowkwanyun, “Race, Class, Crisis: The Discourse of Racial Disparity and its Analytical Discontents,” Socialist Register (2012): 166. ↑
12. Dr. Kwa David Whitaker, “Django Unchained Reflections” available athttp://ibw21.org/news-and-commentary/django-unchained-reflections/.
1. Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Random House, 1956), 5.↑
2. Robert Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350-1870 (Chapel Hill, N.C., and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2002) and Contract, Coercion and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).↑
3. Manohla Dargis, “War Is Heaven,” Los Angeles Times, December 28, 2003, available at:http://articles.latimes.com/2003/dec/28/entertainment/ca-dargis28 ↑
4. Ronald Butt, “Margaret Thatcher: Interview for Sunday Times,” London Times, May 3, 1981.↑
5. A key early compendium illustrating the basic fault lines in the debate is Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, eds., Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1956).↑
6. Erin Aubry Kaplan, “Django an Unsettling Experience for Many Blacks,” Los Angeles Times,December 28, 2012, available at: http://articles.latimes.com/2012/dec/28/entertainment/la-et-django-reax-2-20121228 ↑
7. Andrew O’Hehir, “Tarantino’s Incoherent Three-Hour Bloodbath,” Salon, December 26, 2012, available at:http://www.salon.com/2012/12/26/tarantinos_incoherent_three_hour_bloodbath/↑
8. Omali Yeshitela, “Django Unchained, Or, ‘Killing White While Protecting White Power’: A Review,” Black Agenda Report, January 30, 2013, available at: http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/django-unchained-or-“killing-whitey-while-protecting-white-power”-review is one of the few commentaries I’ve encountered that makes that observation, although otherwise the essay shows the limits of a racial critique of capitalism.↑
9. Ryan Brooke, “The Truth About ‘Django Unchained,’” Daily Kos, January 10, 2013, available at: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/01/10/1177813/-The-Truth-About-Django-Unchained.↑
10. Michael Rudolph West, The Education of Booker T. Washington: Black Leadership in the Age of Jim Crow (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 2008).↑
11. Adolph Reed, Jr. and Merlin Chowkwanyun, “Race, Class, Crisis: The Discourse of Racial Disparity and its Analytical Discontents,” Socialist Register (2012): 166. ↑
12. Dr. Kwa David Whitaker, “Django Unchained Reflections” available athttp://ibw21.org/news-and-commentary/django-unchained-reflections/.
Dr. Whitaker
seems to have made his own peace with neoliberalism, not least as an operator,
through his Ashe Cultural Center, of a half-dozen Cleveland-area charter
schools which, in addition to making their contribution to the destruction of
public education, have run afoul of the Ohio Department of Education for being
so poorly managed as to be judged “unauditable.” See: Edith Starzyk, “6 Charter
Schools Sponsored by Ashe Cultural Center Declared Unauditable,” Cleveland
Plain Dealer, November
24, 2010; Starzyk, “Charter Schools to Lose State Funds Because of Poorly Kept
Financial Records,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, April 13, 2011; and Starzyk,
“Lion of Judah Charter School Leader Indicted, Accused of illegally spending
$1.2 Million in Public Money,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 15, 2013. ↑
13. Notable exceptions to the film’s generally warm reception are Kelly Candaele, “The Problematic Political Messages of Beasts of the Southern Wild,” Los Angeles Review of Books,August 9, 2012; Armond White, “How Do You Pronounce Quvenzhané?” City Arts, January 30, 2013, available at: http://cityarts.info/2013/01/30/how-do-you-pronounce-quvenzhane/; Vince Mancini, “The Case Against Beasts of the Southern Wild,” Filmdrunk, December 3, 2012, available at: http://filmdrunk.uproxx.com/2012/12/the-cast-against-beasts-of-the-southern-wild and two short reviews by Ben Kenigsberg: “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” Time Out Chicago, July 5, 2012 available at: http://timeoutchicago.com/arts-culture/film/15470806/beasts-of-the-southern-wild-movie-review and “Beasts of the Southern Wild: A Republican Fantasy?” Time Out Chicago, July 6, 2012, available at:http://www.timeoutchicago.com/arts-culture/film/15493241/beasts-of-the-southern-wild-a-republican-fantasy.↑
14. See, for example, Leni Riefenstahl: Vanishing Africa (New York: Harmony Books, 1982);Africa (Cologne: Taschen, 2010), and The Last of the Nuba (London: Tom Stacey Ltd., 1973). For access to an additional layer of complication in these exoticizing accounts, I suggest juxtaposing the first two photographs that appear in the Africa volume.↑
