by Patricia J. Williams
Released: 26 Feb 2010
Train stations are a great place from which to survey the world of this wintry economic landscape. Ever-increasing numbers of Americans gather in their shelter, the well-heeled to avoid airline delays, the homeless for their warmth. Train stations are some of the few places left in America where a full spectrum of citizens — rich, poor, high, low — sit side by side, cheek by jowl.
Last week I had to go from Washington to Boston. I settled in to wait at Gate J of Union Station with my knitting and a book of crossword puzzles. A woman who had seemingly donned everything she owns sat down two seats away from me. She was wearing a linty black knit cap drawn over short dreadlocks, an oversize stained sweatshirt and baggy maroon trousers. She carried several smudged and well-worn shopping bags, which she arranged in a semicircle at her feet, and she began talking to them, commiserating about the terrible state of the world. Her tone was gentle, conversational, light. At first I thought she was speaking on a cellphone — there were polite pauses in what she said, moments of agreement and playfulness — but in fact she was not. She mourned the loss of democratic process in the Senate, the rise of mercenary armies and agribusiness as well as the concentration of corporate power in the manufacture of butter and detergents. (“It looks like there are a thousand brands on the shelves, but in fact they’re all owned by one or two multinationals.”) She feared the social consequences of the financial crisis: “Things that should protect our economy… the Robinson-Patman Act… They’re so busy undoing that — that undoing will be our undoing…”
Genius? Insanity? Either way, her observations threw me for a loop — they were illuminating, mesmerizing, shocking, dislocating. I dug my iPhone from my bag and Googled the Robinson-Patman Act. In some other universe, I used to know what it said. As the tiny blue screen fluttered and winked to life in its search for meaning, I gazed about the waiting area of Gate J. Nearly everyone was similarly engaged with their cyberspacial phylacteries, davening into thin air, entranced, uttering streams of words that echoed in the high-domed space like a turbulent waterfall. Unlike the woman next to me, however, they all seemed to be deploying visible Bluetooth devices or earplugs affixed to their heads, their eyes flat, inwardly transfixed.
Fifteen years ago, I suppose, the place would have seemed like a ward at Bellevue. A well-dressed man across from me was enunciating loudly about having to reschedule a game of handball. A woman with a messily overstuffed briefcase had her head cocked like an eager spaniel’s in order to keep her phone tucked in the hollow between shoulder and neck; she murmured over and over, “Uh-huh… uh-huh… uh-huh… uh-huh,” like a series of involuntary spasms. A college student in a porkpie hat congratulated a friend on his recent engagement and promised to throw him a bachelor party with lots of “juicy, big-lipped prostitutes, dude.” A guy in a hoodie and mud-spattered Timberland boots was waxing lively about “some people” who don’t want to “move their fat butts and work.” Not on a cellphone was the exception — a wiry child of about 10 with alarming, much too bright eyes, darting up and down the aisles seeking “a dollar for food.”
Fifteen years ago, it was still springtime in America. The thought of a recession as deep as ours crossed few minds outside the more perspicacious — some said paranoid — quadrants of academia and, of course, the perpetually redlined limits of inner cities. In contrast, the present-day waiting room at Union Station was ablaze with the semaphores of legitimacy, exhaustion, the absurd. My head spun with fatigue and the roaring heteroglossia. Next to me, the woman in the linty hat was telling the same story over and over: she moved so fluently among the disappointments of commerce, politics, law enforcement and grammatical apocalypse (“You need to end that sentence with a question mark, young lady!”). I struggled to track the coherence in her constantly disrupted narrative. An amiable security guard strolled by. He nudged at the woman’s circle of bags with his shoe and told her to move along. She gathered her belongings, the flow of her words never ceasing. There was a particularly intriguing riff about the police having killed her, followed by a soft, wise little laugh: “But you can’t let your kin kill you either.” Then, still addressing the epistemic gatekeeper within, she offered shyly, “You are very well liked.” “Thanks,” she responded brightly and shuffled off.
The District of Columbia suffers the highest percentage of homelessness in the nation. African-Americans, veterans and the mentally ill are disproportionately represented among their ranks. As the foreclosure crisis spreads, incrementally leveling this unfortunate playing field, non-African-Americans, nonveterans and the certifiably sane struggle madly to distinguish themselves from the usual narratives of poverty: laziness, lack of qualifications, bad choices. A determined dis-identification with the already internally displaced has edged into our national parlance, with a host of predictable resentments. The possibility that we, the broad collective of people, are sinking into a communal financial ooze is underestimated, rationalized as the fault of the ones who sank first. From Fox News to the blogosphere, such analysis focuses on blaming those on the bottom for being too heavy, weighing too much and generally dragging the rest down.
In Madness and Civilization, Foucault wrote, “If, now, we try to assign a value, in and of itself, outside its relations with the dream and with error, to classical unreason, we must understand it not as reason diseased, or as reason lost or alienated, but quite simply as reason dazzled.” By the same token, the failure to see our common fate defines a dangerously bedazzling split between spirit and logic; between poetry and engineering; between the messiness of mercy and, ultimately, the orderliness of law.
