<table width="600" align="center" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr><td><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><font color="#333333" size="2"><a href="http://www.truth-out.org/between-race-and-reason-anti-intellectualism-american-life/1314634662" target="_blank"><b>Between Race and Reason: Anti-Intellectualism in
American Life</b></a><br></font></font></td></tr><tr><td><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><font color="#333333" size="2">Susan Searls Giroux - Stanford University Press/<a href="http://truthout.org/" target="_blank">truthout.org</a></font></font></td>
</tr><tr><td><br></td></tr><tr><td><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><font color="#333333" size="2"><i>This is excerpt from Susan Searls Giroux's latest book,
"Between Race and Reason: Violence, Intellectual Responsibility, and the
University to Come" (Stanford UP), which won the prestigious Gary A.
Olson Award for Best Book Published in Rhetoric and Cultural Studies in
2010. In this excerpt she gives an excellent analysis of the growing
anti-intellectualism whic!
h has swept the far right, and correctly links it to racial issues
which inform it. Part of the great dilemma we face is that we cannot
solve fact-based problems with ideological fantasies. Sadly, when nearly
half the population takes pride in its willful ignorance, it is
unlikely anything of substance will be addressed meaningfully.<br>
<br>
Professor Giroux is associate dean of humanities and an associate
professor of English and cultural studies at McMaster University in
Canada. </i></font></font></td></tr><tr><td><br></td></tr>
<tr><td><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><font color="#333333" size="2">In late October 2008, just days before the U.S.
presidential election, George Monbiot of London’s The Guardian, caught
perhaps in a mood of deepening anxiety and dread over the impending
outcome, leveled an indictment against the American government and at
least half of the electorate in the form of a question: 'How did
politics in the U.S. come to be dominated by people who make a virtue
out of ignorance?” In a rather unkind primatological allusion, he
invoked as evidence the eight-year reign of George W. Bush, the recent
vogue of Sarah Palin-and before her, Dan Quayle, apparently to round out
the VP wing of 'gibbering numbskulls” past and present-as well as the
'screaming ignoramuses” in attendance at Republican rallies who insisted
that Barack Obama was both a Muslim and a terrorist. 'Like most people
on my side of the Atlantic,” he ventured, 'I have fo!
r many years been mystified by American politics. The U.S. has the
world’s best universities and attracts the world’s finest minds. It
dominates in discoveries in science and medicine. Its wealth and power
depend on the application of knowledge. Yet, uniquely among the
developed nations . . . learning is a grave political disadvantage.”[1]
A troubling observation to be sure. How exactly does one make sense
of, let alone respond to, such an astonishing contradiction, such an
ungenerous play on the concept of American exceptionalism? There are,
of course, a number of possibilities. (a) Denial: reduce the charge to a
hiccup of European arrogance tinged with a bit of resentment. (b)
Dismissal: declaim as cynical the blanket condemnation of ineptitude
among government officials and the fools who elected them. (c)
Deflection: assert that the election results-and the resounding defeat
handed to the McCain-Palin campaign, which ran primarily on emotional
appeals!
to fear and patriotic fervor-vindicate the good sense of the !
voters and render Monbiot’s judgment too quick. It would be tempting to
answer '(d) all of the above” and continue to bask in the warm
afterglow of the Obama victory and the ensuing worldwide celebration
that marked the end of the Bush era. But, alas, we are not saved.<br>
<br>
Indeed the pre-election antics appeared in hindsight little more than an
opening prelude to the 'delirium,” as The Economist termed it, of the
summer of 2009 debates on health care; the furor over the president’s
'indoctrination” of school children; the growing momentum of the
'birthers,” unchecked by repeated proof against their claims; and other
crazed conspiracy theorists who showed up at town hall meetings armed
to the teeth, leaving many to wonder why the nation surrendered public
debate over the most pressing political issues of our time (to say
nothing of media coverage) to the most extreme and unstable elements of
the far right.[2] Even the esteemed journalist Bill Moyers, deeply
unsettled by current events, couldn’t resist a bit of uncharacteristic
sarcasm: 'So here we are, wallowing in our dysfunction. Governed-if you
listen to the rabble rousers-by a black nationalist from Kenya smuggled
into the United States to kill Sarah Palinâ!