15. Howard Gensler, “Maggie Gyllenhaal Talks Unions, Education and Motherhood,”Philadelphia Daily News, September 28, 2012. She even compared her character to Norma Rae and Erin Brockovich. (Carol Lloyd, writing on the GreatSchools, Inc website, proclaimed the film “the Silkwood…for education reformers”; available athttp://www.greatschools.org/improvement/parental-power/7033-wont-back-down-movie-review-parent-trigger-law.gs.) Gyllenhaal went on to aver “there are huge problems with the teachers union” and invoked that empty liberal phraseology to call for having the temerity to “look at things that are broken.” I won’t speculate as to where being “left of Trotsky” might place Gyllenhaal on the political spectrum, but this patter brings to mind a conversation I had with our provost at the New School, the well-known post-colonial anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, when the adjunct faculty, who were 90% of the institution’s total, were organizing with the United Auto Workers for collective bargaining rights. Appadurai had been even more aggressively hostile to the unionization effort than our unindicted former war criminal president, Bob Kerrey. I sought Appadurai out at a colleague’s cocktail party to remonstrate with him about his manifest hostility to the unionization effort. He very warmly and genially assured me that he loves unions and that, if the New School were a place that really exploited its adjuncts, like Harvard or Yale, he’d be all for the effort. But, he said, the New School is such a fragile institution that it simply couldn’t afford to take the risk. I told him that he sounded like the human resources director at Whole Foods or Wal-Mart.↑
16. Howard Gensler, “Director Daniel Barnz Defends Won’t Back Down,” Philadelphia Daily News, September 28, 2012. Barnz upped the ante by addressing criticism that Christian fascist billionaire Philip Anschutz bankrolled the film. For Barnz, “What’s really going on here is a refreshing reach across the ideological divide. This is a conservative Republican evangelical Christian who hired the Jewish liberal Democrat—that’s me—to helm this movie. This is someone who said: ‘This is a problem in our country. I have the resources to help a wide exploration of this that could reach a lot of people and I’m going to do it.’ And he let us go out and do it and he empowered us. He empowered me and he empowered this very liberal cast and producers to do that.” Karen Butler, “Gyllenhaal, Barnz: Won’t Back Down Doesn’t Bash Teachers’ Union,” UPI News Service, September 28, 2012, available at:http://www.upi.com/Entertainment_News/Movies/2012/09/28/Gyllenhaal-Barnz-Wont-Back-Down-doesnt-bash-teachers-union/UPI-26961348868531/ Can Barnz be that stupid and gullible? Or does he just imagine the rest of us are? ↑
17. Kathryn Bigelow, “Kathryn Bigelow Addresses Zero Dark Thirty Torture Criticism,” Los Angeles Times, January 15, 2013, available at:http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/15/entertainment/la-et-mn-0116-bigelow-zero-dark-thirty-20130116.↑
18. Jon Wiener, “‘Django Unchained’: Quentin Tarantino’s Answer to Spielberg’s ‘Lincoln,’” The Nation, December 25, 2012, available at: http://www.thenation.com/blog/171915/django-unchained-quentin-tarantinos-answer-spielbergs-lincoln.↑
19. Jon Wiener, “The Trouble with Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln,” The Nation, November 26, 2012, available at: http://www.thenation.com/blog/171461/trouble-steven-spielbergs-lincoln↑
20. Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1982 and 1999). The change is especially striking because McAdam’s account is driven by examination of structural processes and the dynamics of collective resource mobilization, perhaps to a fault. ↑
21. Minister J. Kojo Livingston, “The Hard Truth—Why I Liked Django,” Louisiana Weekly,January 14, 2013, available at: http://www.louisianaweekly.com/the-hard-truth-why-i-liked-django-another-minority-opinion/ ↑
22. Lawrence D. Bobo, “Slavery on Film: Sanitized No More,” The Root, January 9, 2013, available at http://www.theroot.com/category/views-tags/slavery-film-1 In one breath he proclaims Django to be “the most cinematically and culturally important film dealing with race since Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing.” Two paragraphs later he defends the film against those who have criticized its historical absurdities: “But the film is intended as entertainment, not as historical documentary-making. Indeed, it is explicitly pitched as a revenge fantasy, making the spaghetti western an almost perfect template. This is movie-making; this is cinema. It is art, not a history lesson.”↑
