The Comfortable White Moderate Won't Act to Preserve the Nation
We are confronted again with the vile reality created by the fantasies which have been at the core of the nation since before it was even a nation. In the streets of our cities, the phrase Black Lives Matter rings out each night, and stares at passers by from signs and graffiti each day. The need for this proclamation being born from the reality of a culture and society steeped in and shaped by white supremacy. A culture and society which has no fundamental understanding of the definition of the word “all.”
There is some “progress,” as we’ve been taught to think of it in this mythology. Some monuments to some of white supremacy’s staunchest defenders, those who forced a bloody civil war to preserve it are being taken from their perches, a recognition that their glorification is an affront to civil society finally coming. Other symbols of the glorification of the fantasies of whiteness being retired so that their visages no longer loom on the shelves of our grocery stores. Interestingly, these are acknowledgments of the long discussed problems of representation, but not part of the demands of the current movement taking to the streets . Arguments over the semantic come to the fore, becoming boulders shackled to the fierce urgency of now, as a passive aggressive attempt by the comfortable to slow and still control changes needed for the marginalized, disenfranchised, persecuted and oppressed.
Even as public opinion begins to shift in some areas, it’s been a sisyphean task to gain the support of the white majority for these measures, most of which have been purely symbolic. The central demand of the protests in the last 60 days being a near complete restructuring of the priorities of local government, from a focus on policing and criminal punishment to public health and community support is treated as if it’s a concept of such complexity, it’s impossible for people to understand. It’s true that there is complexity in the implementation, but even there, a Google search can provide any number of different perspectives on how to implement it. It becomes an argument about the semantics and “optics” of saying defund the police, instead of talking about what “defund the police” means because to do so means the arguments and proposals therein might be taken seriously by the general public convinced of their viability by advocates who have rigorously researched and argued the benefits over many years. Instead, creating an argument about “optics” and “messaging” means never having to discuss the material realities that need to change. It becomes an issue of “perspective,” not an issue of life and death, especially for white people generally, and definitely not for the comfortable white moderate.
It’s been 40 years now, we’ve been watching video of police brutalize and murder Black people and in nearly every case, police walk away without consequence. Black men are 6% of the total population of the country, and they are 33% of the unarmed people killed by police. This alone is a staggering statistic. It would, in a country aspiring to make real it’s proclamation that “all men are created equal,” create an urgent concern. It’s often said that perception is reality, and this is where we come to the problem.
Instead of perceiving the urgency at the core of the fact that our fellow Americans, our fellow human beings are being murdered by officers of the law who are charged with preserving order, we (and by we I specifically mean the white people of the nation) attempt to change the subject or to blame the human beings this violence and theft is being visited on. “All lives matter.” “What about black on black crime?” “I don’t support riots.” “White people get killed by police too,” as if this isn’t also an indication of problems in our approach to policing. “Blue lives matter,” a purposeful deflection from the fact that the blue in this case, the uniform, is a chosen identity and can be taken off at any time, where one of the main issues of racism has repeatedly been the demonstration that there is no escape from it. People don’t stop being Black when they leave their jobs or when they make enough money or any of the other reasons which are used in the attempts to not acknowledge racism as a systemic problem and not just a matter of individual ideas and attitudes. Professors, pastors, politicians, and even for Black police officers, it doesn’t matter, racism is still racism and being Black in America means no matter your status, you are always Black in America. It’s a testament to just how deeply into our culture it is ingrained that we don’t even grasp we have been indoctrinated with the idea of Blackness as a permanent lower class to such a degree that the most shocking instances of racism are the one’s where the person subjected to it isn’t lower class. There’s always the willingness to believe a ready excuse when a poor Black person experiences racism, but when someone who isn’t poor and Black experiences racism, it’s much more likely to cause us to pause, because Blackness and poverty are synonymous in the American imagination.
Consider that poverty and Blackness are so intertwined in the American consciousness we easily conceive of reasons people who are both poor and Black will always face the immediate assumption they have committed some crime to deserve racism as a punishment. “He passed a counterfeit $20 bill, and was convicted of a crime 15 years ago,” is reason for someone to lose their life, when in reality, no counterfeit bill was passed.. “He assaulted the man who had been following him and was accosting him,” is reason for a child to lose their life. “He was in the park with a toy gun,” is reason for a child to lose their life. Had George Floyd been a member of a white family who’d had some criminal history they’d long left behind, and were killed after being accused of passing a counterfeit bill (which didn’t even end up being true), there’d be no search to find reasons to justify his murder. If it had been a white son or nephew some paranoid racist had accosted and then killed on the way home from the convenience store, the person who’d committed that murder wouldn’t be a celebrity to anyone. Had it been a white child, playing in a public park with a toy gun who was shot within two seconds of the police arriving on scene, something other than an investigation which found no wrongdoing would happen.
None of this is new though. These are things we’ve been talking about for years now and which have been responded to with obfuscation and deflection already referred to.
And the age old arguments and attitudes find their new expression in the age of the internet. While attempting to criminate Black America for a fantasied laziness and unwillingness to work, the white mob refuses to engage with the results of the research by the Black academic with a Ph D, instead choosing the meme from whichever Facebook group they happen to frequent to reinforce their simultaneous feelings of superiority and victimization. The irony being the the Black academic put considerably more effort and labor into the research and into acquiring a Ph D, which is one of the recognitions of the meritocracy the white mob is appealing to in calling for Black America to work harder. This though, is lost on the average white person, digitally wailing that “all lives matter” while finding every possible excuse to not openly admit Black lives have always mattered less.
