This says it all:
"You do not take a man who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate
him, bring him to the starting line of a race, saying, 'You are free to
compete with all the others,' and still justly believe you have been
completely fair . ."
Carl Jarvis
On 7/9/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Con of Diversity
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
In 1970, when black students occupied the dean's office at Harvard Divinity
School to protest against the absence of African-American scholars on the
school's faculty, the white administration was forced to respond and
interview black candidates. It asked James Cone, the greatest theologian of
his generation, to come to Cambridge, Mass., for a meeting. But the white
power structure had no intention of offering Cone a job. To be black, in
its
eyes, was bad enough. To be black, brilliant and fiercely independent was
unpalatable. And so the job was given to a pliable African-American
candidate who had never written a book, a condition that would remain
unchanged for the more than three decades he taught at Harvard.
Harvard got what it wanted. Mediocrity in the name of diversity. It was a
classic example of how the white power structure plays people of color. It
decides whom to promote and whom to silence. When then-Maj. Colin Powell
helped cover up the 1968 massacre of some 500 civilians at My Lai in
Vietnam
he was assured a glittering career in the Army. When Barack Obama proved
obedient to the Chicago political machine, Wall Street and the Democratic
Party establishment he was promoted to the U.S. Senate and the presidency.
Diversity in the hands of the white power elites-political and corporate-is
an advertising gimmick. A new face, a brand, gets pushed out front,
accompanied by the lavish financial rewards that come with serving the
white
power structure, as long as the game is played. There is no shortage of
women (Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Donna Brazile), Latinos (Tom Perez
and Marco Rubio) or blacks (Vernon Jordan, Clarence Thomas and Ben Carson)
who sell their souls for a taste of power.
Ta-Nehisi Coates in his book "We Were Eight Years in Power: An American
Tragedy" writes that "Barack Obama is directly responsible for the rise of
a
crop of black writers and journalists who achieved prominence during his
two
terms." But this was true only for those black writers like Coates and
Michael Eric Dyson who were obsequious cheerleaders for Obama. If, like
Cornel West, you were black and criticized Obama you were isolated and
attacked by Obama surrogates as a race traitor.
"For those who didn't support Obama it was the lonely time," said Glen
Ford,
the executive editor of the Black Agenda Report, when we spoke recently.
"It's like A.D. and B.C. Before Obama time, my politics reflected that of a
black commentator, probably within a respectable black political spectrum.
I'm looking at a fax, 'NAACP September 8, 2007. NAACP regional leader.' I
got this after giving a keynote speech in Little Rock, Ark., in
commemoration of the events in Little Rock in '57. You see what I'm saying?
I could do that, even as late as 2007. Then Obama happened. It was a
wonderful time for people who endorsed Obama. If you didn't endorse Obama,
you were verboten in the community. All of a sudden you were ostracized."
The absence of genuine political content in our national discourse has
degraded it to one between racists and people who don't want to be
identified as racists. The only winners in this self-destructive cat fight
are corporations such as Goldman Sachs, whose interests no American can
vote
against, along with elite institutions dedicated to perpetuating the
plutocracy. Drew G. Faust, the first woman president of Harvard University,
whose appointment represented a triumph for diversity, upon her retirement
was appointed to the board of Goldman Sachs, a role for which she will
receive compensation totaling over half a million dollars a year. A new and
"diverse" group of Democratic Party candidates, over half of whom have been
recruited from the military, the CIA, the National Security Council and the
State Department, is hoping to rise to political power based on the old
con.
"It's an insult to the organized movements of people these institutions
claim to want to include," Ford said. "These institutions write the script.
It's their drama. They choose the actors, whatever black, brown, yellow,
red
faces they want."
"I don't think a black left should be investing any political capital or
energy into getting Barack Obamas into a Harvard," Ford said, "or believing
it can transform Harvard or any of these ruling-class universities from the
inside out, any more than it can transform the Democratic Party from the
inside out."
Ford points out that "diversity" has been substituted by the white power
elites for "affirmative action." And, he argues, diversity and affirmative
action are radically different. The replacement of affirmative action with
diversity, he says, effectively "negates African-American history as a
legal
basis for redress."
Once the Supreme Court in its 1978 Bakke decision outlawed "quotas" for
racial minorities, ruling institutions were freed from having to establish
affirmative action programs that would have guaranteed a space for those
traditionally excluded. The Trump administration's recent reversal of an
Obama-era policy that called on universities to consider race as a factor
in
admissions is an attempt to eradicate even diversity. President Trump and
his racist enablers, including Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, are
resegregating America.
"You do not take a man who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate
him, bring him to the starting line of a race, saying, 'You are free to
compete with all the others,' and still justly believe you have been
completely fair . ," President Lyndon Johnson said in 1965 to the
graduating
class of Howard University. "This is the next and more profound stage of
the
battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity-not just
legal equity but human ability-not just equality as a right and a theory,
but equality as a fact and as a result."
Johnson's call, along with that of Martin Luther King Jr., was swiftly
sabotaged by white, liberal elites, who divorced racial justice from
economic justice. White liberals could live with laws prohibiting
segregation but not with giving up some of their financial and social
privilege.
