First, Tim Wise's essay, Of National Lies and Racial Amnesia. I don't recommend it but I'll use it to work up a hatchet job. It's here:
The essay is annoying and not good at narrowing the target of its attack, which I suppose is middle class and white. There is also something wrong with his use of words like `black folks'. It crosses lanes of discourse it shouldn't. He has a very hollow ring.
All I can say, is I don't know enough people of the type that Wise seems to be addressing. The Right? The essay is way too long to belabor the obvious that people from different race, gender, class, and heritage see the world differently. Duh.
His other point is the white middle class is in denial, and that's the problem. Okay. I've tried to think that one through several maybe ten years ago. I basically decided denial is just too simple an explanation.
What I see as a problem, is the pro-active cultivation by the neoconservatives and most of the rest of the US political establishment of a political agenda, as the embodiment of this identity. So then appeals to this icon, substitute for a more concrete politics, at least at the discourse level. I see this process going on as both the DLC and neocons try their allurements on the mysterious `swing' vote. That social cultivation is then followed by a re-write of US histories and a general attempt to erase the multi-ethnic, class, race, gender histories that in fact make up the history of the US. This place has never been a monolith and the illusion that it once was, works a lot of damage all around. The concrete political effect of this culture war of smoke and mirrors is to invent arguments to get rid of bilingual education for example, or work up various arguments to support NCLB, The uses of this politics of white identity in class war, work particularly well in the hot intersections of immigration.
The whole system of white/male/class identity moves to shore up neoliberalism with justifications that mask US imperialism in both its military and economic actions. In turn by using this identity profile it makes it a lot easier to manipulate the white male vote and political support against their own class interest.
Here is an essay by Ludovic Bain, another guy I never heard of:
http://www.grist.org/article/blain-death
Ain't I An Environmentalist? I don't follow much of the environmental movements. Blain seems cranked off about elite white men who apparently ran or run environmental NGOs.
At first read, I was having a hard time figuring out what Doug thought was wrong with Ludovic Blaine. But then I just re-read Doug's post to Voyou:
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20091012/014620.html
Here was the rest of my first impression of Blain.
He uses `white elite' too much as the problem getting in the way of an environmental justice movement. This is an old essay from 2005, but it was the best I could find. Instead of the old environmental movement dominated by white elites, Blain suggests:
``The entire sustainability movement in the U.S. and abroad has been expanding the scope of environmentalism for over two decades. Redefining Progress, headed by longtime EJ activist Michel Gelobter, has been pioneering crossover policies that serve constituencies far beyond environmentalists. Redefining Progress provided the intellectual underpinning for the Blue-Green Alliance, which, in 1998, united parts of the AFL-CIO and the big environmental groups for a pro-worker approach to clean energy and climate protection.''
Well, it ain't communism, but what's the problem? About as close as I can come, is a kind of mixed message and ambiguity of audience. Blain gets mixed reviews in his comments section below. It seems to me to reveal a similar problem to Wise. Both of these guys seem to conflate words or rename things, for example `anti-racism' and `environmental justice'. It's this word usage that confused me, because I was used to plain old racism and plain old social justice
Getting back to the white elitism, angle. I see a systemic problem behind that and it has to do with science and technology in higher education. The problem I see is an almost total lack of black and brown, and few women students in the sciences. That noticeable absence is pretty easy to trace back to the economics of class war and the failing public schools. The other traces back to notable sexists attitudes in most of the science community I was around.
My few contacts with environmental issues were all through the sciences, bio-sciences and DoE, Lawrence Berkeley Lab. I sure felt the deep political chill coming from both. So I can understand the conflict between science that has to lay the technological foundations, and the street level activist devoted to environmental justice. I also notice that neither Wise nor Blain addresses the economic system of neoliberalism which operates in contradiction to the best interests of science, social justice and the environment.
It was worrisome to watch the corporatization of the sciences. This process again driven by lack of state money, seems to completely foreclose needed changes to do much about climate or environmental destruction. For example, plant biology was devoting most of its research money to come up with genetic changes to food crops that would benefit international corporations, and do active harm to the various systems of farming in the third world. This example I think works better as a concrete example to the conflict that Blaine writes about.
(As a lighter note. If people think science labs get jumpy if a black guy is handling some of the equipment, you should watch what happens when a blind guy shows up in a chemistry, nuclear physics, or genetics lab.)
CG