Even now, controversy rages on. As protests against police brutality are met with more police brutality, with federal law enforcement recently disappearing people off the streets in Portland. White America either cheers with glee, racial animosity being part of their conscious or unconscious identity or clutches it’s collective pearls and wonders what the country is coming to, offended by the open use of brutality and violence, yearning for a return to order, even as the brutality and violence are a central part of that order, just not so publicly displayed. Some small number of us are out there, participating in those protests. Another small number are following the lead of Black activists and supporting their efforts in local governments to try and get the demands of those protesters put into legislative actions.
The person currently residing in the White House, DHS head Chad Wolf and underboss Ken Cuccinelli are all promising to roll the federal troops out across the country in “Democrat cities.” Somehow, the “small government conservative” and “states rights" defenders have suddenly become extinct. The Gadsden Flags fly, next to the Blue Lives Matter flags, the American flags, the flags of the army of Northern Virginia, the flag of the 13 states, and so on. All of this, pathetically attempting to create some kind of intellectual cover for the fact that they’ve all just come to be symbols for aggrieved whiteness, weaponized in their call to the glory of the violence whiteness has used throughout the history of the United States as it’s ultimate proof of superiority. Liberty has ever only been the domain of whiteness in the United States.
Whiteness has paved this path, even as the white moderate Dr. King wrote of stares in horror unable to fully admit to themselves the implications of the world unfolding around them, nearly all of us who happen to have had the luck to draw white skin at birth, have been complicit in creating this or in burrowing into our own comfort. For many of us, there’s barely the excuse we’ve been living under the lash of capitalism. We’ve lived well, and comfortably, sacrificed little or nothing when we have had so much more than we could ever need. We’ve chased the luxury and the status, and said “being responsible” and “taking care of ourselves” has been why we’ve chosen not to find some way to engage against the will to power of forces of dehumanization and degradation. Those same forces of degradation and dehumanization have always provided us ready arguments, and we’ve been satisfied to engage “the controversy,” when it’s been so very clear, for so very long, these haven’t been debates between parties who bring good will to the arguments. The “good” white people may even take some time to learn enough statistics and basic fundamentals of what systemic racism is to appear well informed. They’ll, of course, promote the “peaceful protest” ad nauseam, pointing to the Civil Rights Movement as the example, without ever acknowledging that “peaceful” and “non-violent” are very different things where civil disobedience is concerned, and they certainly won’t take the time to learn what the people who spend their lives studying social movements have to say about these subjects. Peaceful is non-threatening, and definitely not to inconvenience comfortable whites.
Worse, so many of us have been so complicit because it has always been a question about what the lifting up of others means for us. “What about all the hard work I’ve done to get here?” It’s a question so often asked by the comfortable and those living in some semblance of luxury. They don’t understand it is a semblance of luxury, but it is. It’s a question not based in how much they might lose materially, but how much they might lose in status, self worth, recognition. “I deserve to be here because I worked for it, and those who aren’t here don’t deserve to be.” The here though, isn’t a place, it’s a social position. It is the superiority they fear losing. It’s not being this far ahead or above the “others,” and it’s fine if a few Black Americans might reach this status or even be fabulously wealthy, because they too have “worked for it.” The rest of Black America, despite the evidence of systemic racisms intrusion into every single part of American life, is basically just lazy. Even poor whites are an excuse to ignore anti-Black racism, and instead of being people who probably just lost the lottery of birth have to be hicks, drug addicts etc. It’s not even this is a belief of people who live in the kind of luxury which is the top 20% of the American wealth. This is the sentiment for people who have upper middle class and middle class lives. It’s in the very meaning of the values we’re taught. The status, the place you get to occupy in society, the satisfaction of believing it has been secured for you by your labor, and that your labor affords you luxury and comfort while some lack of it means those others deserve degradation and dehumanization. You keep going, defending that life, defending what it affords you, and you must do so. This is one of the most potent weapons of whiteness, the need to have done well in the game, because of what it says about your value.
Had, at some point, we stopped to have to consider what else was happening in the world, had we had to decide what effort we might make to prevent any of the many stones along the path to today from being laid, we would not all collectively be here. Collectively, we white people, haven’t done that though. There’s never been enough, it’s never reached so urgent a level we might sacrifice for the “others.” We might occasionally make a racket, some number of us will even attend marches organized as a way to “bring awareness” or to “make our voices heard,” but we won’t risk anything. We need to get in the Acura and go home. The Honda would have served just as well, but the Acura really fits better, doesn’t it?
What we don’t realize, is that all of this is built, as it is, so that we never make the decision to make that collective sacrifice. Yes, of course, the incredibly wealthy continue to be incredibly wealthy, and they do continue to be able to serve themselves an outsized share of the pie. Certainly. They have the world they live in, far from ours, and certainly far from the world of the people who have to live with the fear and degradation necessary to make our world, our superiority possible. They get to keep having that world and serving themselves that slice of the pie, because they know that superiority means more to us than anything else does.
Because the reality is this, nothing, no amount of work we may have done in our lives, no amount of effort we may have expended, no amount of labor we may have believed entitles us to the life we have also makes right the deaths of Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, George Floyd, Philando Castille, Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, Eric Bell, and the list of names of people killed because this system must uphold the contract it’s made with us, and part of that contract is that we get to be superior to someone, because we fulfilled that contract. We can only believe there is something like a social contract when we discount the value of the lives of the millions of people whom that contract is either never offered or to whom it comes with addendums we would never accept.