23. See, for a smattering, two comments by Jamelle Bouie: “Quick Thoughts on Django Unchained,” December 29, 2012, available at: http://jamellebouie.net/blog/2012/12/29/quick-thoughts-on-django-unchained and “A Different Kind of Revenge Film,” The American Prospect, October 28, 2011, available at http://prospect.org/article/different-kind-revenge-film; Jelani Cobb, “Tarantino Unchained,” The New Yorker, January 2, 2013, available at: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/01/how-accurate-is-quentin-tarantinos-portrayal-of-slavery-in-django-unchained.html; Adam Serwer, “In Defense of Django,” Mother Jones, January 7, 2013, available at http://www.motherjones.com/mixed-media/2013/01/tarantino-django-unchained-western-racism-violence. ↑
24. See, for example, “The Confederacy and Firefly” athttp://firefly10108.wordpress.com/2008/09/04/the-confederacy-and-firefly/ ↑
25. Jeff Hart, “Why Care About Cullen Bohannon?” Culture Blues, November 17, 2011, available at http://www.cultureblues.com/2011/11/why-care-about-cullen-bohannon/.↑
26. Alexander H. Stephens, “Cornerstone Speech,” March 21, 1861, Savannah, Georgia, available at: http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?documentprint=76 ↑
27. Patricia Storace’s fine essay “Look Away, Dixie Land,” New York Review of Books,December 19, 1991, discusses Margaret Mitchell’s and her family’s roles in crafting and purveying that ideology. Her father was president of the Atlanta Historical Society, one of the many such societies created in the years around World War I for the express purpose of propagating the South’s story. Storace also notes Mitchell’s mutual admiration with Thomas Dixon—a direct link to Birth of a Nation—including the gushing fan letter he sent her on her novel’s publication and her equally gushing, appreciative reply.↑
28. Adolph Reed, Jr., “Crocodile Tears & Auto-critique of the Bourgeoisie: Rollerball & Rebellion in Mass Culture,” Endarch 1 (Winter 1976).↑
29. It is chilling in this connection to note that H. Bruce Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001) and Jerry Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York: New York University Press, 2000) examine the extent to which representations in those films that reverse iconic images from the war, along with repeated rehearsal of urban legends like the antiwar protesters spitting on returning GIs, have shaped collective memory of the war, including even veterans’ memories of their own experiences. Also see Penny Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies and Hawks: The Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 2013).↑
30. This brings to mind historian Barbara Jeanne Fields’s objection to the mindset among historians and others who “think of slavery in the United States as primarily a system of race relations—as though the chief business of slavery of were the production of white supremacy rather than the production of cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco.” See Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review (1990) reprinted in Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 117.↑
31. Racecraft, 20-24. Also see Walter Benn Michaels’ review, “Believing in Unicorns,” London Review of Books, February 7, 2013, 25-26.↑
32. Stephens’s “Cornerstone Speech;” Hammond’s “Mudsill Speech,” and Calhoun’s “Speech on the Reception of Abolition Petitions, Delivered in the Senate, February 6, 1837” are all available in Paul Finkelman, ed., Debating Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South: A Brief History with Documents (Boston & New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003).↑
33. Reginald Horsman, Josiah Nott of Mobile: Southerner, Physician, and Racial Theorist(Baton Rouge, La., and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 130 and 258, reports that Nott owned as many as sixteen slaves and in 1860 recorded assets of $40,000 in real estate, $10,000 personal property, and an annual income in excess of $10,000.↑
