I don't know where they get the money

Renaissance Hotel, Aruba

I remember a time when you seldom heard people speaking a foreign language on the streets of Manhattan. Maybe in the Bronx people spoke Spanish -- Puerto Ricans -- but not on Park Avenue or even in Greenwich Village. Nowadays, not only does one hear German and French but also languages one cannot so easily place: is it a Slavic tongue, or perhaps Hebrew? One hears the chattering in Central Park, one of New York's major tourist attractions, but also in Zabar's and at Whole Foods.

And those are only the folks who are identifiably "European," for there are also lots of families who seem to hail from the Indian subcontinent and who speak other unfamiliar languages.

When I studied in Germany back in the 1960s, very few Germans traveled across the sea. The same for the French, Italians, Dutch, and so on. Back then, the tourists in Europe were Americans, most of whom traveled on group tours and stayed in hotels where they did not have to suffer European plumbing or unheated bedrooms. We who were students at foreign universities took pride in our hardiness back then.

European cities in the late 1960s were not yet the efficient, polished, tourist-accommodating places they have become. It is true that the Paris Metro ran well, as did all trains north of the Italian border, but my experience of the austerity of Paris and of Germany allowed me to appreciate the privileged material conditions of the U.S. and, in the long run, may have protected me from an overestimation of the merits of foreign countries, all of which were still resolutely different from one another. Not only was Europe not yet connected to the world, electronically or otherwise, but it was also unheated for the most part.

Despite Fodor’s European guidebooks, it was also intensely wearying to find one’s way around a foreign country. There were none of the hang-outs that now exist all over the world, from Hong Kong to Katmandu, buffering the experience of gap-year travelers. In that respect there is now very little to challenge a traveler in Europe or even in Asia in the early 21st century. Students traveling abroad today, whatever their nationality, find the same conditions in practically every town or city, including American-style coffee shops with internet access and clean toilets. Moreover, even in Italy everyone now speaks English. The world has really become Americanized, as Europeans used to complain in the 1960s, but they in the meantime have gone along with it.

I also remember when French and Germans didn't look the same. Nowadays when I hear a foreign language with which I am not familiar I will study the face to see if its features give the speaker away as, say, Polish or Russian. Eastern Europeans are not yet quite as "polished" as Western Europeans: they don't have a century of economic progress behind them. But the funny thing about economic progress is that it homogenizes us. We are all alike in our tastes. We read the same kinds of magazines for guidance on how to dress or how to outfit our homes. So, the advance of wealth over a wider swath of the earth leads more and more to the erasure of national or ethnic identity.

So, clearly people have money nowadays. They travel to places where the inhabitants do the same things and live the same way as they do back home.

Against "knowningness"

My friend Gesine and I went to the Guggenheim to view the exhibition How to Work Better, which surveys the oeuvre of Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss. As the Guggenheim brochure indicates, it is "the first comprehensive overview of their 33-year-collaboration in a New York museum." If you are looking for "art" in a traditional sense, for instance, an object that you can feast your eyes on, that you can "dwell" with, that makes you consider how its craft has been achieved, then this show is not for you. This is art that can only be viewed in an institutional setting: at large museums or at international biennales. It represent a kind of "Gesamtkunstwerk." You can't pick up a replica for your book shelf, although postcards are available.

The walls of the winding, ascending galleries of the Guggenheim are filled with "replicas" of ordinary objects, with videos of "chain reactions" utilizing everyday objects, large monitors showing still photographs, slide installations with ponderous questions ("Why Does the World Turn Around Once a Day"). There are also innumerable small constructions composed of two figures, of unfired clay, to which are affixed a "concept": e.g., "High and Low." The goal is "to confuse traditional hierarchies and value systems."

Small and Big

A five-year-old could produce the figures, although, of course, a five-year-old would not be so "knowing" as to dream up the concepts. Come to think of it, maybe Fischli and Weiss had kids prepare the objects: it is hard to believe that they actually immersed their own hands in clay, like in a preschool. But what do I know? The show is for people who are "knowing," for whom the contraries represented by the objects represent some kind of wisdom.

