By
New Age Islam Edit Desk
7 December
2020
•
Responding to Terrorism in France
The
New York Times
•
Boko Haram and Islamist separatism in northern Nigeria
By
Majeed Dahhiru
•
Allegations of Islamophobia in the Labour party go far beyond one party donor
By
Owen Jones
• Why
Did Racial Progress Stall in America?
By
Shaylyn Romney Garrett and Robert D. Putnam
• Our
attitudes to race are complex. Our response to racism should be complex too
By
Sonia Sodha
•
Barack and Michelle: Scenes From a Marriage
By
Timothy Egan
-------
Responding
to Terrorism in France
The
New York Times
Dec. 4,
2020
In the wake
of two horrific incidents of Islamist terrorism in France, President Emmanuel
Macron and many of his countrymen have reacted angrily to criticism from abroad
suggesting that French policies, and especially the French version of
state-enforced secularism, somehow contributed to the lethal radicalization of
a sliver of the country’s large Muslim population.
The French
reaction is understandable. The beheading of a schoolteacher and the murder of
three churchgoers in Nice by Islamist terrorists cannot be justified by any
grievance, real or perceived. Any attempt to lay the blame for these horrific
crimes on their victims, or on national policies, is perverse. France, a
country with a deep commitment to human rights and a robust tradition of
self-criticism, offers many legal avenues of protest — witness the Yellow Vest movement
that has periodically convulsed France for two years now.
In the face
of scathing criticism from Mr. Macron — expressed in a letter in The Financial
Times, an interview with Ben Smith, the media columnist of The New York Times,
and elsewhere — The F.T. and Politico Europe both removed articles questioning
the role of French policies in Islamist violence. The core of the president’s
complaint was that English-speaking countries that share France’s values were
in effect “legitimizing this violence, and saying that the heart of the problem
is that France is racist and Islamophobic.”
It is not
always fully appreciated outside France’s borders that the country is home to
the largest number of Muslims in the Western world, more than 8 percent of the
country’s total population. It also has a history of horrific terrorist
attacks, including, in 2015, the raid on the offices of the satirical magazine
Charlie Hebdo and the assaults on Paris cafes and entertainment halls that left
130 dead.
Furthermore,
France’s approach to ethnic minorities differs from the American model in
fundamental ways not often understood. The American way is basically to promote
the coexistence of different ethnic groups and religions; the French model,
born of the French Revolution, is a universalist one in which people of all
races, religions and backgrounds are treated without differentiation as
citizens with equal rights. France maintains no register of people’s ethnicity
or religion.
A critical
element of that model is the French concept of secularism, laïcité, a legacy of
the French struggle against the power of the Roman Catholic Church. Whereas
freedom of religion in the United States began as defense of religion against
the state, France’s began with a defense of the state against religion. So
French policies such as banning Muslim head scarves in school, perceived by
many of the French as combating religious coercion, is often criticized in what
the French call the “Anglo-Saxon” world as an attempt to forcibly impose French
identity on immigrants.
To its
critics, the French model does too little to improve the lot of Arab and
African Muslims living in suburban public housing, the “banlieues” where youth
unemployment runs sky-high and many of the Islamist radicals are incubated. Conditions
there have only worsened with the coronavirus pandemic.
In a major
speech in early October, Mr. Macron assailed the rise of “Islamist separatism”
and promised a new law to defend France’s secular and democratic values. He
also recognized the problem of the “ghettoization” of French cities where “we
built our own separatism ourselves,” but the speech drew sharp criticism from
French Muslims, including charges that it stigmatized Muslims, especially women
and working-class Muslims.
These are
issues that should be open to debate, both within France and among mature
democracies. But the debate cannot cross into any notion that any victim of
Islamist terror “had it coming.” Mr. Macron is right to reject any such
suggestion.
But he goes
too far in seeing malicious insult throughout the “Anglo-American media.”
Serious news organizations in the United States, including The New York Times,
have sought to offer full and nuanced reports on the terror attacks in France
and on the French government’s policies. It was unfair of Mr. Macron’s
international communications adviser, Anne-Sophie Bradelle, to suggest that The
Times and The Washington Post said France was “at war with Islam.” Neither
suggested this, nor argued that France’s core problem was that it is “racist
and Islamophobic.”
But racism
and Islamophobia are major problems in France, as they are in the United
States, Britain and elsewhere in the Western world. So is Islamist terror, and
the many issues of cultural integration, tolerance and competition posed by
mass migration. These are the common challenges of the Western world, and no
country has demonstrated a fully adequate response.
Under
President Trump, the United States government has woefully abandoned its
tradition of openness to immigrants and refugees, and the president has
deliberately fanned racism and intolerance for political ends. French news
outlets have not spared Mr. Trump and his followers in their coverage of his
administration, nor should they.
The French
media has also demonstrated a robust readiness to assail Mr. Macron’s policies,
as it has done in recent weeks against the introduction of a “general security”
bill that, among other things, included what looked like an attempt to protect
the police from public scrutiny. After two incidents of police brutality caught
on video, the bill was pulled back for a rewrite.