Whiteness is in large part about always being able to believe that whatever labor we have expended is always going to be worth more than it is worth to attempt to make a nation where one’s value and the social contract one is offered has no variance based on the color of a person’s skin, the religion we practice or whatever other ridiculous reasons whiteness has found to use as leverage against people. Whiteness is collectively believing we deserve the Acura more than the Honda, because of what it says about who we are, to the degree we will undermine and delegitimize the stability of society in order to hold on to that delusion, and that "those people" deserve to ride the bus or a bicycle or scooter or whatever else.
Make no mistake the road to where we are today is paved with white grievance. In my lifetime alone, it’s been a labor of many years. It’s paved with Ronald Reagan’s welfare queens. It’s paved with the Omnibus Crime Bill of 1994. It’s paved with the undoing of the regulations on the financing industry put in place after the Great Depression, through the arguments against taxation, because it is theft from those who work in order to give to those who don’t. It’s paved with the War on Terror, and the building of entirely new security apparatus we were desperate to have so that brown people could never again reach into our sense of security and shake it so deeply. A desperation so deep, combined with a fantasy of our own moral righteousness that the delusion of whiteness would never turn it against us, it’s produced war crimes, two wars which seem to have no end and from which a select few have been accruing bottomless profits. It’s paved with the lives of thousands of people in New Orleans, dying needlessly on national television. It’s paved with the untold number of lives snuffed out after Katrina, away from the television cameras as racist militias and private security firms marauded through that city, “restoring order,” so that white capital could go in and re-establish a new order. It’s paved with the years of “stop and frisk,” and the tens of thousands of lives turned upside down by living in occupied territories on American soil so that white politicians could tell people their cities had been made safe. It’s paved with white America turning a blind eye to the erasure of rights of even white people during the Occupy movement, because economic equality would mean something white America has never had to withstand, not coming out ahead in the “game.” Even as it may have meant the vast majority of white people being less likely to be preyed upon by a broken financial system, the possibility that it might bring about more equality, not complete equality, but something closer, was too much. It’s paved with years of insisting the Tea Party was actually about small government and economic anxiety, when reams of research pointed toward fears about the changes in demographics, and plain racism. It’s paved with all the years of convincing ourselves to believe “states rights” was a good will argument or that “small government” meant anything other than not intruding on the fantasy of whiteness. It’s paved with years of watching Black people murdered and brutalized on video, and always finding some way to say “It’s complicated” so that we could excuse ourselves from the blatant obviousness of it all. It’s paved with the maternal mortality rates of Black women. It’s paved with the medical outcomes for Black Americans, the shortages in mental health treatment for Black America. It’s paved with the penal system being the number one source of treatment for mental health in the entire nation, and the utterly criminal over representation Black America has in that system. It’s paved with constantly telling ourselves “I don’t see color,” and “I don’t have a racist bone in my body,” when somehow, the electoral and legislative choices of color blind people continued to produce racist outcomes. It’s paved with the degree to which we have gone out of our way to excuse the racism of family and friends, with the millions of excuses we have. And it’s paved with the last several years of hanging on to the desperate desire that the lunacy of this delusion of whiteness might not engulf everything as a narcissistic maniac was handed the most powerful office in the world because the one thing he has been expert at has been manipulating that delusion of whiteness.
We have deluded ourselves into believing the social contract we have made with whiteness made it genuinely impossible for us, The United States of America, to be the same as so many other nations in the history of civilization. We have desperately believed we are somehow exceptional, and a requirement of that belief has been that we refuse to genuinely see the evidence, in the eyes, the words of our fellow Americans who’ve told us repeatedly, consistently and unerringly, we are not what we believe we are. We have refused to hear from the living and to see the examples they attempted to show us, and maybe even more depraved, we’ve refused to see the bodies of those they have mourned and we have refused to see the grief of those in mourning. We have refused to see, because it serves us to be blind.
After all of this, one of the most pernicious concepts of whiteness, American Exceptionalism, is squeezing the country and its political and social psychology like a vice. From one side comes the mindless braying about how this is “the greatest country in the world,” which also somehow means it’s can’t possibly have a significantly racist philosophy weaved into the fiber of it’s being, as if the two are mutually exclusive somehow. Considering the racist history of colonialism throughout the world, it could very well be the country providing it’s citizens the best overall standard of living, and still be extremely racist. It’s how statistics work, and how far that result may be skewed, by just how far beyond the average white moderates ability to even imagine, the standard of living is for very few people. Reams of data proving systemic racism is a genuine fact are all just written by people who “hate our great country.”
On the other side, the people who aren’t anywhere near as likely to go running around screaming about the greatness that is or was, but who are also constitutionally incapable of genuinely considering the question, “Is it happening here?” This is the part of the population who will look at the ineptitude which has caused tens of thousands of deaths due to COVID 19, secret police snatching people off of the streets, levels of corruption that are breathtaking, even for the oligarchic nation this has been for a long time, the constant targeting of minority populations by a leader who presents himself as infallible and as the protector of a mythological ideal of the nation that has never existed, the not insignificantly sized movement which treats him as if he is infallible and is willing to commit violence at his behest, the hollowing out of the norms and traditions of liberalism and democracy, the uplifting of an ethnic nationalist movement by that same leader and then turning around and when someone refers to this state of affairs as fascist will ask, “Is it really fascism though?” Would any of these suggest a fascist government as single instances? No, which is why they are always considered as if they are each separate and presented in the press as if they are separate, without the context of all the other examples also evidenced. To take the step back and look at them as a whole, the picture is relatively clear, but even the so called “intelligentsia” and the appointed authorities on objectively assessing the facts can’t bring themselves to openly acknowledge what’s staring us all in the face, and literally shooting some in the face. We are now a nation run by fascists, and are quickly descending into becoming a fascist nation.