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The Fire Next Time
The Right Wing Reboots Segregation
As we pass from 2010 to the new year, Congress resumes in its conservative-dominated configuration. This new wave is sustained by a right-wing power base informed by ideologues who would eviscerate the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise of equality by restricting voting rights and limiting public expenditures on the “parasites” who leech off the welfare of “their” America.
Many of these views, while wrapped in Ayn Rand’s individualist “ethical egoism,” protect a political and social order based on wealth and impermeable group privilege, one also rooted in a segregationist “us versus them” mentality, albeit persisting well beyond the racial divide. Christians versus others. Natives versus immigrants. English-only speakers versus snooty cosmopolitans. Inherited privilege versus equality as birthright.
Consider these recent salvos: Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce is so concerned about the “hijacking” of the Fourteenth Amendment that he has sponsored a bill that would refuse issuance of state birth certificates to children born here whose parents are not legal citizens. Rand Paul, freshman senator from Kentucky, believes that the Fair Housing Act is wrong because “a free society will abide unofficial, private discrimination, even when that means allowing hate-filled groups to exclude people based on the color of their skin.” John Cook, the very public member of the Texas State Republican Executive Committee, wants to replace Republican Joe Straus, who is Jewish, as speaker of the Texas House of Representatives because “We elected a House with Christian, conservative values. We now want a true Christian, conservative running it.” And Judson Phillips, head of the Tea Party Nation, has endorsed “the original intent” of restricting voting rights to citizens who are property holders because “if you’re a property owner, you actually have a vested stake in the community.”
Many policies originally promulgated to maintain economic supremacy by controlling the movement and political force of blacks in the Deep South seem to have come full circle, afflicting not just recent immigrants but poor and middle-class white people. One vivid example is the fate of Gene Cranick, an elderly, wheelchair-bound white resident of Obion County, Tennessee. When a backyard trash fire spread to his house in October, the fire department arrived, only to watch his home burn to the ground because Cranick had not paid a $75 yearly “pay to spray” fee. Cranick had the misfortune to live in an unincorporated area that had the limited services historically associated with black neighborhoods—when fire, sewer and police services would stop at the edge of a town based on the lines of segregation. Richard Kluger’s book Simple Justicerelates how in the 1950s civil rights activist Joseph DeLaine’s South Carolina home was apparently targeted by arsonists: “Members of the all-white Summerton fire department were on hand as the wooden house burned to the ground, but they made no effort to put out the flames because DeLaine’s house, they said, was beyond the town limits. And it was—by 100 feet.” (For those interested in the details of the legal and political battles for the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise of equal citizenship, I highly recommend Patricia Sullivan’s Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement.)
Just a few weeks ago, while speaking of his youth in Yazoo City, Mississippi, during the most violent times of the civil rights movement, Governor Haley Barbour became positively misty: “I just don’t remember it as being that bad.” How bad wasn’t it? According to Barbour, the White Citizens’ Council heroically ensured school integration and bravely kept the Ku Klux Klan at bay. In fact, the White Citizens’ Council set up a system of all-white private academies that left Mississippi’s public schools virtually all black and all woefully underfunded. It is true that to some degree the White Citizens’ Council often took public stances in opposition to the KKK, yet this professed opposition was not because it was in favor of blacks’ civil rights but because Klan violence attracted international attention, which was often “bad for business.” So instead the council tended to espouse resistance to integration through economic threats and the isolation of entire communities.
Indeed, Haley’s elder brother Jeppie was elected mayor of Yazoo City in 1968 on a platform of economic isolation of any blacks (or whites) who pressed for integration. Willie Morris’s 1971 book Yazoo: Integration in a Deep-Southern Town details what Jeppie described as blacks’ efforts to “get us on our knees so they can tell us what to do.” “When I came into office I intended to get some paving and some sewage improvements for the colored,” Jeppie said. “But now I can’t get too enthusiastic about it.” The time might come, Jeppie warned, for the whites to retaliate with firings and other measures.
Recently, The Huffington Post ran excerpts from a 1956 article by David Halberstam in which Nick Roberts of the Yazoo City Citizens’ Council explained why fifty-one of fifty-three blacks who had signed an integration petition withdrew their names: “If a man works for you, and you believe in something, and that man is working against it and undermining it, why you don’t want him working for you—of course you don’t.” This sort of thinking imagines the collective power of the White Citizens’ Council as nothing more than the individual choices of “a man” in dealing with “that man”—both of whom are syntactically equally endowed with options and opportunities. In the aggregate, however, these “preferences” become insidious disguises for a gangsterish mentality by which the endowed “we” eliminates anything but the narrowest sense of community. The rest of the polity, marked as “them,” remain alien—all while being chided to pay and pay and pay in order to play. That this creates a controlling class of the economically privileged—to wit, an oligarchy—seems utterly lost on the ground these days.
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Filed under ayn rand, civil rights movement, class, ethics, gene cranick, Haley Barbour, housing, Jeppie Barbour, joe straus, joseph DeLaine, judson phillips, NAACP, obion county, political commentary, race, gender, class, ethnicity, rand paul, recession, russell pearce, southern strategy, White Citizens Council, yazoo county