That’s what
the news media does, at home and abroad. It is its function and duty to ask
questions about the roots of racism, ethnic anger and the spread of Islamism
among Western Muslims, and to critique the effectiveness and impact of
government policies. When terrorists strike, however, there is only one
response. On that front, Mr. Macron, France is not alone.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/macron-terrorism-france.htm
------
Boko
Haram and Islamist Separatism In Northern Nigeria
By
Majeed Dahhiru
2nd
December 2020
In what can
be described as one of the most horrific massacres of the highest number of
unarmed civilians in a single attack in the last ten years of the unending Boko
Haram insurgency, the mass killings of over 43 people of their kind in the
rural farming community of Zabarmari in Borno state, north east Nigeria by one
the world’s most deadly terror group, has left the human world utterly horrified
with bewildering dismay. Slaughtered like beasts of feasts with their hands
tied tightly behind, Boko Haram insurgents slit open the throats of 43 people,
all of them farmers working in their rice farms leaving their lifeless bodies
lying limp beside their decapitated heads. And by the time they were done with
their murderous carnage, unchallenged by Nigeria’s security forces, the green
rice fields of Zabarmari was turned red by the freely flowing blood of unarmed
and defenceless Nigerian farmers that were left to die in the hands of Boko
Haram insurgents unprotected by the Nigerian state.
Whilst the
rest of the world is horrified by one of the most horrific and bestial mass
slaughter of human beings in modern history, Nigerians are not as exasperated
by the Zabarmari massacre because they have somewhat adjusted to the sad
reality of living in the third most terrorized country on earth. Nigeria’s
complex web of complicated security challenges, which has seen its northwest
corner ravaged by trans-border bandits, farming communities in its north
central parts pillaged by killer herdsmen and its north east axis over run by
Boko Haram insurgents has reduced Africa’s most populous country to the
continent’s largest human slaughter slab.
Ten years
after the Boko Haram insurgency started in 2010; the Nigerian state has not
been able to contain this deadly terror group but instead its security forces
have been drawn into a prolonged war that has clearly become intractable. It is
conservatively estimated that the Boko Haram insurgency has claimed over 47,000
lives and displaced over 2 million others in the North East alone in the last
ten years. After nearly a decade since
the start of the Boko Haram insurgency, a lot of questions about the motive,
aims, strategic objectives, recruitment, mode of operation and funding remains
unanswered.
That the
epic centre of the multifaceted security challenges confronting Nigeria, the
biggest of which is the Boko Haram insurgency is undoubtedly in its northern
half and specifically, the Muslim North, provides a credible lead as towards
resolving the unresolved questions about one the world’s most deadly terror
group. Boko Haram insurgency is a violent manifestation of the radical ideology
of Islamist separatism upon which the mainstream theological frame work of
northern Nigeria Muslim religion if firmly built upon. Straddling the southern
parts of the ancient region of western Sudan, which was characterized by the
19th century militant Islamist reformist movements, the Muslim north of
Nigeria, is an area encompassing the legacy theocratic city states of the
ancient Kanem-Borno Empire and the Fulani Sokoto Caliphate.
Following
the British colonial experiment of amalgamation in 1914, which brought the
region and the rest of non-Muslim Nigeria under one administrative control to
be government by a secular, constitutional and democratic system of government,
fearing the loss of their Muslim heritage hegemony and power, the leadership of
the Muslim made haste slowly in accepting the new modern reality especially,
education. Considering it a Judeo-Christian heritage that was being used as a
tool to neutralise their traditional Muslim ways of life by Western colonial
powers, the Muslim north would be slow in embracing ‘’western’’ education and
any other way of life it considers western.
Over half a
century after the British colonial interregnum, which stirred Nigeria, a
multi-religious and multi-ethnic country they created on the path of a modern,
secular and constitutional democracy, which guarantees every Nigerian the right
of religious freedom came to an end in 1960, the Muslim north slowly began to
recoil and started a return backwards to its pre-colonial Muslim theocratic
state of traditional administration. And when Salafism filtered into the region
from Saudi Arabia through Sudan in the early 1970s, the robust Muslim heritage
of its militant Islamist reformism of the 19th century made the Muslim north of
Nigeria made a fertile ground for sowing the seeds of radical Islamist
revivalism that was sweeping across the wider Muslim world.