On the one hand we have the people who believe the “greatness” of the nation can only be defended by fascism, and on the other hand we have the people who are incapable of allowing themselves to soberly, realistically examine the country as it is and exists today, and factually assess whether or not it’s within the realm of reason to refer to the current government and society as fascist. They believe the “greatness” of the nation will magically prevent the descent into fascism, and therefore, it's impossible for that descent to already have come. It’s America, so it will stop or be stopped. It’s not possible for The United States to follow in the footsteps of the many hundreds of nations who’ve fallen into authoritarianism, and certainly not for us to fall into fascism, a 20th century ideology when there’s a very strong argument to be made that the United States was one of the chief influences in the 20th century, and part of the reason we are failing to meet to meet the moment is the refusal to acknowledge that the 20th century is over and we need to begin to evolve for the reality of the 21st century. It makes sense that it's a 20th century ideology taking hold, because we won't let go of the 20th century. You can spot them because they will be found to say, “This is not who we are,” or “What happened to us?” They’ve been unable to see who we are because the Exceptionalism they refuse to let go of has required they not see that Americans are human beings, which means being like the human beings who supported Pinochet’s reign of terror and Hitler’s Third Reich. We are not somehow inherently more moral. We are not somehow nationally immune. We are also human beings just like those who may not have supported those regimes, but did little or nothing to stop them from ascending or from engaging in the actions which have made them infamous. At the very base of the both the inability to recognize and the choice to support this fascist movement, is the concept of whiteness.
Trump’s deployment of federal law enforcement onto the streets of cities where he is unpopular is being dismissed by many of the people who believe the “greatness” of the nation will prevent fascist descent. It's being characterized as a “political stunt” as if fascism itself wasn’t obsessed with the image of strength. Even if we accept the supposition that it’s all a show for Fox News and the Cult of Trump… He’s using federal agencies to exact physical punishment on the people his supporters perceive as the enemy… How does that make it less fascist?
This is so often the white moderate Dr. King wrote about. The person who says, “Slow down. Not so fast. Progress takes time,” and in their inability to recognize the difference between urgency and hatred, “hate doesn’t defeat hate,” but still has yet come to the realization that their faith in some fundamental goodness of the nation, the “we will get there,” without arduous, stringent, unbending, disruptive pressure has enabled the exact opposite to happen. It was by leveraging the racist sickness at the heart of white America that a narcissist madman was able to ascend to power, to re-embolden and to finalize re-normalization the kind of racial hatred and fear which has come to a boil, after being allowed to simmer for so long as the mantra of “progress” and “time” was repeated to anyone who attempted to confront it aggressively. Justice which has been delayed is the justice being outright denied today. It is the basis of the gravest threat to anything we can conceive of as “freedom” that we’ve seen in our lifetimes.
So it is, we find ourselves in the here and now that is crushing reality of here and now. We are now what we expect to be three months from an election. We have lost what should be shocking numbers to a pandemic to which we have responded by testing the idea that no response is better than the wrong response. It looks now to be getting worse again in the coming months, as we see the second wave beginning to rise. We are in an economic crisis, brought on by the pandemic, which the government is refusing to use it’s powers to borrow and/or tax to provide relief. We are about to have millions of people lose their homes, either becoming houseless, as in sleeping in cars, on the streets etc or being in a state of constant transit, going from place to place that works in the short term, but is never going to be a long term solution because it’s not genuine economic stability. We are seeing a government embrace lawlessness, corruption and fascism. The streets of our major cities are nightly filled with people clamoring for a justice which has been delayed and denied for hundreds of years. They have been routinely brutalized by local police and now, the federal government is sending in secret police to intimidate them, to punish them or to see them lost in it’s labyrinthian, serpentine, and plodding court and penal system.
It should be occurring to us at this point that the likelihood of something like free and fair elections is dwindling by the hour, but again, our desperate belief in American Exceptionalism isn’t letting us look this fact very squarely in the face. We know there is going to be massive voter suppression. This is now the norm in states with Republican legislatures and in Republican controlled localities. We don’t know what part these new secret police may play, if any. We also know the entirety of the Republican Party is not just at ease with, but positively enamored with the idea that a hostile foreign power is going to influence the election as much as they possibly can. And we know, there is a narcissistic megalomaniac sitting in the White House who has already gone to the lengths of inventing entire fantastical realities in order to explain whatever narrative he wants to be true. He won’t openly commit to respecting election, and is causing the Postal Service to be dismantled from the inside, so that voting during the pandemic has to actually be a threat to your health. He’s even suggested there may be a need to “postpone” the election.
Let’s be clear that this walking, talking embodiment of narcissistic white masculine neurosis hasn’t faced any significant consequences for his actions, not only in his tenure in the White House, but more or less throughout his entire life. We’re teaching him right now, at this minute, there is no consequence for violating one of the core tenets of the Constitution which is supposed to make us so Exceptional, through the lack of consequences for his deployment of federal troops against civilians in the United States and his purposeful sabotage of the USPS. There’s no shortage of support for these either, as the cult following he's accrued find him infallible. We’ve already taught him there is no consequence for so much of the rest of his behavior, ranging from the plainly ridiculous to the illegal. How is it we think this man is going to gracefully take the loss which a fair election seems to be guaranteed him at this point? How is it we are so sure he’s going to allow a free election which would almost guarantee him the loss? Even if we take that leap of faith that “fair and free” elections may happen, do we not believe he is going to spend the next four months engendering so much racial hatred and anxiety so that he will have his cult ready to take any possible action to preserve his power? Is it not clear that should elections go forward, he’s going to spend the next four months making sure there is no faith in their outcome? Hasn’t he already shaken faith in those outcomes? Exactly what evidence do we have to believe there is anything this man might not do to preserve his power or even just the appearance of power? None. All of the evidence is directly contrary.