34. Samuel A. Cartwright, “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” De Bow’s Review XI (July 1851): 64-69 and (September 1851): 331-36. It is reprinted in Paul F. Paskoff and Daniel J. Wilson, eds., The Cause of the South: Selections from De Bow’s Review, 1846-1867 (Baton Rouge, La., and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1982). On Cartwright’s place among antebellum southern apologists, see James Denny Guillory, “The Pro-Slavery Arguments of Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright,” Louisiana History 9 (Summer 1968): 209-227.↑
35. Paul Liem and Eric Montague, eds., “Toward a Marxist Theory of Racism: Two Essays by Harry Chang,” Review of Radical Political Economics 17 (1985): 39. See also Adolph Reed, Jr., “Marx, Race, and Neoliberalism,” New Labor Forum 22 (Winter 2013): 51-52.↑
36. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 64. They elaborated: “The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.” This insight is straight-forward and should be clear enough to anyone not in thrall to the various academic and other discourses that have taken shape around the project of rendering capitalism invisible and obfuscating its class dynamics.↑
37. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color-Blindness(New York: New Press, 2010). For a systematic critique of the limits and counterproductivefeatures of this approach as both history and politics, see James Forman, Jr., “Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration: Beyond the New Jim Crow,” New York University Law Review 87 (2012): 21-69. See also Reed and Chowkwanyun, “Race, Class, Crisis” and Adolph Reed, Jr., “Three Tremés,” July 4, 2011, available at http://nonsite.org/editorial/three-tremes.↑
38. See, for example, Mahmood Mamdani, “The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency,” London Review of Books, March 8, 2007.↑
39. Reed, “Marx, Race, and Neoliberalism”: 53.↑
13. Notable exceptions to the film’s generally warm reception are Kelly Candaele, “The Problematic Political Messages of Beasts of the Southern Wild,” Los Angeles Review of Books,August 9, 2012; Armond White, “How Do You Pronounce Quvenzhané?” City Arts, January 30, 2013, available at: http://cityarts.info/2013/01/30/how-do-you-pronounce-quvenzhane/; Vince Mancini, “The Case Against Beasts of the Southern Wild,” Filmdrunk, December 3, 2012, available at: http://filmdrunk.uproxx.com/2012/12/the-cast-against-beasts-of-the-southern-wild and two short reviews by Ben Kenigsberg: “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” Time Out Chicago, July 5, 2012 available at: http://timeoutchicago.com/arts-culture/film/15470806/beasts-of-the-southern-wild-movie-review and “Beasts of the Southern Wild: A Republican Fantasy?” Time Out Chicago, July 6, 2012, available at:http://www.timeoutchicago.com/arts-culture/film/15493241/beasts-of-the-southern-wild-a-republican-fantasy.↑
14. See, for example, Leni Riefenstahl: Vanishing Africa (New York: Harmony Books, 1982);Africa (Cologne: Taschen, 2010), and The Last of the Nuba (London: Tom Stacey Ltd., 1973). For access to an additional layer of complication in these exoticizing accounts, I suggest juxtaposing the first two photographs that appear in the Africa volume.↑
15. Howard Gensler, “Maggie Gyllenhaal Talks Unions, Education and Motherhood,”Philadelphia Daily News, September 28, 2012. She even compared her character to Norma Rae and Erin Brockovich. (Carol Lloyd, writing on the GreatSchools, Inc website, proclaimed the film “the Silkwood…for education reformers”; available athttp://www.greatschools.org/improvement/parental-power/7033-wont-back-down-movie-review-parent-trigger-law.gs.) Gyllenhaal went on to aver “there are huge problems with the teachers union” and invoked that empty liberal phraseology to call for having the temerity to “look at things that are broken.” I won’t speculate as to where being “left of Trotsky” might place Gyllenhaal on the political spectrum, but this patter brings to mind a conversation I had with our provost at the New School, the well-known post-colonial anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, when the adjunct faculty, who were 90% of the institution’s total, were organizing with the United Auto Workers for collective bargaining rights. Appadurai had been even more aggressively hostile to the unionization effort than our unindicted former war criminal president, Bob Kerrey. I sought Appadurai out at a colleague’s cocktail party to remonstrate with him about his manifest hostility to the unionization effort. He very warmly and genially assured me that he loves unions and that, if the New School were a place that really exploited its adjuncts, like Harvard or Yale, he’d be all for the effort. But, he said, the New School is such a fragile institution that it simply couldn’t afford to take the risk. I told him that he sounded like the human resources director at Whole Foods or Wal-Mart.↑