The rapid
spread in the Muslim north of Salafi version of the Islamic religion, whose
cardinal doctrine is a return of Muslims to its own interpretation of what its
self-appointed theological potentates considers being in conformity with
puritanical prophetic tradition within a the legal frame work of a Sharia ruled
global Muslim state, resulted into the mainstreaming of the radical ideology of
Islamist separatism in the region. coming under the theological influence of
Salafi clerics who continuously watered the seeds of radicalization for several
decades by passionately preaching the virtues of a Sharia ruled Muslim state
and virulently denouncing the vices of a secular, multi-religious,
constitutionally governed democratic society and in the process creating a
cognitive conflict between the Islamic faith of millions of northern Nigeria
Muslims and the citizenship of Nigeria their country. These influential clerics
go the extra mile to exhort Muslims to consider the struggle [Jihad] for the
realization of the ideal Sharia ruled Islamic state a religious duty that
attracts great reward in the hereafter. In this process, hate and intolerance
against people of other sects or religion are virulently preached and are
variously denounced by these clerics as apostates and unbelieving infidels.
Islamic separatism
in the Muslim north has found expression in the mass hysteric agitation for the
full implementation of the Muslim Sharia law in a region that is an
incorporated part of a secular, multi-religious and constitutional democratic
Nigerian country. notwithstanding the fact the constitution of the federal
Republic of Nigeria guarantees every Nigerian freedom of religion, which allows
Muslim unhindered observance of Sharia faith [upholding virtue and abstaining
from vice by personal conviction], the Muslim north considers Nigeria’s
governing legal frame work incompatible with their Islamic until it is repealed
and replaced with Sharia law [upholding of virtue and abstaining from vice by
compulsion].
Unfortunately,
the political leadership of the Muslim north have devised an ingeniously means
of weaponising religion as a potent arsenal of political mobilization for their
selfish end by preying on the religious emotions of their people. Pretending to be in solidarity with the
people in their aspiration for a Sharia ruled Islamic states, political leaders
in the Muslim north pledged to impose Sharia rule in the states of the region
if supported to power. However, Governors like Ahmed Yarima of Zamfara, Muazu
Babangida Aliyu of Niger state and Abdullahi Umar Ganduje of Kano failed
woefully to realize the ideal Islamic state that their people yearned for
despite imposing Sharia law in their state because they didn’t imbibe Sharia
faith personally.
Boko Haram
insurgency may have started ten years ago in 2010, the seeds of radical
Islamist separatist ideology, which is its driving force, was sown several
decades before and it is still being watered to blossom by Salafi clerics that
are the dominant authoritative voices in the mainstream northern Nigeria Muslim
community. Whereas, the Boko Haram insurgency is centred on the north east
region of Nigeria, the Boko Haram ideology permeates the entire Muslim north
with millions of latently radicalized Muslims ‘’Boko Haram’’ at heart. It is
the prevalence of Boko Haram radical ideology of Islamist separatism in the
mainstream northern Nigeria Muslim theology that is providing the oxygen in
form of funding, logistics and recruits that are willing to fight for the realization
of their ideal Sharia ruled Islamic state. Boko Haram insurgents are just
putting to practice the Boko Haram ideology that has been preached for several
decades, which political Islam has failed to achieve in the region.
The most
sustainable solution to the Boko Haram insurgency is to begin a systemic
reversal of the radical Islamist separatist ideology and the removal of its
embellishments on the main stream northern Nigeria Muslim theology with the
ultimate aim of reconciling the faith of latently radicalised Muslims with
their Nigerian citizenship and restoring secularity to the region where
religion and the state are separated. The continuous existence of Hisbah, the
Sharia law enforcement police in some northern Muslim states like Kano, which has
descended from arresting individuals on charges of blasphemy and destroying
bottles of alcoholic beverages of tax paying Nigerian businesses to banning the
use of the term ‘’black Friday’’ on radio stations is a cannon fodder for the
continuous struggle of Boko Haram insurgents in the struggle to achieve their
ideal Islamic state because it reinforces the belief in the psyche of many a
Muslim that one cannot be ‘’Nigerian’’ and ‘’Muslim’’ The intention behind the activities of
Governor Ganduje of Kano and his Hisbah approximates those of Abu Shekau and
his band of killers.
https://www.sunnewsonline.com/boko-haram-and-islamist-separatism-in-northern-nigeria/
------
Allegations
Of Islamophobia In The Labour Party Go Far Beyond One Party Donor
By
Owen Jones
4 Dec 2020
Nearly a
decade ago, the Tory baroness Sayeeda Warsi declared that bigotry towards
Muslims has “passed the dinner-table test”. This isn’t to say that other forms
of racism and bigotry aren’t rampant, or indeed hardwired into British society
and its institutions – such as the disproportionate levels of poverty or police
harassment endured by black Britons. What it does mean is that people in this
country can say virtually anything about Muslims – including those with power,
social cachet and influence – without consequence.
One study
from the Muslim Council of Britain finds that most newspaper coverage of
British Muslims is negative, including 78% of stories in the Mail on Sunday.
Rod Liddle, columnist at The Spectator, can write columns arguing “there is not
nearly enough Islamophobia within the Tory party” and for elections to be held
when Muslims cannot vote, and have his journalistic career remain intact. Boris
Johnson, a former Spectator editor, can pen a screed comparing veiled Muslims
to “letterboxes”, triggering a 375% surge in Islamophobic incidents, and still
become prime minister. Half of Conservative party members can express the
belief that Islam – a religion observed by 2.5 million Britons – is “a threat
to the British way of life”, and no general outrage is triggered.