Is it any shock that the same DHS which has deployed federal forces to quell protests directed at systemic racism are now searching for a way to make connections between the conservative bugaboo, antifa, and foreign organizations or states so that they can employ terrorism laws? Despite the ignorance of most Americans in using the term “terrorists” (including, but certainly not limited to the comfortable white moderate who refers to protesters who’ve engaged in property destruction this way), there is no legal determination or definition of a domestic terrorist. Lawmakers, scholars and lawyers have been unable to craft a definition which wouldn’t also significantly encroach on our conception of free speech and freedom of assembly and association.
Having had the bloviating proto-fascist in the White House already express his desire to see antifa labelled terrorists, DHS is now going about trying to operationalize that definition by stringing together some kind of half ass connection between people who have supported or do support activities that are or have been in the same vein as those committed by antifascists. With these few months left before the election, and what we’ve seen already, there should be no doubt that if DHS should be able to connect anyone they can publicly declare as a “member of antifa,” (despite there being no organization, no leadership, and no direct set of qualifying attributes) DHS will start picking people up they feel are both effective at organizing protest or influencing public opinion and who can be in any way labelled as antifa. If they can find a way to stick some kind of claim of material support to a foreign organization or state on one or two people an ignorant public will believe are members of antifa, that changes the rules significantly, and they can be held indefinitely. Let’s be very clear, the BLM protests are contrary to fascism by their very nature. They are a democratic response to state violence against a persecuted minority. This is how fascism works. It finds a way to use the weaknesses of liberalism and democracy to legalize it’s illiberal and undemocratic aims, specifically so the comfortable moderate isn’t aroused to any kind of significant contrary actions by illegality.
What this means is that there has to be a Plan B. Currently, the majority of the country is resting on the idea that come November, there will be an election and that Trump will lose that election. Joe Biden will win, and some semblance of sanity will be returned to the nation. Let's first acknowledge the degree to which the normality expected by the comfortable white moderate is, in point of fact, insanity based on the oppression and bloodshed of others. Having said that, what happens if (A) Trump does somehow come up with a way to postpone elections or attempt to meddle with the actual vote count (these are most improbable possibilities, but it would naive to write them off as impossible in the year 2020), (B) he and his loyalists do genuinely refuse to accept the outcome of an election he loses (and let’s not just expect he would spend the two months between the election and what should be the inauguration of a new president being the venal, vindictive selfish prick we all know him to be, and wrecking as much of the federal government and infrastructure as he possibly can) or (C) Republican voter suppression, meddling with the Post office, Trump’s electoral college strategy and Democrats poor electoral college strategy all come crashing together to create another instance where Trump wins the election with a minority of the vote?
The foundation on which this fascist movement is built is the racism the United States has accepted, while at the same time denying it so as to maintain its belief in American Exceptionalism. The arguments of late that the clashes between protesters and federal troops in Portland were taking away from the message of Black Lives Matter is a narrow diagnosis. It’s not a coincidence federal forces were deployed against the protests in support of Black Lives Matter, but precisely because they are protests in support of Black Lives Matter. The fury with which the descriptions of institutional racism are met is proof of it, but for the comfortable white moderate, these have to be separated. It must be a question of either supporting Black Lives Matter or supporting clashes with federal authorities, because it can’t be that the only way to support Black Lives Matter is to support those who clashed with federal authorities so that Black Lives Matter can continue their protest. It has to mean there is a separation between the fascism which is now blatant and the failings of the comfortable white moderate to be interested in, much less address the legacy of racism which is intrinsic to contemporary American life, because if it doesn’t, the comfortable white moderate has to take responsibility for the part they played in laying the path for Trump to ascend. Of course, part of the self identity of being a moderate prevents any such self reflection, because “moderatism” is sold as the lack of political ideology, and therefore believes itself to have made the rational decisions. The result here, Trump and Trumpism, are far from rational.
The makers, promoters, and adherents of the “moderate consensus” will never take responsibility for their part in creating the path on which Trump strode into the Oval Office. The “moderate consensus” is essentially no different in Trumpism in it’s dedication to preserving it’s internal sense of logic and legitimacy, at any cost.
We can look to the differences in the responses to Katrina and to 9/11, in the long term, to understand a bit more fully. Both Katrina and 9/11 killed roughly 3,000 people. We responded to 9/11 with fury. It reshaped our approach to law enforcement internally, and internationally. Homeland Security, which is now being used as the hammer to quell dissent, was born out of it. We went to war in two countries, one of which had nothing to do with the attack on 9/11. We implemented and accepted vast new surveillance capabilities and infrastructure. The response to Katrina, on the other hand can be generously described as anemic. It has essentially been nothing, on a larger scale which would help prevent a disaster at all like it from happening again. No sweeping changes to prevent other failures of necessary and aged infrastructure across the country. No nation wide plans for how to be able to evacuate and house those who can’t afford to do those things on their own in other wide scale disasters. It’s hard to say if we even decided to figure out how to air lift potable water into places where it might be needed following another large scale disaster. The failure to support Puerto Rico certainly suggests we haven't. The hard truth is that most of the American public probably don’t even care enough to know that the death toll and the depth and breadth of destruction from Katrina were as much caused by the failure to maintain infrastructure as they were by the storm itself. The loss of life and the scope of destruction would have been much less if New Orleans infrastructure were properly maintained and it’s levees didn’t fail as a result. After 9/11, it was verboten to suggest maybe the United States and it’s corporate citizens not continue to economically exploit people all over the globe so that we would no longer engender such fierce hatred. After Katrina, suggesting that New Orleans basically be scrapped because of its lack of elevation was often heard.