�™s baby.”[3] The peculiar degradation of these three fundaments of a
substantive democracy-informed and judicious political discourse,
intelligence, and education-in contemporary American politics to which
Monbiot and others refer has had a long and storied career, extending
back to the early days of the republic. The subject was given
unparalleled examination in Richard Hofstadter’s Pulitzer-prize winning
volume, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, published in 1963. It is
important to note, however, that for Hofstader anti-intellectuals are
neither the 'gibbering numbskulls” nor the 'screaming ignoramuses” that
Monbiot and a growing chorus of journalists, scholars, and others
criticize. Rather, Hofstadter viewed them as a far more effective enemy
to the educated mind and to a vibrant, democratic political culture,
which requires for its very survival an abiding commitment on the part
of its citizenry to critical thought, moral judgment, the capac!
ity for self-reflection, and an acute awareness of self-limita!
tion. Neither uneducated nor unintellectual, anti-intellectuals
constitute the ranks of the 'half-educated,” men and women who are
'deeply engaged with ideas, often obsessively engaged with this or that
outworn or rejected idea.”[4]<br>
<br>
Hofstadter describes them as hardly indifferent or hostile to the life
of the mind, but as 'marginal intellectuals, would-be intellectuals,
unfrocked or embittered intellectuals, the literate leaders of the
semi-literate, full of seriousness and high purpose about the causes
that bring them to the attention of the world.”[5] Indeed, he notes,
even the most rigorous thinkers are not immune to anti-intellectual
moments. Writing in the immediate aftermath of McCarthy era, he locates
among the anti-intellectual vanguard the following: highly intelligent
and articulate evangelical ministers; religious fundamentalists of
various sorts; politicians who inflamed populist and nationalist
sentiment (including, he notes, some of the shrewdest); businessmen and
other self-appointed spokespersons for practicality, utilitarianism, and
free enterprise; right-wing editors with strong intellectual
pretensions; anti-Communist pundits; and for that matter, Communist
leaders, who he!
ld intellectuals in high suspicion, if not contempt. What such a
disparate assemblage of characters share is a kind of militancy fueled
by a severe, fundamentalist morality; he calls them 'one hundred
percenters,” who brook no ambiguities, doubts, equivocations,
reservations, and certainly no criticism. Such rigidity they consider
evidence of their own toughness and strength-as well as, revealingly, a
testament to their masculinity.[6]<br>
<br>
Following Hofstader’s logic into the present moment, we would add to
these ranks latter-day market fundamentalists, such as Jim Cramer and
other disciples of the brilliant and tragically myopic Milton Freedman,
and their powerful and embittered friends in the conservative movement,
such as the peerless Grover Norquist and Karl Rove, Bush’s reputed
brain; the intellectual denizens of highly partisan think tanks, from
the American Heritage Institute to the Heritage, Olin, Schaiffe, and
Coors foundations, like Charles Murray; as well as their learned
counterparts in the academy, like Lawrence Mead or Samuel Huntington;
the various crusaders of the Christian right, like Pat Robertson, who
called for the assassination of a world leader, and others who rail
against science and the rights of women and gays such as Bill McCartney,
the founder of the Promise Keepers; demagogic populists like Patrick
Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh; jingoistic patriots inspired by Newt
Gingrich and!
Tom DeLay; and the impassioned, often inflammatory anti-immigration
and anti-terrorist politicians and media pundits, of whom there are far
too many, such as Tom Tancredo, Thelma Drake, Bill O’Reilly, Ann
Coulter, Lou Dobbs, Glenn Beck. And we would acknowledge, as we do so,
the continuing draw of masculinist posturing for both men and women. For
nearly four decades, these 'leaders of the semi-literate” have assisted
in the transformation not only of all three branches of government but
of the political culture of the nation as well, swaying the voting
public through base appeals to our deepest insecurities and fears, most
typically expressed and circulated through racially charged
representational codes. In apocalyptic tones, they warned that
'traditional American values” and 'our American way of life” were on the
brink of collapse as a result of some marauding horde-thugged-out young
black men, welfare queens, overpopulating Latinos, illegal immigra!
nts, radical Jihadists, or 'gay married terrorists” (i!