Most
British Muslims support Labour, but their votes should not be taken for
granted. A decade ago, the Labour MP Phil Woolas was ejected from parliament
for lying about his Lib Dem opponent in the 2010 election – leaflets
distributed by Woolas claiming that Watkins had “wooed” Islamic extremists and
failed to condemn radical groups attacks were ruled by an election court to be
deliberately misleading.
When the
then deputy leader, Harriet Harman, said he had no future in his party, a
mutiny of Labour MPs took place. This was not an isolated incident. Anti-Muslim
sentiment remains ingrained in the Labour party, as revealed in a recent report
by the Labour Muslim Network, which found that 29% of Muslim members and
supporters had experienced Islamophobia in the party, 44% did not believe the
party took the issue seriously, and 48% didn’t believe the party would deal
with it effectively in its complaints process.
Which
brings us to the case of the property developer David Abrahams, who funded New
Labour reportedly to the tune of hundreds of thousands of pounds. After Keir
Starmer wrote to wealthy former donors – Abrahams included – asking for them to
resume their financial support, the property developer declared that he had set
up a direct debit to provide Labour with cash. Since then, a litany of
Islamophobic tweets has been exposed by the Guardian: from declaring he doesn’t
“know how to divide political Islam from moderates and fundamentalists”
because: “It is the very nature of the beast!” to declaring Israel’s neighbours
“chose terrorism and invented suicide bombers”.
Labour has
said it cannot find any record of new funds from Abrahams and will not accept
any of his money, but an investigation is to take place given he is a member of
the party. If any good comes out of this episode, it is to open up a
conversation about how Islamophobia has been mainstreamed – including in many
progressive circles – and must now be fought. After all, Labour is right to
tackle antisemitism within its own ranks and the record level of anti-Jewish
hate crimes in British society as a whole also needs to be confronted. Now that
the Equality and Human Rights Commission has issued directives that Labour is
legally bound to implement in order to tackle antisemitism, the party must
confront its wider problems of racism, too.
As well as
Islamophobia, black, Asian and minority ethnic Labour party staff members have
expressed fears of a “hierarchy of racism”, not least after a leaked report
suggested alleged racist abuse by Labour officials against black Labour MPs.
Failures by the Labour leadership to unequivocally oppose the deportation of
people who have lived in Britain since they were children – even after the
Windrush scandal – only fuel such claims. Indeed, it is notable that Abrahams
himself once tweeted that black South Africans he spoke to “preferred white
rule as less corrupt and more viable and professional”, suggesting prejudices
not confined to Islamophobia.
It’s worth
reconsidering Warsi’s comments made a decade ago. If Abrahams isn’t expelled
from the party, then what message is to be sent, both to Muslims and the bigots
who menace them? Fears that Islamophobia is permissible, and even officially
sanctioned, will have greater justification.
It underlines,
too, how those within Labour demanding that the leadership dilutes its
dependence on trade union funding in favour of wealthy individuals are inviting
trouble. Unions are democratically accountable mass organisations with publicly
transparent policy agendas. Wealthy individuals will open up their cheque books
and declare, as Abrahams has, that he would be “happy to donate more” if the
party commits to “the right policies”. Labour was founded to be the political
wing of working people – the clue being in the name – and attempts to distance
itself from these roots will prove morally hazardous.
Anti-Muslim
bigotry is rampant in British society. Starmer’s team are right to refuse
Abrahams’ money, and build on those foundations to confront a prejudice that
infects Labour’s own membership. By kicking Abrahams out, the party can show
British Muslims that there is no place for racism in the party, or the country.
The decision isn’t a hard one.
-----
Owen
Jones is a Guardian columnist
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/04/islamophobia-labour-david-abrahams-british-muslims
------
Why Did
Racial Progress Stall in America?
By
Shaylyn Romney Garrett and Robert D. Putnam
Dec. 4,
2020
In the
popular narrative of American history, Black Americans made essentially no
measurable progress toward equality with white Americans until the
lightning-bolt changes of the civil rights revolution. If that narrative were
charted along the course of the 20th century, it would be a flat line for
decades, followed by a sharp, dramatic upturn toward equality beginning in the
1960s: the shape of a hockey stick.
In many
ways, this hockey stick image of racial inequality is accurate. Until the
banning of de jure segregation and discrimination, very little progress was made
in many domains: representation in politics and mainstream media, job quality
and job security, access to professional schools and careers or toward
residential integration.
However, on
a number of other measures, the shape of the trend is surprisingly different.
In our book, “The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We
Can Do It Again,” we examine century-long data, tracking outcomes by race in
health, education, income, wealth and voting. What we found surprised us.