Gesine and I had different reactions to the show. She liked the whimsicality of the small objects, contended that they make you think. I always feel like a disapproving chaperon on such occasions, for my response to such shows is always of "the emperor has no clothes" variety. And just as with emperors, an astonishing amount of institutional resources have gone into maintaining the deception. The description of the artists' methodology in the the brochure produced in me the proverbial gag reaction. Take this one: "Tischi and Weiss shunned the authoritative voice of the artist and acted instead as whimsical philosophers who pondered all questions, great and small."

But the subject of my post here is "knowingness." The appeal of such "art" is to people who are in the know about the latest cool things, people who are ahead of the curve and who express their knowingness in being able to get what the artist is doing, unlike the rubes who wonder what the fuss is about. Of course, I recognize what the artists are doing. I have a Ph.D., and I am au current about the contemporary art scene, but my rube background also makes me aware of the gimmicky aspect. Indeed, I suspect that the artists themselves know that they are not philosophers and that what they are doing is a gimmick. It is a gimmick, however, that has led to a career, to prizes, awards, exhibitions, magazine covers, and the like. That is the artistic world we live in now. Art requires craft, and while there is much craft in what has been installed at the Guggenheim -- people with various skills, especially technicians, are required to pull it all together -- in the end its purpose is to satisfy a small crowd of connoisseurs. In the process, it confirms a conformity of taste,  the taste of people in the know.

On Being White: Concluding Rant

Socialism never dies

My goal in this series has been to suggest the insincerity, if not downright mendacity, of the assumptions of the field of “whiteness studies,” an academic outpost of cultural studies. The jargon of this field, in particular “white privilege,” has penetrated the consciousness of anyone who watches MSNBC. As my posts have tried to demonstrate, “white privilege” is not what it turns out to be, and the real target is working class whites, who were supposed to advance the socialist revolution of America. Instead, the working classes turned out to be “reactionary.” As I discussed in an earlier post,  James Baldwin’s essay “On Being White … and Other Lies,” a foundational text of whiteness studies, is exemplary of the rage of intellectuals toward the European immigrants who settled the New World and transformed the U.S. economy into its present capitalist prosperity. Having failed the intellectuals, the white working classes must now be consigned to the dustbin of history. Blaming the victims, indeed.

The present contempt of the hard left for the working classes has been accompanied in recent decades by the condescension of liberal whites toward less privileged whites who still cling, as President Obama put it, to the their guns and religion, along with other traditional values. Moreover, for a number of years already, the prospects of working class whites, by all social indicators, have been sinking, for instance, in joblessness, suicide, and a high out-of-wedlock birth rate. So, not only have the social and educational achievements of the great majority of blacks not matched the hopes of those who signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, but whites are also losing ground.

Consider the situation in the new millennium: hardly any big city mayor or other politician, no prominent hedge-fund manager, attorney, or corporate executive, not to mention investment banker or actor, sends their kids to non-competitive public schools. Most other American children go to public schools, which, except in the richest districts of the U.S., are labs of affirmative action, and where no child today, white or black, is allowed to fail. There is no need to rehearse the downward trend of educational achievement since about 1973. Now, if you can't read beyond third-grade level after eight years in school, you move on to high school anyway. Parents can no longer spank their own children, teachers can't fail them, and everyone agrees that competition is bad for the psyche.

This downward trajectory is a legacy of the cohort that began school in 1950, which includes myself as well as the leading lights of whiteness studies as well as the liberal elite. Thus, this series began with two personal anecdotes, ranging from the early 1960s to the present, about my own experience of race in America. I did not grow up in one of the traditional elite classes of the U.S.: no Mayflower blood in my veins. Yet I had the good fortune to enter school in the early 1950s, when kids mastered the three R’s, learned to write in a comprehensible hand, and absorbed the ability to sit quietly at our desks for several hours straight. Because of the decade’s moral and material limitations, we kids developed lots of inner starch.

And while  we had plenty of rich people back in the 1950s ––they were the first ones who could afford private phone lines and color TVs –– in essentials even the life styles of the well-off did not diverge profoundly from that of ordinary folks. For instance, the bank manager might have been able to afford a Cadillac, but he didn’t set himself off by driving one. His kids, moreover, went to the same school as the kids of workers.

By the time we graduated from high school in the early 1960s, the U.S. economy had long left the rest of the weary, war-torn world far behind. Whether we went directly from high school into the work force or first attended college, we were well qualified to continue the powering of this great economic engine. In doing so, we also did quite well for ourselves. Indeed, we have become the only Americans to have it all –– and that continues to have it all, privileged in our access to high culture, literature, and the arts, not to mention solid retirement accounts.