16. Howard Gensler, “Director Daniel Barnz Defends Won’t Back Down,” Philadelphia Daily News, September 28, 2012. Barnz upped the ante by addressing criticism that Christian fascist billionaire Philip Anschutz bankrolled the film. For Barnz, “What’s really going on here is a refreshing reach across the ideological divide. This is a conservative Republican evangelical Christian who hired the Jewish liberal Democrat—that’s me—to helm this movie. This is someone who said: ‘This is a problem in our country. I have the resources to help a wide exploration of this that could reach a lot of people and I’m going to do it.’ And he let us go out and do it and he empowered us. He empowered me and he empowered this very liberal cast and producers to do that.” Karen Butler, “Gyllenhaal, Barnz: Won’t Back Down Doesn’t Bash Teachers’ Union,” UPI News Service, September 28, 2012, available at:http://www.upi.com/Entertainment_News/Movies/2012/09/28/Gyllenhaal-Barnz-Wont-Back-Down-doesnt-bash-teachers-union/UPI-26961348868531/ Can Barnz be that stupid and gullible? Or does he just imagine the rest of us are? ↑
17. Kathryn Bigelow, “Kathryn Bigelow Addresses Zero Dark Thirty Torture Criticism,” Los Angeles Times, January 15, 2013, available at:http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/15/entertainment/la-et-mn-0116-bigelow-zero-dark-thirty-20130116.↑
18. Jon Wiener, “‘Django Unchained’: Quentin Tarantino’s Answer to Spielberg’s ‘Lincoln,’” The Nation, December 25, 2012, available at: http://www.thenation.com/blog/171915/django-unchained-quentin-tarantinos-answer-spielbergs-lincoln.↑
19. Jon Wiener, “The Trouble with Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln,” The Nation, November 26, 2012, available at: http://www.thenation.com/blog/171461/trouble-steven-spielbergs-lincoln↑
20. Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1982 and 1999). The change is especially striking because McAdam’s account is driven by examination of structural processes and the dynamics of collective resource mobilization, perhaps to a fault. ↑
21. Minister J. Kojo Livingston, “The Hard Truth—Why I Liked Django,” Louisiana Weekly,January 14, 2013, available at: http://www.louisianaweekly.com/the-hard-truth-why-i-liked-django-another-minority-opinion/ ↑
22. Lawrence D. Bobo, “Slavery on Film: Sanitized No More,” The Root, January 9, 2013, available at http://www.theroot.com/category/views-tags/slavery-film-1 In one breath he proclaims Django to be “the most cinematically and culturally important film dealing with race since Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing.” Two paragraphs later he defends the film against those who have criticized its historical absurdities: “But the film is intended as entertainment, not as historical documentary-making. Indeed, it is explicitly pitched as a revenge fantasy, making the spaghetti western an almost perfect template. This is movie-making; this is cinema. It is art, not a history lesson.”↑
23. See, for a smattering, two comments by Jamelle Bouie: “Quick Thoughts on Django Unchained,” December 29, 2012, available at: http://jamellebouie.net/blog/2012/12/29/quick-thoughts-on-django-unchained and “A Different Kind of Revenge Film,” The American Prospect, October 28, 2011, available at http://prospect.org/article/different-kind-revenge-film; Jelani Cobb, “Tarantino Unchained,” The New Yorker, January 2, 2013, available at: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/01/how-accurate-is-quentin-tarantinos-portrayal-of-slavery-in-django-unchained.html; Adam Serwer, “In Defense of Django,” Mother Jones, January 7, 2013, available at http://www.motherjones.com/mixed-media/2013/01/tarantino-django-unchained-western-racism-violence. ↑
24. See, for example, “The Confederacy and Firefly” athttp://firefly10108.wordpress.com/2008/09/04/the-confederacy-and-firefly/ ↑
25. Jeff Hart, “Why Care About Cullen Bohannon?” Culture Blues, November 17, 2011, available at http://www.cultureblues.com/2011/11/why-care-about-cullen-bohannon/.↑
26. Alexander H. Stephens, “Cornerstone Speech,” March 21, 1861, Savannah, Georgia, available at: http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?documentprint=76 ↑