n economist Paul Krugman’s satiric phrase). And most Americans went
along for the ride. Even those who didn’t buy the coded rhetoric (even
as they enjoyed the privileges of a still-uneven playing field)
complacently went about their lives, feasting on too-easy credit,
flipping houses, or fixating on celebrity culture until all the consumer
bubbles finally broke. Though the candidate who stood for change, for a
restoration of democratic principle against a rising tide of
fundamentalisms-market, military, religious-won the 2008 election by a
respectable but not overwhelming margin, the legacy of the last forty
years of conservative counterrevolution did not magically disappear
after Inauguration Day.[7]<br>
<br>
Nearly a half-century after it was written, Hofstadter’s erudite volume
remains essential reading for those troubled by the effects of
anti-intellectualism, and the various fundamentalisms that inspire and
inflame it, on democratic public life and political culture. In fact,
his uncompromising analysis of the political climate in which Thomas
Jefferson ran for president in the infamous 1800 election-an election
that also signaled a revolutionary shift in the political direction of
the nation-is particularly instructive in light of the 2008 campaign,
which uncannily recapitulated many of the same themes. Jefferson was the
first distinguished victim of a decisively anti-intellectual attack,
and the assault on him (leveled principally by Federalist leaders and
members of the established clergy) set a precedent for subsequent
efforts to render an active, curious mind either trivial and ridiculous
or evil and dangerous. The echoes of such efforts to sway the electorate
on!
principles that violate reason, reflection, evidence, and judgment are
heard to this day: intellect makes 'men” timid and ineffectual; they
are likely to vacillate rather than to act boldly in the face of crisis;
their intellectual pursuits produce in general a suspicion of, or a
hostility to, Christianity; and they are committed to abstract, radical,
or even 'foreign” ideas over the quintessential American values of God
and country.<br>
<br>
The capacity for reflective, creative, and critical thought, finely
honed argumentation, and public persuasion-talents one might otherwise
assume well recommend a candidate for the office of president-were
transformed into the gravest of liabilities. Jefferson’s critics
assailed his philosophical training and literary talents, which they
insisted made him unfit for practical tasks. Their eager acknowledgment
of the elegance of his rhetorical style provided only further proof of
the man’s lack of political substance. Said one South Carolina
congressman, William Loughton Smith:<br>
<br>
The characteristic traits of a philosopher, when he turns
politician, are, timidity, whimsicalness, and a disposition to reason
from certain principles, and not from the true nature of man; a
proneness to predicate all his measures on certain abstract theories,
formed in the recess of his cabinet, and not on the existing state of
things and circumstances; an inertness of mind, as applied to
governmental policy, a wavering of disposition when great and sudden
emergencies demand promptness of decision and energy of action.[8]<br>
<br>
Thought, according to those suspicious of a critical and contemplative
mind, inevitably got in the way of action. In addition to these
offenses, Jefferson also stood accused of a lack of experience,
particularly military experience-the very ingredient which had made his
esteemed predecessor, George Washington, a patriot, a man of great
character, and an effective, no-nonsense leader. Smith, contriving to
portray Jefferson’s astonishing and wide-ranging intellectual abilities
as trivial and ridiculous, mocked his scientific interests and his
inventiveness as 'impaling butterflies and insects, and contriving
turn-about chairs” adding that such merits 'might entitle him to the
Professorship of a college” but were utterly incompatible with the
duties of the presidency and the command of the Western Army.[9]<br>
<br>
Such charges should sound strangely familiar. Barack Obama’s reflective
capacities and rhetorical strengths have been frequently acknowledged
by his opponents, who, interestingly enough, hailed from similar
quarters: the religious right and Republican descendants of Federalist
persuasion. But the praise, like that heaped on Jefferson, primarily
served to underscore allegations of inexperience and unbridled idealism.
Like its distant predecessor, the election of 2008 was framed as a
choice between military experience and character-the strength of which
seemed to rest on an ex-soldier’s patriotic zeal and plain speech, on
the one hand, and change-in the figure of a young cosmopolitan and
former University of Chicago professor of law who represented new ideas,
gifted oratory, and hope-on the other. Then, as now, when the bad news
befalls the White House-whether by messenger on horseback or emergency
phone call-at three o’clock in the morning, Americans are prompted to!