Along the way, circa 1973, however, my cohort took over the reins of “the institutions” and began to establish an agenda that has reversed the process by  which schools, except in the richest districts of the country, produce successful children. It was done with the best of intentions. Maybe we had it too easy growing up. In any case, we no longer had the inner starch to be as tough as our parents had been. We imagined that everyone could be like ourselves –– as well fed and well educated as we had been — but without any prerequisites: for instance, hard work, discipline, and so on, values that had made us successful in the first place.

In effect, we were rejecting the values of the decade in which we were raised. Our animus toward the 1950s, however, simply reflected the imperative of the more dynamic economy that we inherited, one that thrived on, well, squandering. As we progressed through life by treading where no previous generation had trod before, we confused our material progress with moral superiority. What liberals call social progress, however, has been achieved by institutionalizing the values of adolescents, the social category that receives its allowance from other people and insists that others pay for its mistakes. The truly most privileged generation in American history introduced the politics of people who have always had a roof over their head and don't worry about where their next meal is coming from.

Contemporary liberals, especially those who came of age like me in the Sixties, did not set out to create a class divide. Far from it, and they are indeed aware of it, because of the contrast it represents to their own conventional, conservative lives. Yes, conventional and conservative. If they were not, liberals would not have succeeded as well as they have. They may have pushed the limits in their jobs, in their intimate relationships ("open marriage"), and in their leisure ("adult drugs"), but well-educated liberals have the lowest divorce rate and the highest standard of living. So, while they care about the future and generational continuity, they have their 401Ks and their SUVs, their farmers’ markets, their rent-stabilized apartments or the apartments they bought for a song when co-oping began in Manhattan, their vacation homes in Colorado or Arizona. And if the national high school graduation rate for the lower classes is abysmal, their own kids and grandkids have had every opportunity to excel. Thus, when they vote, it is not for the nation’s solvency and its future prospects, but for indulgence: for “choice.” As we liked to say in the Sixties, it is no skin off my back. After all, we didn’t start adult life with $150,000 in student loan debt.

What to Wear to Church!

Today there are a lot of high-status blacks who enjoying the material privileges of high-status whites. No doubt they feel the same gratifications (and are subject to the same insecurities) as do high-status whites when they fill up their shopping carts at Whole Foods or Citarella, but do they harbor the same condescension toward low-status whites as do American liberals? I suspect that they do. After all, they also watch MSNBC. And yet … how paradoxically different is their public attitudes toward their own less fortunate brethren, those without their educational advantage or their professional status. I speak not of the views they hold among themselves, in churches, in barber shops and hair salons, on the street, especially about the black underclass. Whatever they may personally think of the behavior of the black underclass, their hesitation may come down to, “There but for the grace of God …”

Note also that they do not condescend toward folks in their neighborhoods and cohort who still hold to the values of “middle class” life: marriage, good work habits, and church attendance. Whatever role affirmative action may have played in their own good fortune, more important is that they, like me, grew up with such values. It is class, not race, that today defines whether one is privileged. Privileged whites seek to efface their own origins in the middle class.

Picture credits: DreamsTime; The Plushist

On Being White: A Series (7)

Low-status white becomes high-status black

My own feeling about not quite belonging at events like that in Central Park reflects, for sure, loyalty to my own roots among ordinary Americans, as we felt ourselves to be in the 1950s, when we aspired not to be elite, but simply middle class. But my hesitations may also may indicate why blacks of equal educational achievement as myself are not as quick as I am to take advantage of such events. However much I may feel like an interloper, I do not stand out; I pass. The same cannot be said for blacks; they always stand out, which is not necessarily what you hav in mind when prepare to go out for an evening of music. Unlike in my case, one suspects that they may feel judged as to how well they measure up to the expectations of the milieu. (Something very similar happened to me when I lived in Japan for several years: every time I picked up a pair of chopsticks, every Japanese eye was on me to see how well I performed.) It’s not very relaxing to be constantly self-monitoring, which is demanded by current public discourse on race. Better, blacks might think, to stick with their own gatherings, social and professional, which are numerous in the age of Meet Up and at which they would be among people "like themselves."