In terms of
material well-being, Black Americans were moving toward parity with white
Americans well before the victories of the civil rights era. What’s more, after
the passage of civil rights legislation, those trends toward racial parity
slowed, stopped and even reversed. Understanding how and why not only reveals
why America is so fractured today, but illuminates the path forward, toward a
more perfect union.
In measure
after measure, positive change for Black Americans was actually faster in the
decades before the civil rights revolution than in the decades after. For
example,
The life
expectancy gap between Black and white Americans narrowed most rapidly between
about 1905 and 1947, after which the rate of improvement was much more modest.
And by 1995 the life expectancy ratio was the same as it had been in 1961.
There has been some progress in the ensuing two decades, but this is due in
part to an increase in premature deaths among working-class whites.
The
Black/white ratio of high school completion improved dramatically between the
1940s and the early 1970s, after which it slowed, never reaching parity.
College completion followed the same trajectory until 1970, then sharply
reversed.
Racial
integration in K-12 education at the national level began much earlier than is
often believed. It accelerated sharply in the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court
decision, Brown v. Board of Education. But this trend leveled off in the early
1970s, followed by a modest trend toward resegregation.
Income by
race converged at the greatest rate between 1940 and 1970. However, as of 2018,
Black/white income disparities were almost exactly the same as they were in
1968, 50 years earlier. Even taking into account the emergence of the Black
middle class, Black Americans on the whole have experienced flat or downward
mobility in recent decades.
The racial
gap in homeownership steadily narrowed between 1900 and 1970, then stagnated,
then reversed. The racial wealth gap is now growing as Black homeownership
plummets.
Long-run
data on national trends in voting by race is patchy, but the South saw a
dramatic increase in Black voter registration between 1940 and 1970, followed
by decline and stagnation. What data we have on national Black voter turnout
indicate that nearly all of the gains toward equality with white voter turnout
occurred between 1952 and 1964, before the Voting Rights Act passed, then
almost entirely halted for the rest of the century.
These data
reveal a too-slow but unmistakable climb toward racial parity throughout most
of the century that begins to flatline around 1970 — a picture quite unlike the
hockey stick of historical shorthand.
We draw
attention to the unexpected shape and timing of these trends not as an attempt
to argue that things are or were better for Black Americans than they might
appear. Quite the contrary. Gains on the part of Black Americans — though clear
and surprisingly steady during the first two-thirds of the 20th century — were
due almost entirely to their fleeing the South by the millions during the Great
Migration. Starting new lives in cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles and
Philadelphia meant access to better health care, education and economic
opportunities. But these destinations, too, were characterized by a persistent
reality of exclusion, segregation and racial violence. It was Black Americans’
undaunted faith in the promise of the American “we,” and their willingness to
claim their place in it, against all odds, that won them progress between the
end of Reconstruction in the 1870s and the end of the civil rights movement in
the 1970s. Collectively, these migrants and their children and grandchildren
steadily narrowed the Black-white gap over those years.
In the last
half-century, however, that collective progress has halted, and many who fought
so hard for this progress have now lived to see it reversed. U.W. Clemon, an
African-American lawyer who won a precedent-setting Alabama school
desegregation case over 40 years ago — and recently took up a remarkably
similar legal battle in the same county — summarized the historical arc well,
saying “I never envisioned that I would be fighting in 2017 essentially the
same battle that I thought I won in 1971.”
It is
against this backdrop of stillborn hopes and intergenerational reversals that
Black Lives Matter protesters have taken to the streets. The recent police
killings have undoubtedly been sparks in the dry tinder boxes of over-policed
Black communities. But those communities are also situated within a parched
landscape of stagnant progress toward racial parity, half a century after the
passage of landmark Civil Rights legislation, and a century and a half after
Reconstruction. What to many white Americans are mere charts and graphs, to
Black Americans are the contours of their genealogy.
But if
Black Americans’ advance toward parity with whites in many dimensions had been
underway for decades before the Civil Rights revolution, why then, when the dam
of legal exclusion finally broke, didn’t those trends accelerate toward full
equality? Why was the last third of the 20th century characterized by a marked
deceleration of progress, and in some cases even a reversal?
We have two
answers to these questions.
The first
is simple and familiar: White backlash. Substantial progress toward white
support for Black equality was made in the first half of the 20th century, but
when push came to shove, many white Americans were reluctant to live up to
those principles. Although clear majorities supported the 1964 Civil Rights
Act, a national poll conducted shortly after its passage showed that 68 percent
of Americans wanted moderation in its enforcement. In fact, many felt that the
Johnson administration was moving too fast in implementing integration.
Lyndon B.
Johnson’s rejection, in 1968, of the Kerner Commission’s recommendations of
sweeping reforms to address racial inequality suggested that his fine-tuned
political sensitivity had detected a sea change in white attitudes in the year
since he — more than any previous president — had led the project of racial
redress. This was a dramatic example of deliberate acceleration followed by
deliberate deceleration, a pattern which mirrored the abandonment of
Reconstruction.