27. Patricia Storace’s fine essay “Look Away, Dixie Land,” New York Review of Books,December 19, 1991, discusses Margaret Mitchell’s and her family’s roles in crafting and purveying that ideology. Her father was president of the Atlanta Historical Society, one of the many such societies created in the years around World War I for the express purpose of propagating the South’s story. Storace also notes Mitchell’s mutual admiration with Thomas Dixon—a direct link to Birth of a Nation—including the gushing fan letter he sent her on her novel’s publication and her equally gushing, appreciative reply.↑
28. Adolph Reed, Jr., “Crocodile Tears & Auto-critique of the Bourgeoisie: Rollerball & Rebellion in Mass Culture,” Endarch 1 (Winter 1976).↑
29. It is chilling in this connection to note that H. Bruce Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001) and Jerry Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York: New York University Press, 2000) examine the extent to which representations in those films that reverse iconic images from the war, along with repeated rehearsal of urban legends like the antiwar protesters spitting on returning GIs, have shaped collective memory of the war, including even veterans’ memories of their own experiences. Also see Penny Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies and Hawks: The Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 2013).↑
30. This brings to mind historian Barbara Jeanne Fields’s objection to the mindset among historians and others who “think of slavery in the United States as primarily a system of race relations—as though the chief business of slavery of were the production of white supremacy rather than the production of cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco.” See Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review (1990) reprinted in Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 117.↑
31. Racecraft, 20-24. Also see Walter Benn Michaels’ review, “Believing in Unicorns,” London Review of Books, February 7, 2013, 25-26.↑
32. Stephens’s “Cornerstone Speech;” Hammond’s “Mudsill Speech,” and Calhoun’s “Speech on the Reception of Abolition Petitions, Delivered in the Senate, February 6, 1837” are all available in Paul Finkelman, ed., Debating Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South: A Brief History with Documents (Boston & New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003).↑
33. Reginald Horsman, Josiah Nott of Mobile: Southerner, Physician, and Racial Theorist(Baton Rouge, La., and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 130 and 258, reports that Nott owned as many as sixteen slaves and in 1860 recorded assets of $40,000 in real estate, $10,000 personal property, and an annual income in excess of $10,000.↑
34. Samuel A. Cartwright, “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” De Bow’s Review XI (July 1851): 64-69 and (September 1851): 331-36. It is reprinted in Paul F. Paskoff and Daniel J. Wilson, eds., The Cause of the South: Selections from De Bow’s Review, 1846-1867 (Baton Rouge, La., and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1982). On Cartwright’s place among antebellum southern apologists, see James Denny Guillory, “The Pro-Slavery Arguments of Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright,” Louisiana History 9 (Summer 1968): 209-227.↑
35. Paul Liem and Eric Montague, eds., “Toward a Marxist Theory of Racism: Two Essays by Harry Chang,” Review of Radical Political Economics 17 (1985): 39. See also Adolph Reed, Jr., “Marx, Race, and Neoliberalism,” New Labor Forum 22 (Winter 2013): 51-52.↑
36. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 64. They elaborated: “The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.” This insight is straight-forward and should be clear enough to anyone not in thrall to the various academic and other discourses that have taken shape around the project of rendering capitalism invisible and obfuscating its class dynamics.↑
37. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color-Blindness(New York: New Press, 2010). For a systematic critique of the limits and counterproductivefeatures of this approach as both history and politics, see James Forman, Jr., “Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration: Beyond the New Jim Crow,” New York University Law Review 87 (2012): 21-69. See also Reed and Chowkwanyun, “Race, Class, Crisis” and Adolph Reed, Jr., “Three Tremés,” July 4, 2011, available at http://nonsite.org/editorial/three-tremes.↑
38. See, for example, Mahmood Mamdani, “The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency,” London Review of Books, March 8, 2007.↑
39. Reed, “Marx, Race, and Neoliberalism”: 53.↑