Both of these are results of the “moderate” consensus, and the approach to the response is as different as it is because 9/11 shook the sense of security for the comfortable white moderate, and Katrina didn’t. The unnaturally aided disaster isn’t something the majority of comfortable white moderates could summon the same kind of fear for. Only recently have we started to see some instances of things like the failure to maintain infrastructure begin to become evident in a way which might cause the comfortable white moderate to stir, the NYC subways becoming undependable in a way which is new for the city, the dam failures in Michigan. The predictions about many of the nations bridges soon reaching the point of no return if they aren’t given significant attention were making it into national news before the current round of surreality, with COVID 19, BLM protests, the USPS being dismantled from the inside. These things make the national news. The reports about the state of New Orleans levees didn’t make national news, and they weren’t important enough for the people in Congress to fund.
This is what the comfortable white moderate has experienced and some, to a certain degree know, all of this is theater for their benefit. As long as the most extremely wealthy and privileged continue to stay that way, and continue to be able to enrich themselves without the pesky interference of something like the need for society to remain stable, it will continue to be for their benefit. The politicians will purposely speak to us, target us with their advertising, they will watch what the polls say about our preferences. The news will cater to our attention span and the topics we spend the most time with, because that’s the name of selling advertising in any news environment, be it print, radio, television or internet. All of this is about the comfortable white moderate and ensuring they are given enough to prevent them from making common cause with the poor, disenfranchised and/or oppressed. The country has catered to us for decades for that reason.
What seems clear, is that this isn’t going to change. Nothing in our history or recent months suggests it will.
There is no Plan B, because getting to a Plan B means considering the possibilities which are going to disturb the comfortable white moderate too much. It is far from impossible that Trump could win a second term as president. That Plan B can’t wait for the day after the election for us to form it. It needs to be formed now, so it can be deployed the day after the election. This has to be something more than a mass of pink hats. It has to be something more along the lines of a general strike, and it has to stop the gears of the economy from turning. The other thing that has to start happening now is that it has to be made clear that the comfortable white moderate, sitting behind their keyboards, whining about inconvenience and the fears brought about by mass civil disobedience are not worth listening to. This has been the game, for longer than any of us have been alive, and we have to acknowledge it openly, en masse and disempower the dynamic which creates it.
It has always been the case that the comfortable white moderate has seen themselves as and portrayed themselves as if they are going to be the “moderator,” going between the status quo and the change agents, trying to establish “compromise.” This is never the case though. They are always the means through which the status quo is most effectively defended, whether it is reasonable or just or not. It is specifically because they benefit from there not being the kind of sweeping, large scale changes we desperately need right now. They benefit, in keeping their comfort, their illusions of safety and their status, as long as the status quo stays the same, and that is particularly true where the caste system of race is concerned. They are not the “representatives of reason and moderation,” which they want to believe themselves to be or the that they portray themselves to be. What exactly is the acceptably moderate amount of racism? Are any white people really suited to answer that question? The comfortable white moderates are the domestic agents of the wealthy and powerful, essentially the army of the elite which regulates the poor, disenfranchised and oppressed in order to make sure the sense of unrest never reaches quite the level of full scale revolution or non-violent, non-cooperation. The comfortable white moderate already exists, and it's the status quo or the change agents trying to convince them to choose a side. The comfortable white moderate promises they are going to represent the needs of the poor, disenfranchised and oppressed to the defenders of the status quo and the elites who exploit everyone else for their benefit, and they promise they are going to come back with the “best possible compromise.” They aren’t capable of coming back with the best possible compromise though, because the best possible compromise is going to require a level of sacrifice to their comfort and luxury that they would have already made if they were willing to consider it, even if only for the good of the nation. They aren’t capable. The comfortable white moderate will never see themselves as truly being equals with the poor, the disenfranchised and the oppressed, because to do so would reveal the lives they have dedicated themselves to have required others be poor, disenfranchised and oppressed. It is not the “neutral, objective position” Western civilization has indoctrinated them to believe is also morally neutral, and they will do anything to avoid the reality of their moral culpability, from which it follows that it never changes and certainly that they'll never make restitution for it.
For any change movement to survive and to succeed, it must be clear that the comfortable white moderate who will sacrifice nothing but other people’s time with their stupid, unthinking demands of how people who have been left out of the social contract they have been offered and guaranteed should react to the existence of discrimination in who is offered which particular social contract. It must be openly acknowledged that their views are as worth taking into consideration as they are willing to sacrifice for the betterment of the society, which is to say very little.
The comfortable white moderate is going to do nothing, should Trump either win the coming election, steal the coming election or decide that it doesn’t matter whether he’s won or lost the election and he’s not going to agree to transfer power to the president elect. The comfortable white moderate is going to wring their hands, moan about the surreality of it all, make social media posts about what the country is coming to, probably also start talking about how we have to have “unity” and “civility” as the rest of us try to actually do something which makes clear such an authoritarian power grab is not going to be met with docile acceptance. If property burns, the comfortable white moderate will do as they have always done, proclaim the horribleness of such a thing, without acknowledging the future of the nation is actually in the balance, because the comfortable white moderate values their property, the status and safety it conveys to them more than they value the lives of their fellow Americans or fellow human beings more generally. This is the unfortunate, but historically accurate truth. We have seen in the last few months, repeated yet again.