And it is
in that earlier period of American history where the second answer to the
question of why racial progress stagnated after the civil rights era can be
found, as made clear by new statistical evidence we present in “The Upswing.”
On the
heels of Reconstruction came a period that Southerners called “redemption,” a
violent project on the part of vanquished Southern elites to restore white
hegemony in the wake of the progress Black Americans had made after the Civil
War. Redemption coincided with the vast upheaval of industrialization and
urbanization, when the United States more broadly plunged into the Gilded Age.
Gross extremes of wealth and poverty, a tattered social fabric rife with
factionalism and nativism, a gridlocked public square and a culture of
narcissism were its hallmarks. The late 1800s was thus, by nearly every measure
— including the stark retrenchment of nascent racial equality — the worst of
times.
But as the
century turned and the Gilded Age gave way to the Progressive Era, America
experienced a remarkable moment of inflection that set the nation on an
entirely new trajectory. A diverse group of reformers grabbed the reins of
history and set a course toward greater economic equality, political
bipartisanship, social cohesion and cultural communitarianism. This shift and
the long-run trends it set in motion are detailed in scores of statistical
measures in “The Upswing.”
Some six
decades later all of those upward trends reversed, setting the United States on
a downward course that has brought us to the multifaceted national crisis in
which we find ourselves today, which bears a remarkable resemblance to the
Gilded Age. The wide array of statistical evidence compiled in “The Upswing” —
ranging from the distribution of income pre- and post-taxes to bipartisanship
in Congress and split-ticket voting and from civic engagement, church membership
and social trust to parents’ choice of their children’s first names — shows
that the Progressive Era represented a fundamental turning point in American
history.
These
interconnected phenomena can be summarized in a single meta-trend that we have
come to call the “I-we-I” curve: An inverted U charting America’s gradual climb
from self-centeredness to a sense of shared values, followed by a steep descent
back into egoism over the next half century.
The moment
America took its foot off the gas in rectifying racial inequalities largely
coincides with the moment America’s “we” decades gave way to the era of “I.” At
the mid-’60s peak of the I-we-I curve, long-delayed moves toward racial
inclusion had raised hopes for further improvements, but those hopes went unrealized
as the whole nation shifted toward a less egalitarian ideal.
A central
feature of America’s “I” decades has been a shift away from shared
responsibilities toward individual rights and a culture of narcissism. Economic
inequality has skyrocketed, and along with it have come massive disparities in
political influence and a growing concentration of political-economic power in
the hands of a few billionaires. Polarization and social isolation have
increased. Whatever sense of belonging Americans feel today is largely to
factional (and often racially defined) in-groups locked in fierce competition
with one another for cultural control and perceived scarce resources.
Contemporary identity politics characterizes an era that could well be
described as a “War of the ‘We’s’.” This is a reality that predated the
election of Donald Trump, though his presidency threw it into sharp relief. And
a new presidential administration will not by itself restore American unity.
It is
difficult to say which came first — white backlash against racial realignment
or the broader shift from “we” to “I.” Perhaps America’s larger turn toward “I”
was simply a response to the challenge of sustaining a more diverse,
multiracial “we” in an environment of deep, embedded and unresolved racism. But
it is also possible that a broader societal turn away from shared
responsibilities to one another eroded the fragile national consensus around
race as all Americans began to prioritize their own interests above the common
good. A selfish, fragmented “I” society is not a fertile soil for racial
equality.
Indeed, the
fact that landmark civil rights legislation passed at the very peak of the
I-we-I curve suggests that an expanding sense of “we” was a prerequisite for
the dismantling of the color line. Without what the historian Bruce Schulman
calls the “expansive, universalist vision” that America had been building
toward in the preceding decades, it is hard to imagine that such watershed
change — so long and so violently resisted — would have been possible.
Through the
“long civil rights movement,” as it has come to be called, Black activists had
prevailed upon the white establishment to widen the “we” in important (though
ultimately insufficient) ways across many decades. By the late 1960s, though
the work of widening was not nearly complete, America had come closer to an
inclusive “we” than ever before. But just as that inclusion began to bear
tangible fruit for Black Americans, much of that fruit began to die on the
vine.
The lessons
of America’s I-we-I century are thus twofold. First, we Americans have gotten
ourselves out of a mess remarkably similar to the one we’re in now by
rediscovering the spirit of community that has defined our nation from its
inception. America has turned the tide from “I” to “we” once before and we can
do it again. And, to a greater extent than heretofore recognized, we made more
rapid progress toward racial parity during the communitarian epoch than during
the period of increasing individualism that followed.
But “we”
can be defined in more inclusive or exclusive terms. The “we” we were
constructing in the first two-thirds of the last century was highly racialized,
and thus contained the seeds of its own undoing. Any attempt we may make today
to spark a new upswing must aim for a higher summit by being fully inclusive,
fully egalitarian and genuinely accommodating of difference. Anything less will
fall victim once again to its own internal inconsistencies.
