How is saying that "we" all embrace the neoliberal immigration agenda really helping? How is saying that folks working with the "truly disadvantaged" - the staggeringly disproportionately poor and imprisoned communities of color - are cozying up to neoliberals going to bring anyone to the post-class politics class analysis side of things? It matters not an iota to poor disenfranchised Black folks living on the south side of Chicago or Gary, IN, or Flint or Detroit or Oakland or... that there are more poor white people than them... The political question is: why does Michaels rant about identity politics - more a feature of the academy than the street - instead of working to get poor white people to see their shared class location with poor minorities? Chosing what you write on, who you critique and who you're speaking to is a very political act and indicative of one's politics. Read bell hooks - who has made pretty similar arguments in many different places - presents a different model of how one active in a particular community might push that community towards less parochial modes of thought. It is possible to be polemical with being a prick and angry without being a bitch. Hell, read Shag and Chuck day to day.
Man, I was in grad school in Santa Cruz, CA, at the height of postmodernism, I know all about the insanity of identity politics. I know all about being objectified as "that white guy who keeps on bringing up class" (and stuff like the vast majority of poor people being white). I studied labor organizing in the Imperial Valley, I know all about the power and greater threat of of multi-racial unions. But I am neither stupid nor prick nor asshole enough to suggest a conflation of all racial politics, of all gender politics, and of all sexual politics with class-blind identity and neoliberal politics... and whether or not he means it that is how Michaels comes across to a number of us. He seems to give no credence to how fraught racial, gender and sexual poltics have been within the class-focused left over the years...
I can tell you no one I know doing community organizing or social work or what-have-you, much less my students, are going to listen to someone making the argument that I think needs to be made the way Michaels makes it. As I said, as far as I am concerned the differences he elides, the levels of analysis he collapses, and the aspects of American politics he backgrounds means that - at least to me - he comes off as a self-important UCB/UofC out-of-touch-with-the-lived-experience-of-the-people-he-claims-to-be-in-alliance-with prick. Maybe his written work is better and I'd think differently if I read it. Maybe not.
Did any of the issues I raised about how folks on the ground know a great deal more about the world than they see themselves being able to address make any impact on your reading of my post? I do my best not to tell such people how little they understand what's really going on... I made that assumption as a self-importantly prick-ish grad student and - quite properly - had my ass handed to me by a hard working, really insightful community/labor organizer in El Centro and a hard working, really insightful entomologist for the California Cooperative Extension office in Holtville.
On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 1:33 PM, Chris Maisano <cgmaisano at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Calling Michaels a "prick" or "assholic" based simply on listening to the
> interview is total projection. I listened to it too, but I fail to see how
> either his argument or his comportment on the interview qualifies him to be
> regarded as such.
>
> Alan says: "Why not make the same basic argument by means of the remarkable
> similarities associated with the disproportionate consequences of
> neoliberalism for lower income historically oppressed minorities and low
> income whites? Why not make an argument for class struggle rather than one
> denigrating the prioritization of race and diversity? Because such an
> argument gets you fewer readers, is way less sexy and garners you far less
> renown?"
>
> - Michaels argues against the prioritization of race and diversity for the
> same reasons Reed does: 1) "race" doesn't adequately explain a lot of the
> ills that prevail in, say, predominantly African-American inner city
> neighborhoods (and it does nothing to address the fact that the vast
> majority of the poor are white); 2) you're not going to be able to do much
> to address those ills unless you organize for universal social programs.
> Most white people (and lots of socially ascendant people of color) will not
> want to pay taxes to fund programs that they see as primarily benefiting
> poor black people. Sad, but true; 3) diversity/multicultural talk more often
> than not pays little more than lip service to class politics, even within
> the left (such as it is). It's very good in my view that WBM, Reed, and
> others are taking whacks at some sacred cows and making the argument that -
> gasp! - class politics is what makes the left "the left." It's kind of weird
> to me
> that people are freaking out over this point.
>
> It's also really interesting to see Alan and Shag impute ulterior motives
> to Michaels for which there really is little to no evidence. Shag
> acknowledges that it's unfair to characterize his argument as driven by
> resentment toward rising women and people of color, but does it anyway. Alan
> claims that WBM's entire critique is premised upon nothing but
> personal advancement. Perhaps folks are just having trouble acknowledging
> that WBM's argument has more merit than they'd like it to.
>
>
>
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>
-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319