vote for a man of action, not intelligence, which is derided as
inevitably naïve, 'timid,” 'abstract,” or 'wavering.” Whereas the former
law professor was said to lack any military experience and have
negligible foreign policy credentials, McCain emphasized his war
record, his heroism, his endurance, as vouchsafed by his five-year
imprisonment in a Viet Cong POW camp, and above all his patriotism.<br>
<br>
Appeals to practicality and patriotism were not the only rhetorical
weapons in the arsenal of Jefferson’s opponents-or Obama’s. Hofstadter
regales his readers with various efforts to paint Jefferson as a
dangerous scourge without faith or morals. His learning and speculation,
it was said, made an atheist of Jefferson; he had not only challenged
theologians about the age of the earth but opposed having school
children read the Bible-vagaries that made him a threat to religion and
society. Further proof of his alleged immorality was offered in a litany
of accusations: that he was a coward during the Revolutionary War, that
he started the French Revolution, that he harbored a secret ambition
to become a dictator, another Bonaparte. And strikingly, though
Hofstadter makes only a passing reference to the charge, the integrity
of this white, patrician male was tainted by an association with race:
it was asserted that he 'kept a slave wench and sired mulattoes,” a dis!
honor less to his wife than to his white blood-thus, according to the
racial reasoning of the time, proof of moral depravity.<br>
<br>
Obama was subject to similar demagogic efforts throughout the seemingly
interminable two-year campaign cycle. While McCain played the role of
the valiant soldier and patriot, Obama stood accused of 'palling around
with terrorists” like University of Illinois at Chicago professor Bill
Ayers and other subversive intellectuals (a redundancy for
conservatives). Moreover, Obama’s Christianity was called into question
repeatedly with insinuations of his secret Muslim faith, as if the
espousal of such doctrines were adequate grounds to disqualify him
immediately from political office. Indeed, it was Sarah Palin’s very
religiosity-in addition to other perceived assets including her folksy
demeanor, her status as mother of five, her fascination with guns, and
not so implicitly her whiteness as mirrored in the clean, white snows of
the Alaskan wilderness-that made this contemporary Annie Oakley such an
appealing vice presidential pick for the McCain team. She embraced !
the very commitments and values of the Republicans’ most stalwart
constituency: the Christian right. In contrast, much was made of Obama’s
middle name, 'Hussein,” which was chanted over and over again at
Republican rallies, betraying similar efforts to associate him with the
dangerous Middle Eastern dictator, if not quite claiming, as in
Jefferson’s case, that he aspired to become a despot. (That accusation,
of course, would come within Obama’s first six months of office, when
during the summer of 2009, angry constituents at town hall meetings
would tout images of the president with a Hitler moustache or feature
him on placards with Stalin, Mao, or Che Guevara.) Such charges
performed a double duty for the Obama’s critics, casting 'Barack Hussein
Obama” as not only a threat to all Christians, but beyond the pale of
whiteness, both as a man of African descent and as an alleged Muslim, a
category that increasingly carries both religious and ethno-racial !
'civilizational” implication.<br>
<br>
Just as Jefferson’s intellectual disposition, his sensibilities, his
tastes were pilloried as 'foreign,” a clear precursor to contemporary
tactics designed to generate fear toward those characterized as 'not
American,” Barack Obama was consistently characterized as alien. Of
Jefferson, one Federalist pamphleteer claimed: 'It was in France, where
he resided nearly seven years, and until the revolution had made some
progress, that his disposition to theory, and his skepticism in
religion, morals, and government, acquired full strength and vigor. . .
. Mr. Jefferson is known to be a theorist in politics, as well as in
philosophy and morals. He is a philosophe in the modern French sense of
the word.”[10] The anti-intellectual rejection of the candidate as a
'theorist” and a 'philosophe” anticipates accusations of
anti-Americanism hurled at contemporary intellectuals, particularly
those critical of the Bush administration, even as the charge ir!
onically depicts thinking as a foreign, even subversive activity.
Obama was not only educated in various regions of the world including
Indonesia, Africa and the United States, but he was also of mixed-race
heritage. Most definitely, it was implied, where not emphatically
stated, he was 'not one of us.”[11] Of course, like Jefferson, Barack
Obama did win the presidential election; but the rather shocking figure
of the fifty-eight million (46 percent of the popular) votes cast for
the McCain-Palin ticket, despite its many allegiances to the utterly
corrupt and generally despised Bush administration, should give us
pause. This brief engagement with the Jeffersonian legacy is all the
more revealing for the decidedly ironic way in which Jefferson, and much
of the iconography of the American Revolution, has been appropriated
by the far right in post-election America-from 'tea parties,” to the
incessant appearance of the Gladstone flag and other militia flags fe!
aturing rattlesnakes and often accompanied by the slogan, &#39!