As Theodore
Roosevelt put it, “the fundamental rule in our national life — the rule which
underlies all others — is that, on the whole, and in the long run, we shall go
up or down together.”
-----
Shaylyn
Romney Garrett, a founding contributor to Weave: The Social Fabric Project, and
Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard, are the authors of
“The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It
Again.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/race-american-history.html?
----
Our
Attitudes To Race Are Complex. Our Response To Racism Should Be Complex Too
By
Sonia Sodha
6 Dec 202
Is a
mass-produced jerk chicken burger a symbol of cultural appropriation or a
celebration of British multiculturalism? This is an old debate that
periodically resurfaces and so it was a couple of weeks ago when McDonald’s
launched its latest festive offering.
In this
case, a story that got echoed across much of the tabloid press was constructed
out of a few random comments criticising McDonald’s on social media; it was
journalists who built and amplified this narrative. But occasionally, others
who should know better get drawn in, such as the MP who picked a fight with
Jamie Oliver over his jerk rice.
I have long
thought that reducing debates about racism to flippant questions about
fast-food burgers and supermarket curry kits is damaging to the antiracist
cause. But new research on public attitudes to racism by the Runnymede Trust
and Voice4Change England helps us understand why.
The study
is all the better for shunning mass polling as the primary way of understanding
how the public thinks about race. Instead, researchers undertook two one-hour
conversations with 60 people from a range of backgrounds. What emerges is both
good and bad news for those of us who care deeply about ending racism. The good
news is that the weight of public thinking is that racism matters, that it is
something that is learned and education has an important role to play; also,
that racism is part of our national history.
The less
good news is that some people buy into the idea that racism is “natural”, that
we all have an affinity with people who look more like us. There is a lack of
understanding about the nature of structural racism; public thinking gravitates
towards the idea that racism is about individual actions and responsibilities.
There is a strong sense that there is no going backwards and that things will
inevitably get better over time.
Yet in the
20 years since the Macpherson report, black people have gone from being five to
nine times more likely to be stopped and searched by police than white people.
And there is a strand of zero-sum thinking: the worry that tackling racial
discrimination will inevitably mean majority groups giving things up.
Importantly,
researchers found people hold beliefs that would be considered both warm and
hostile to antiracism campaigns: it is possible for someone to believe both
that racism is ingrained in human nature and will never change, but that we are
making progress as a society, or that it is important we all do something about
racism while at the same time worrying about the consequences for themselves.
The
populist right is very good at activating the more hostile strands of thinking
by stoking this idea that if a minority benefits, the majority must lose. When
Conservative MP Ben Bradley calls the education of white, working-class boys a
“taboo” subject, he implies that white, working-class children have been
unfairly overlooked by people more interested in promoting the interests of
minority children; if it were Asian or black children, “heads would roll”, he
says (the lack of accountability for institutional racism in the Met suggests
they wouldn’t).
By
confecting this into a conflict between white and non-white children, he
conveniently obscures the role of class. Far from being taboo, the class
attainment gap for poor children, the vast majority of whom are white, was one
of the key drivers of Labour education policy, which on any objective measure
was far better than what followed, including Conservative chancellors slashing
thousands of pounds a year in tax credits from parents in low-paid work and
Tory education reforms that have done little to address the fact that
working-class children remain far less likely to attend a good quality school.
The
intellectual underpinnings of this zero-sum thinking lie in notions of “white
identity” from academics such as Eric Kaufmann. Kaufmann argues that the rise
of right populism is primarily the product of white communities’ opposition to
increasing racial diversity. He attacks the notion that structural racism
exists at all and encourages politicians to promote the need to maintain “white
culture”.
But this is
to take far too simplistic and patronising a view of the way white,
working-class communities think about race. It cannot account for all the
historical examples where a predominantly white labour movement built
solidarity and common cause with campaigns for equality.
The
Runnymede research shows that there are strands of public thinking that the
right can activate to achieve its ends of sowing division. But there are also
positive ways of thinking about race that antiracist campaigners can connect
with and build on, sometimes in the same person and certainly within the same
community. In particular, antiracism campaigners need to find ways to explain
the often counterintuitive idea that racism is not just about individuals but
systems. “We need to communicate to people that racism is something that’s
designed into our system, which means we can design something better,” says
Sanjiv Lingayah, the lead author of the research.
But there
are also traps. Certain ideas risk playing into the damaging idea that majority
white and minority interests are directly in conflict, which antiracism
campaigners need to challenge. Cultural appropriation often fits into that
category, as do terms such as “white privilege” and “white fragility”. Yes,
there is an overall structural advantage to being white compared with being
non-white, but, no, it does not build solidarity to imply that if you are
white, you are automatically “privileged”. Yes, men who went to Eton may have
to loosen their grip on the levers of power, but that would, frankly, be good
for all the rest of us.
