> Frankly, I think Arianna's only politics are social climbing and
> self-promotion- she's drifted from New Age gurus when that was the zeitgeist
> to trailing Newt to the revolution, then abandoning ship before that wreck
> hit the rocks. You have to admire her for her sure sense of the wind, and
> if she thinks the wind is blowing in the anti-racism direction, that may be
> a good sign.
>
> On the other hand, the point of the post is not her self-promotion but the
> documentation of the words and mealymouthed excuses of the racist Right
> leadership. A liberal probably couldn't have elicited such cold
> documentation.
>
> --Nathan
My sentiments exactly. Opportunism *CAN* serve a useful function here and there -- the point is to exploit it for all it's worth when it appears, since after all it's exploiting US!
This is a very significant part of the history of the civil rights movement -- the disgrace of Naziism, the spread of liberation movements around the world, the alternative of Communism, the needs of an industrializing economy all made opportunistic minimalist gestures of support for the civil rights movement quite appealing. Again and again, activists made the most of the openings such gestures provided.
We're a long way from that situation right now, but the same underlying principle applies. However, another one needs more attention precisely because we're in a different situation. That situation is the reformation of a new "high" racism -- meaning a racism that fits the needs (and hence values) of dominant elites.
Because the old high racism couldn't work anymore after WWII, AND there was a broad mass movement against it opportunism opened opportunities and the momentum favored simply taking maximum advantage of those opportunities.
Now, however, Arianna Huffington is a representative of the new high racism, so a higher level of scrutiny is required, even while we make use of the quotes she provides.
The new high racism is libertarian, rather than old-line social conservative. Easy give-away: Charles Murray, co-author of "The Bell Curve" and more recently a book on libertrianism itself.
This is very much in evidence in the responses to my review of *The Shape of the River* at Intellectual Capital this week (http://intellectualcapitol.com/bibliotech/rev-012899.asp). The ideology of individual acheivement uber alles will allow a few select spots for exemplary blacks -- Thomas Sowell and Colin Powell have already been cited in that discussion , while Huffington's current fave is J.C. Watts (father of 2 illegitimate kids, erstwhile tax cheat, and mysteriously unindicted government official on the take, a shining moral example in Huffington's universe...for the moment at least.)
Huffington's attack on the remnants of the high racism of yesteryear--the low racism of today--should be seen in terms of this new constellation which raises a feature of racism past--the exemplary black as a tool of mass oppression--to a core principle.
Some very good perspective on this can be gained by considering how the high racism of another era functioned, and how it was challenged and destroyed. I refer to the ideology of colonization that arose after the Revolutionary War, and served to unite Northern and Southern elites under the fiction of eventual universal emancipation--once all the blacks could be shipped back to Africa.
In the recently published posthumous work, *Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality*, Paul Goodman describes how this ideology encompassed varying elite interests of north and south, and created a comfortable palliative for those more sensitive souls who were genuinely troubled by slavery. It was only when the fragmented free black community began to rally itself and express its unyielding opposition to colonization that things began to change, followed by the emergence of biracial abolitionism.
I believe that libertarianism today functions in an historically analogous fashion: it organizes seemingly self-evident observations into a self-congradulatory "moral" framework that automatically over-simplifies all pressing problems, and explains away even the possibility of articulating contradictions; it provides a common framework in which divergent, even antagonistic factions of elite interest and opinion can find a mutual accomodation, so they can focus their attentions on what really matters to them; it deligitimizes any form of criticism that aims at a fundamental AND highly visible contradiction in its claim to morality, rationality, and human progress.
So, while we should definitely appreciate help from any quarter in exposing and attacking the old racism, we should be doing our homework well to become adepts ourselves in exposing and attacking the new.
Last of all, here's the money question for another thread: Can Butler help shed light on Huffington's role in all this? And if so, how do you translate that into an op-ed right alongside Huffington's?
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"