;Don’t Tread on Me,” to the 'patriot movement” (and its various calls
for revolution, succession, and state sovereignty), which has made
Jefferson’s quip that 'the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time
to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots” its rallying cry.<br>
<br>
Historically speaking, the suspicion of intellect has for centuries
spawned a variety of anti-intellectual commitments-the fetishization of
folksiness, the cult of efficiency and practicality, jingoistic
patriotism, militarized masculinity, and religious fervor. Whereas in
the era in which Hofstadter wrote it was still possible to equate
mainstream intellectual culture with the culture of liberalism, this is
no longer the case. The below-the-radar conservative counter-revolution
begun in the late 1960s, coterminous with a highly visible repressive
law-and-order crackdown on various civil rights and anti-war protesters,
and eventually displaced the liberal hegemony of mid-century America,
as its advocates exploited and intensified the anti-intellectualism of
the culture. The consequence of this ascendancy has been a crisis of
liberal ideals and democratic values, of the very possibility of
politics, which has generated a cottage industry of similarly themed
tomes that commenc!
e where Hofstadter’s probing analysis left off.<br>
<br>
However, questions remain about whether the presumption that Obama’s
presidency commences an officially 'post-racial” and 'post-partisan”
period of American politics will continue to hold true, providing yet
another kind of dubious departure from reality and reason. To be sure
the George W. Bush administration, if unsurpassed in the degree of its
commitment to anti-intellectualism, was certainly not alone in its
willingness to deceive and manipulate everyday 'folks.” Over the past
century, there have been political leaders-Franklin Roosevelt, John
Kennedy, and Bill Clinton-who successfully tempered their intelligence,
invoked a colloquial idiom, claimed an affinity for common values and
tastes (Bill and his Big Mac attacks) and survived. Others who were less
adept-Adlai Stevenson, Al Gore, John Kerry-simply perished, as their
opponents effectively labeled them as too cerebral, too elite, if not
also effete, for effective leadership. While it is true tha!
t on the campaign trail, Obama exemplified thoughtfulness and
circumspection and spoke with eloquence and dignity, he also proved
adept at staying connected with the everyday, playing hoops with his
mates from high school the morning of the election, assuaging the fears
of children who faced a daunting move with the promise of a puppy.<br>
<br>
In the service of heightening such 'exuberant identification” (as
Judith Butler describes it) with Obama’s leadership, a few items are
missing from the presidential agenda altogether, and their absence
weighs heavily against soaring hopes for genuine democratic renewal.
Successive bailouts for financials and other industries have proven
unhelpful for everyday citizens-and particularly citizens of
color-facing alarming levels of unemployment, impoverishment, and home
foreclosure. Yet Obama has chosen to abet the nation’s collective
refusal to discuss race and, more emphatically, racial injustice-his
one speech on the subject notwithstanding.<br>
<br>
Yet at no other time have we been more in need of a critically engaged,
creative, and thoughtful citizenry who can face with courage and
conviction the challenges-political, economic, ecological,
spiritual-that we face both nationally and internationally. Obama is a
product of this elite system and will not push against its interests,
unless compelled by an informed and active citizenry. 'Obama used
hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign funds to appeal to and
manipulate this illiteracy and irrationalism to his advantage,”
observes Hedges.[12] And indeed the electorate was invited to focus
increasingly on the person of this potential leader-his eloquence, his
gravity, his unfailing cool, even his jump shot-and a compelling
personal narrative that simultaneously invoked the triumphalism of
America’s beloved immigration mythology and offered a redemptive
conclusion to its most egregious racial sins. However, Hedges warns that
'these forces will prove!
to be his most deadly nemesis once they collide with the awful
reality that awaits us.”[13]<br>
<br>
I suspect Hedges is largely correct in his assessment. Yet we can not
accept that our capacity to think, our educational system, and with it
American democracy itself, have reached a terminal stage. And it is
because I reject these premises that I argue strongly for academics,
administrators, teachers, intellectuals, and others to assume their
responsibilities as educators who play a vital role in molding citizens
who can actively and critically participate in democratic public life.