This
research gets us away from reductivist, static accounts of public attitudes to
race. It shows that, while there are aspects of public thinking that
antiracists need to challenge, there is also a lot of positive stuff to work
with. But to get lured into giving the impression that this is a fight between
“them” and “us” is only to serve the agenda of the populist right.
-----
Sonia
Sodha is the Observer’s chief leader writer and a columnist
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/06/our-attitudes-to-race-are-complex-our-response-to-racism-should-be-complex-too
-----
Barack
and Michelle: Scenes from a Marriage
By
Timothy Egan
Dec. 4,
2020
He walks
too slowly, a languorous Hawaiian ambler. She’s a get-to-the-point woman, in
gait and gab. He’s a politician. She has no use for the type. He gets tangled
up in fancy talk. She cuts through the fluff. He smoked. She loathes the smell
of cigarettes.
Can this
marriage be saved? We know, of course, that it can. We now have more than 1,100
pages on the extraordinary lives of Michelle and Barack Obama, as told by
themselves. The two books — her “Becoming,” published in 2018, and his “A
Promised Land,” out last month — broke sales records, almost single-handedly
rescuing the bookstores of North America.
The
national ground they cover, like the country itself, is vast: Arriving at the
White House during the biggest financial
crisis since the Great Depression. The heavy lift of expanding health care. The
stone-cold barnacle of Mitch McConnell. Their own historic marker: the first
Black president and first lady.
But behind
their national identities, there’s also the private love story, and scenes from
a marriage just as complicated as any other.
Indeed,
long after people stop wondering how the Affordable Care Act came to be,
they’ll likely be reading the Obamas as a marriage tutorial. Though he seems to
get his way on his grandest ambitions, she frequently pushes back, saying their
lives have to be about we, not me — or it won’t work.
It’s been a
long time, and it is likely to be a long time coming before a married couple
from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue have as much to say about one of the central
mysteries of life. I would have liked to have seen more of the interior life of
the first lady Edith Wilson, after she essentially ran the executive branch
following President Woodrow Wilson’s stroke. And who doesn’t wonder what went
on behind the sad gaze of the long-suffering Pat Nixon?
The Obama
marriage, as they tell it, reflects both the strains of their place in history
and the contemporary aggravations of professional strivers — the hard balancing
of dual careers. Seemingly opposites, Barack and Michelle actually complete
each other.
At times,
her subtle snubs are just right, as when the president bolts out of bed early
one morning to receive the news that he’s been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
“That’s wonderful, honey,” she says, unimpressed, then rolls over to get more
sleep.
He knows
how lucky he was to find her, and how — at the peak of his power — he misses
the bond from simpler times. He says, “there were nights when, lying next to
Michelle in the dark, I’d think about those days when everything between us
felt lighter, when her smile was more constant and our love less encumbered.”
Somehow,
they defied the stereotype of those living their vows inside a political bubble
— the wife with the adoring stare, the absentee husband who only seems to care.
What’s more, their description of how the two became one and stayed that way
seems, dare I say, authentic.
Here’s
Michelle, a first-year lawyer by way of the South Side of Chicago, Princeton
and Harvard Law School, on meeting, dismissing and then falling in love with
the man who walked into her office one summer day. She’d heard he was cute,
smart and ambitious. “I was skeptical of all of it. In my experience, you put a
suit on any half-intelligent Black man and white people tended to go bonkers.”
And just to
be clear: “He was refreshing, unconventional, and weirdly elegant. Not once,
though, did I think about him as someone I’d want to date.”
But as
summer went on, she fell for his weirdness and his wit, his tardiness and his
tranquillity, and when the mystery tug at her heart became too strong to
resist, she knew she was in trouble. “He was like a wind that threatened to
unsettle everything,” she writes. She spends more than 50 pages in her memoir
on the courtship.
By
contrast, it takes Barack, a notoriously loquacious man, a mere four pages in a
book of more than 700 pages to get from meeting Michelle to their wedding day.
Going into
politics proved to be one of the biggest sources of contention in their
marriage. “We began arguing more, usually late at night when the two of us were
thoroughly drained,” he writes. “‘This isn’t what I signed up for, Barack,’”
says Michelle. “‘I feel like I’m doing it all by myself.’”
Indeed,
like so many women, she made a considerable sacrifice of her own career to
ensure that the family they raised would be normal, and to help Barack become
the most powerful man in the world — something he consistently acknowledges.
His wife, ever
the pragmatist, and the more succinct of the writers, has the best explanation
of how they have stayed together for nearly three decades:
“What
happens when a solitude-loving individualist marries an outgoing family woman
who does not love solitude one bit? The answer, I’m guessing, is probably the
best and most sustaining answer to nearly every question arising inside a
marriage, no matter who you are or what the issue is: You find ways to adapt.
If you’re in it forever, there’s really no choice.”
-----
Timothy
Egan (@nytegan) is a contributing opinion writer who covers the environment,
the American West and politics. He is a winner of the National Book Award and
the author, most recently, of “A Pilgrimage to Eternity.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/obama-marriage.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
-----
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