The comfortable white moderate cannot bring themselves to believe that what, at this point, is extremely likely, is even possible, because they have never been disabused of their belief in American Exceptionalism, and now, they are going to take us all with them because they are unable to face the reality that The United States is only at all special when it’s people decide to take the actions which show it to be something other than exactly the same any other empire that has ever existed. There is nothing inherent in it, as a nation. There is nothing inherent in our Constitution. We are the nation we are, today. Today, there is very little that is exceptional about us. We’re teetering on the edge of full blown fascist authoritarianism, we have an ever-growing underclass of poor, oppressed and disenfranchised while a small number of elites grow wealthier than the world has ever seen, and we have a bovine resistance to acknowledging these realities. We are nothing special. This is a process which has played out, in similar fashion with every single empire which came before. “It can’t happen here” as the basis for the final tenuous strands of belief in American Exceptionalism is no less irrational than the Q Anon conspiracies, the claims of the “superiority of the white race” or the “great conspiracy to destroy the white race.” On its surface it appears less malicious, but it is no less irrational and it is going to be no less deadly.
If you are poor, if you are a minority, if you are struggling right now, with your physical health, with your mental health, if you are struggling in any way, it is imperative to understand that the comfortable white moderate, as a class and population, are not going to be your ally, at any point. They are never going to get so far as being an “accomplice.” To struggle is to experience weakness, and to experience weakness is to invade the fantasy of our Exceptionalism. The overwhelming majority of the comfortable white moderates would turn the rest of us over to the Secret Police, if there were a law for it, and if failing to do so would risk their comfort, luxury and/or security. This is what has to be understood about the United States, and what has to be understood about “American Exceptionalism.” This has been true in every case of large scale social upheaval and the attempts of authoritarians to seize control. The comfortable white moderate is never going to see themselves as being this person, because they are part of the “exceptional” nature of the country, so this can’t be like all those other nations who’ve fallen to authoritarians and fascists. They can’t possibly be the same kind of people who turned Jews into the SS. The reality is that they will be, and the majority of them are incapable of seeing it. The minority of those who are capable of seeing it will convinces themselves it’s for the good of the nation, to prevent too much violence and destruction and chaos. They will choose order and routine, no matter whether that order and routine is just or whether it is murderous and genocidal, they've demonstrated as much already. What matters is whether there is an intrusion on their sense of comfort, luxury, status and safety. That’s all that ultimately matters. They are incapable of making other calculations because this is the life they have always known, because it has been the social contract they have been offered and accepted and are incapable of imagining it is not the case for everyone, because part of that contract has been that they are protected from that reality, and that they are allowed to ignore it or excuse it somehow on the rare occasions it intrudes on their own.
As terrified as the United States has always been of communism, it meant that the critiques of capitalism put forward by Marx haven’t been taught with any real depth. Some part of the result is that the comfortable white moderate in the United States is unknowingly filling the place and purpose Marx described as the “bourgeoisie.” Whatever one might make of Marx or communism, his critique has been proven valid, and worse, is continuing to be proven valid as the material well being of the majority of the nation continues to deteriorate. Others have since also found ways to develop a better understanding of the intricacies and intersections of class and race in the United States, and those have been given no more serious consideration than Marx critiques, often because the people who are making them come from the oppressed racial background or class. Again, it’s been part of the social contract in the United States that the comfortable white moderate is believed to be and allowed to portray themselves as “rational” and “objective,” where we’ve all also been indoctrinated to believe a Black person is, by the nature of being Black, not “rational” or “objective” where the subject of race is concerned. The same is true of Latinx people where issues of racial discrimination against them are concerned. Somehow though, the white moderate is magically objective and rational about the effects of the racism which enforces the social contract of whiteness they never experience, and have even been protected from witnessing by virtue of being whiteness and its social contract. It is absolutely not a coincidence that everyone who makes a critique which calls into question of American Exceptionalism is painted as a communist or a Marxist. The purpose is to insure only a minority of people ever consider whether those critiques were valid.
The reality is that in two generations, the comfortable white moderate has been the rubber stamp for the small number of monied elites to squander what progress the country was making and what progress could have been made. They have overseen the complete betrayal of what they say are the values and morals which in their minds make the United States exceptional in the first place. As has been stated so often recently, the lack of understanding of and desire to make real the “all” in “All men are created equal,” has produced the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s also meant the comfortable white moderate who was able to continue in comfort after something like the economic crash of 2008, never even bothered to make cause with those who had previously been comfortable white moderates, and were decimated by the largest scale transfer of wealth in American history. The comfortable white moderate certainly has never made cause with the low wage, no benefits workers whom we have now been shown are essential, without equivocation. What they have done is to rubber stamp the policies which have hollowed out the chances the country may have had at becoming exceptional, and squandered what resources it had, in order to stay comfortable in the short term.
For the rest of us who are aware that The United States is not exceptional, and that right now, to rely on some variety of cosmic hope is irrational, this means we have to think further into the future and look at the probabilities, and we essentially have to ignore what the comfortable white moderate has to say. It should be quite clear they have failed to be able to do so up to now, and they have earned what is more or less political exile. The comfortable white moderate isn’t going to be able to functionally accept the need for a Plan B that is somehow different from, “Biden wins the election, and everything goes back to being okay. We still have work to do, but things are sane again.” The need to make a genuine Plan B that takes into account the reality we’re watching play out and prepares for it ahead of time is obvious and genuine to more or less everyone else for whom "normal" wasn't very good for to begin with.