"White liberals are not seeking justice," Ford said. "They're seeking
absolution. Anything that absolves them of responsibility for what this
society has done, they welcome it. They're hungry for it."
"The legal, as well as moral, basis for affirmative action lay in the
culpability of the United States and all of its layers of government in the
enslavement and Jim Crow 'hobbling' of African-Americans-a unique history
of
oppression of a specific people that requires institutional redress," Ford
has written. "Otherwise, the legacies of these crimes will reproduce
themselves, in mutating forms, into infinity. Once the specificity of the
Black American grievance was abandoned, affirmative action became a general
catch-all of various historical wrongs. Stripped of its core, affirmative
action morphed into 'diversity,' a vessel for various aggrieved groups that
was politically versatile (and especially useful to the emerging Black deal
makers of electoral and corporate politics), but no longer rooted in Black
realities. The affirmative action of Dr. King and President Johnson was a
species of reparations, a form of redress for specific and eminently
documentable harms done to African Americans, as a people. It was
understood
as a social debt owed to a defined class."
" 'Diversity,' " Ford wrote, "recognizes no such debt to a particular
people, or to any people at all. Rather, its legal basis is the 'compelling
interest' of public institutions in a diversified student body (or
faculty)."
Diversity does not force the white power structure to address racial
injustice or produce results within the black underclass. This feint to
diversity was abetted, Ford points out, by black elitists who found
positions for themselves in the power structure in exchange for walking
away
from the poor and marginalized.
Ford calls these black elitists "representationalists" who "want to see
some
black people represented in all sectors of leadership, in all sectors of
society. They want black scientists. They want black movie stars. They want
black scholars at Harvard. They want blacks on Wall Street. But it's just
representation. That's it."
The plague of diversity lies at the core of our political dysfunction. The
Democratic Party embraces it. Donald Trump's Republican Party repudiates
it.
But as a policy it is a diversion. Diversity has done little to ameliorate
the suffering of the black underclass. Most blacks are worse off than when
King marched in Selma. African-Americans have lost over half of their
wealth
since the financial collapse of 2008 because of falling homeownership rates
and job loss. They have the highest rate of poverty at 27.4 percent,
followed by Hispanics at 26.6 percent and whites at 9.9 percent. And 45.8
percent of black children under 6 live in poverty, compared with 14.5
percent of white children in that age group. Forty percent of the nation's
homeless are African-Americans although blacks make up only 13 percent of
our population. African-Americans are incarcerated at more than five times
the rate of whites.
Diversity does not halt the stripping away of our civil liberties, the
assault on our ecosystem or the punishing effects of mandated austerity and
deindustrialization. It does not confront imperialism. Diversity is part of
the mechanics of colonialism. A genuine revolutionary, Patrice Lumumba, was
replaced with the pliant and corrupt Mobutu Sese Seko. Both were black. But
one fought the colonial tyrants and the other served them. A political
agenda built solely around "diversity" is a smokescreen for injustice.
The victory by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over the powerful Democratic Rep.
Joe Crowley in a Democratic primary in Brooklyn last month is not a victory
for diversity, although Ocasio-Cortez is a woman of color. It is a victory
of political substance over the empty rhetoric of the Democratic Party.
Ocasio-Cortez defied the party establishment as an avowed member of the
Democratic Socialists of America. She could not even get a pre-election
endorsement from Bernie Sanders, her mentor, who is playing Faust to Chuck
Schumer's Mephistopheles. She calls for Medicare for all, the abolishment
of
ICE, a federal jobs program and an end to the wars in the Middle East and
has denounced Israel's massacre of unarmed Palestinians. She stands for
something. And it is only when we stand for something, including
reparations
for African-Americans, that we have a chance to dismantle corporate
tyranny.
"I've always felt, in the early '60s when I was just a kid, that the silent
partner, sometimes reluctant although still a partner, in the civil rights
movement were the corporations who wanted a unified market," Ford said.
"Jim
Crow was a big anomaly in terms of creating a more unified market in the
United States. You can't have an Atlanta skyline, with its magnificent
elevators, with Jim Crow. Not only would Atlanta not be an international
city, it couldn't be a national city with Jim Crow. The corporate forces
wanted to break down Jim Crow and explicit color discrimination. It
standardized the market. This is what capitalists do. The Democratic Party
is not behaving any differently than the corporations over the past 50
years."
"I'm not worried by the Trump phenomenon," Ford said. "That doesn't scare
me. It's disconcerting. But it doesn't scare me. I'm far more afraid of the
space that it gives to the corporatists. It's to their advantage. Trump
defines the white man's party's space. It's big. It's no joke. It can win
presidential elections. It can win again. It needs money from corporate
Republicans, but it doesn't need anything else from them. The white man's
party more clearly defines the space the Democrats claim. It's everybody
who
is not an overt racist."
"I don't think Trump will ever beat Obama's records in terms of
deportation," Ford went on. "We should be fighting U.S. immigration policy.
But that isn't Trump. We should be organizing against Amazon taking over a
whole city. But that isn't Trump. Will Trump's next pick for the Supreme
Court be different from any pick that a Republican would make? In fact,
because he's crazy, he might fuck up and make a bad pick for himself. He
ain't deep enough to pick the worst guy. He hasn't read the Federalist
Papers."
Chris Hedges