Hedges is undoubtedly right about one thing. The electorate is fast
headed on that collision course with the reality that the Bush
administration sought and that it apparently managed to repress for so
long. As Obama himself acknowledged in his Inauguration Day speech, few
presidents have taken the oath of office under conditions quite so
devastating. Perhaps for this reason, ultimately, he has been compared
to former presidents Abraham Lincoln, also a one-term senator from
Illinois who !
confronted a nation ravaged by civil war; Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
who led America through the Great Depression and Second World War; and
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the civil rights-era commander in chief who
inspired America with his youthful idealism and his sense of hope. But
it is also for this reason that I’ve gone even further back in American
history and invoked the legacy of Thomas Jefferson, who also served in
the county’s highest office in turbulent times, who like Obama would
lead the nation through the convulsions of revolutionary change.
Jefferson witnessed a political revolution in France and then in the
United States, and was able, as a result of those who fought and died
for their country, for its ideals of life, liberty, and equality, to
ascend to the position of president of a new nation divided in its
search for the way forward. Moreover, he was to serve while Western
nations were experiencing yet another, equally profound revolution in
economic d!
evelopment; he was a plantation owner and adherent of an agrar!
ian way of life that was about to give way to new forces of
industrialization, which would transform the country in ways quite
unknown and unimaginable. And there was the fact of slavery, America’s
original sin, about which he wrote most eloquently and ambivalently.<br>
<br>
In order to meet all of these political, economic, and spiritual
challenges, the nation’s third president understood all too well the
necessity of an educated citizenry. Having survived his own bitter and
contentious political campaign, Jefferson had witnessed first-hand the
nefarious and-as we have seen-cataclysmic danger that anti-intellectual,
populist demagoguery poses for a democratic nation. Surely it was this
complex set of conditions and experiences that inspired his radical
educational thought, for it was Jefferson who was one of the first to
put forth a multi-tiered plan for free and universal public education as
the primary means of safeguarding a young and fragile democratic
nation. And it is this legacy that seems to me to offer the most
important lessons for the Obama administration, and for those anxious to
serve the country in its current state of multiple crises. For
Jefferson, education was the primary means of producing the kind of
critically inf!
ormed and active citizenry necessary to both nurture and sustain a
vibrant public sphere; he believed that democracy was the highest form
of political organization for any nation because it provided the
conditions for its citizens to grow both intellectually and morally
through the exercise of these faculties. Consider this passage from
Jefferson’s moving preamble to the 1776 'Bill for the More General
Diffusion of Knowledge,” which bears the hallmark of his views on the
relationship between education and public life:<br>
<br>
Whereas . . . certain forms of government are better calculated than
others to protect individuals in the free exercise of their natural
rights . . . experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms,
those entrusted with power have . . . perverted it into tyranny; and it
is believed that the most effectual means of preventing this would be,
to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large;
And whereas it is generally true that people will be happiest whose
laws are best, and are best administered, and that laws will be wisely
formed, and honestly administered, in proportion as those who form and
administer them are wise and honest.[14]<br>
<br>
Jefferson made education central to his philosophical thought and
political commitments; it proved the best means for both preserving the
natural rights of citizens from all forms of tyranny and a means for
enabling wise and honest self-government. Jefferson conceived of
education as a preeminently political issue-and politics as a
preeminently educational concern.<br>
<br>
As Obama confronts the challenges of the wars he has inherited, an
economy experiencing a shift as profound as the industrial revolution
which displaced agrarianism as a way of life, the moral stain of a vast
carceral empire both at home and abroad, as well as a citizenry riven
by the divisive and demagogic rhetoric of four decades of conservative
counterrevolution, the legacy of Jefferson, and his insistence on the
preeminence of education, may well provide the way forward-and, too, a
warning. I have attempted to argue that a (raceless) racist logic has
shaped each element of these knotted crises-the 'civilizational” war on
terror as well as the nation’s willingness to transform the welfare
state into a neoliberal warfare state-and the ease with which it
criminalized the social ills that issued from that pervasive and
repressive shift. In fact, as early as 2001, ACLU director Graham Boyd
noted that the United States was<br>
<br>
incarcerating African-American men at a rate approximately four
times the rate of incarceration of black men in South Africa under
apartheid. Worse still, we have managed to replicate-at least on a
statistical level-the shame of chattel slavery in this country: The
number of black men in prison . . . has already equaled the number of
men enslaved in 1820. . . . [And] if current trends continue, only 15
years remain before the United States incarcerates as many
African-American men as were forced into chattel bondage at slavery’s
peak, in 1860.[15]<br>
<br>
Following Boyd’s prediction, the ranks of the incarcerated have swollen
from 2 million to 2.3 million in the ensuing eight years. We have moved
from a time in which black Americans were legally defined as property,
to one in which they have been granted 3/5 humanity. From sub-humanity,
they rose to the ranks of second-class citizens, and once a full
schedule of rights had been achieved equally 'before the law,” those
rights and entitlements were dismantled along with the social state,
which held the promise of their provision. In the fantasy world where
'there is no such thing as society,” there are now only dysfunctional
men, women, and their families locked up or locked out of the American
Dream. Still marked by the original sin of slavery, which we have not
entirely repudiated, we now find ourselves in an era ominously
reminiscent of that biblical season of plague, only this time it is not
divine power striking down the first-born children of Pharaoh’s!