The individualistic perspective of our culture says, "If you don't like the way things are, then you have to do what makes things different for you. It's up to you to make your life better." This has always ignored the idea that if what makes my life better means there has to be some collective challenge to the economic, political or social institutions, then what I can do to improve my situation is to be involved with a collective effort. No matter how you can demonstrate or find proof that the social contract is failing you and an entire collective of people like you, it's never the issue that the institutions are failing, and certainly it's never that there needs to be some sense of urgency in addressing those failures. Changing those institutions and changing those social contracts means changing the proximity to the social contract comfortable whites have been offered and accepted, which means, by default, comfortable whites are not the center of attention in the transaction, and that can't be allowed because of the most powerful aspects of whiteness is that is has been the center of attention, the point of view and perspective from which everything else is measured.
Plan B, if it's going to succeed, needs to be able to center something other than whiteness, because refusing to do so is a signal to the fascist movement of the ability to continue to leverage whiteness as the base for their power, for their recruitment, and for how they manipulate the existing norms without too badly upsetting the comfortable whites. They are relying on those comfortable whites to continue to act as arbiters and to treat the fascists as anything other than an existential threat which needs to be extinguished, because that would mean acknowledging the lack of exceptionalism which is part of their self identity.
Right now, we have the Black Lives Matter movement, in the streets, and that has already established some avenues of mutual aid and has developed a language which put something other than whiteness at the center of the discussion. Let's be clear, they are centering Black lives, but the perspective from which they are coming and their demands are not a centering of Black lives at the expense of other lives. We've seen numerous instances where Black Lives Matter have as significantly pushed forward instances of unjust police practices against people who are white, despite what the rhetoric of racists has to say. There are cases of police shootings of white men which are now being re-evaluated because of the attention brought by the Black Lives Matter movement. They were never given attention by the people spouting "all lives matter" because they are collateral damage in the socially mandated methods of policing BIPOC communities.
There is an opportunity right now, to take away the focus of power on whiteness in a way which can both help to move the cause of racial justice forward, by making the demands of Black Lives Matter a reality, and to deal a significant blow to the fascist movement by doing so. It would mean a genuine material support for the Black Lives Matter movement, the protess and it's goals. It would mean financial support, material support in terms of lending whatever skills one might have to the movement (and social movements on the scale this one is, which is part of what gives it some hope of succeeding, need a dizzying array of skills), and using the privilege whiteness is afforded in electoral politics to put more power behind their demands. It means making phone calls/sending emails to elected officials at every level of government, and to making pressuring law enforcement agencies with the same phone and email campaigns.
The basis for the infrastructure for the breadth of movement necessary is already there. It needs support and it needs the dedication to say, "If power is not willing to concede to these demands and is not willing to negotiate in the kind of good faith which understands what's on the negotiating table is how much power our institutions are afforded, we will shut it all down." To create the infrastructure which would be necessary for a movement which had different, but complementary goals would take months, and those are months which could be used gaining ground, and solidifying means of of support and mutual aid instead.
Unlike the way it's been portrayed so far, there does not have to be some kind of split or difference in the goals between advancing the demands of Black Lives Matter and opposing the continued usurpation of power by the fascist movement in the United States. Specifically by advancing the demands of Black Lives Matter, it helps to curtail that usurpation, and sends an unmistakable message to the people who are it's leaders and its adherents. So far, that singular message, that we are collectively willing to even go as far as pulling whiteness from the center of attention to preserve the nation, has never been sent.
White people, who are definitively opposed to fascism and authoritarianism are now in the position that one way or another, our understanding of what makes "our way of life" will change. We're not going back to the "moderately fascist" normal we've had for decades, where people who are not white and not comfortable live with some of the traits of a fascist society, and people who are white and comfortable don't. The choice is now to either definitively act against the fascist movement which is right now maneuvering to sow the chaos it will use to take control by using the preservation of whiteness as the core of US society and government or to make common cause with what has been the rhetorical value all along, and decenter whiteness to achieve both a greater equality and to undermine the ability to fascist to organize and to engender chaos. Understand, as well, for those who constantly chatter about identity politics being some kind of barrier to class solidarity, decentering whiteness makes class solidarity the next logical step, and is also more likely to create the avenues for solidarity between the poor and middle class than anything else we have right now. Continuing to attempt to act or argue as if we don't have a racial caste system which is the foundation of class is just feeding into the fascist ability to propagandize and operationalize whiteness, across class.
It's a chance for the comfortable white majority to demonstrate the most stinging criticisms in the history of racial justice, and social justice more broadly, are on the way to becoming untrue. I can't look at things realistically and say there's much hope of this. It's not something white people have ever demonstrated before. Ironically, the inability to conceive of a nation which isn't centered around the comfort and safety of whiteness will be the thing which ends even the hope of becoming the nation idealistic white people have always promised themselves we were progressing toward. The comfortable white majority is incapable of finding anything but fear when they consider anything like the scope of change and progress this would be, and would necessarily produce. The comfortable white majority have proven themselves exactly that variety of coward for over a century. Though there is some chance the fear of what will result from this fascist movement going unchecked by mass mobilization might be a greater fear, it's not a very good chance.
Engage in creating the mass mobilization to stop it or prepare for the chaos the fascist in the White House and the movement which supports him are going to create to expand their base of power and undermine any other power they can't subsume.