kingdom because he refused to grant full freedom to all people, but
rather the sovereign power of the state seizing every third son born
black. Or perhaps we should push even further back in locating an apt
metaphor for the present to ancient Babylon, to the building of that
colossal tower of Babel, which eventually wrought divine destruction,
condemning humanity to endless confused chatter and conflict. Whatever
path of destruction Jefferson envisioned for a nation that refused to
take heed of its own moral recklessness and injustice, we would do well
to heed his warning. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, he wrote:
'Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that
his justice cannot sleep for ever.”[16] Averting catastrophe-the
organizing theme of the second half of this book-will require a most
arduous task for the nation’s citizenry: a critical and consistent
commitment to think and reflect, to act as citizens who are worthy of a !
democracy.<br>
<br>
1. Monbiot, George. 'How These Jibbering Numbskulls Came to Dominate
Washington.” Guardian, Oct. 28, 2008..<br>
<br>
2. Editor. 'American Health Care: Keep It Honest.” Economist, Aug. 20,
2009.<br>
<br>
3. Transcript. Bill Moyers Journal, Sept. 4, 2009.<br>
<br>
4. Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (p. 21.).
New York: Vintage, 1963.<br>
<br>
5. Ibid.<br>
<br>
6. Ibid, 119.<br>
<br>
7. For a comprehensive analysis of these various fundamentalisms, see
Henry A. Giroux’s Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond
the Age of Greed (2008).<br>
<br>
8. Ibid., 147–48.<br>
<br>
9. Ibid., 149.<br>
<br>
10. On the blog accompanying the website accompanying his 2009
publication, The Threat of Race, David Goldberg pointed out the
racially driven differences in the ways in which relative political
newcomers Barack Obama and Sarah Palin were embraced by the electorate.
He notes: 'More than half the whites polled registered harsher senses
of blacks than they did of whites. While 50 percent of white
respondents at least sometimes have had sympathy for blacks, nearly half
had never or rarely. Similarly, more than 30 percent of white
respondents have never or rarely admired blacks. Nearly half the
respondents characterized blacks as at least moderately violent, and 38
percent as lazy. Lest one think that generally stated racial prejudice
does not necessarily translate into bias against a particular person,
the study also revealed that 47 percent characterized Obama as
‘inexperienced’ while just 4 percent did McCain, 17 percent as
‘un-American’ and just 2 perce!
nt did McCain, and only 29 percent ‘patriotic’ while 61 percent did
McCain. Just under 20 percent consider Obama’s religion ‘a reason not
to vote for him,’ perhaps a less surprising fact considering that 14
percent still think he is a Muslim.”<br>
<br>
11.Hedges, Chris. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the
Triumph of the Spectacle (p. 111.). New York: Nation Books, 2009.<br>
<br>
12. Ibid.<br>
<br>
13. Peterson, Merrill D. The Portable Thomas Jefferson (p. 215.), New
York: Penguin, 1975.<br>
<br>
14. Boyd, Julian P. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Volume 2: 1777 to 18
June 1779 (pp. 526–27). Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press,
1950. Emphasis mine.<br>
<br>
15. Boyd, Graham. 'The Drug War Is the New Jim Crow.” NACLA Report on
the Americas. July 31, 2001.<br>
<br>
16. Peterson, Merrill D. The Portable Thomas Jefferson (p. 215.), New
York: Penguin, 1975.<br>
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