No doubt high-status blacks feel the same gratifications (and are subject to the same insecurities) as do high-status whites when they fill up their shopping carts at Whole Foods or Citarella. In my previous post, I mentioned the cultural assumptions of white liberals about low-status whites as well as their condescension toward them. Do high-status blacks feel the same toward the whites who are "not with it"? I suspect that they do. Material and moral “advancement” go together. There always has to be someone to look down on.

Yet how different is their public attitudes toward their own less fortunate brethren, those without their educational advantage or their professional status. I speak not of the views blacks hold among themselves, in churches, in barber shops and hair salons, on the street, especially about the black underclass. But has anyone lately heard them engage in condescension toward folks in their neighborhoods and cohort who still hold to the values of “middle class” life: marriage, good work habits, and church attendance? While affirmative action may have played a role in their own good fortune, more important for their success (and they know it) is that they, like me, grew up with such values. Whatever they may personally think of the behavior of the black underclass, their hesitation may come down to, “There but for the grace of God …”

In contrast, many of us who grew up in the 1950s have forgotten the source of our good fortune. There is, however, nothing “natural” about it: it was constructed by the working classes of this country, white and black, by laborers in the field or on assembly lines, by small business owners, by all the people in the 1950s who managed to “get ahead,” which meant keeping a roof over their head and supporting a family without a college degree.

Liberal condescension toward low-status whites is supported by the myth of the terrible 1950s. The shelves of Barnes and Noble overflow with memoirs and novels in which incest and rape, alcoholism, bigotry, and general benightedness constitute the hidden family life of that decade. Really, it’s a wonder anyone survived such times. The novelist Jonathan Franzen, who wasn’t even born until the end of the 1950s, who wasn’t in college in 1968 and could not have experienced the Sixties (which for many were the 1970s), wrote a novel about the effects on children who grew up in the 1950s. It was called The Corrections, and it won the National Book Award in 2001. Franzen proved that you don’t even have to have experienced the 1950s to know how terrible they were. The converse of this myth is that, since we came of age –– having survived the 1950s, if you like –– we have made the world a better place. If you believe that, you are most definitely a liberal.

Picture credit: Crisis Forums

On Being White: A Series (6)

I mentioned in the previous post of this series that I often felt like an interloper at cultural events or at fine restaurants. Like James Baldwin in his desire to be acknowledged by the larger cultural elite, I wanted to "sit at the table." Whiteness scholars would say that I am "privileged," but, truth to be told, I have simply learned the "mores" of these environments.

After all, to call an event “white” or to speak of “white” privilege, however, does not mean that all of the people who used to be known as Caucasian would find an opera in Central Park their kind of thing. Besides, in the new millennium you don’t have to be rich to do things that only the really wealthy did in the 1950s. Ordinary working folks nowadays can afford a ten-day vacation tour of France. In our present economy, you distinguish yourself by your choices, consumer and otherwise. Money is of course a good method of doing this, although even spending money that you don’t have is okay, for instance, by maxing out on your credit cards. In such a fluid society, however, it is not enough to do Paris; Paris is so passé, especially when anyone and everyone can afford to go there. Instead, it is important to “discover” the “undiscovered,” the latest best thing, what no one has yet thought of or commodified, be it culinary, geographical, or sexual. Like airplane passenger status, privilege must constantly be upgraded.

Thus, not all whites are “equal,” and some are less equal than people with dark complexions. The people who easily maneuver the new territory of privilege, who keep ahead of the curve, even if their immediate ancestors hail from Hong Kong or Bombay, belong to a new cultural and social elite. This social class is a byproduct of the unprecedented historical prosperity enjoyed by America and other “Western” nations. It goes without saying that all of us have been affected by this prosperity, even conservatives, even leftists, in fact, aside from a few outliers, everyone who is fortunate enough to live in an advanced Western commercial economy, of which the U.S. has simply led the way. Conservatives like good wines and farmers’ markets, too. Thus, if you live in Tucson or Indianapolis and eat Thai or Indian food, if you like to shop at Whole Foods (rather than at the local, lower-priced corporate supermarket), if you don’t mind subtitles with your movies, you are half way to being part of this class. And if you listen to TED talks, if evangelicals creep you out, you are likely to be the real thing.

Continuous upgrading of one’s cultural attitudes comes with this territory: thus, the condescension of this new class toward American whites who are behind the curve, not only in life style, but especially in their professed adherence to “traditional” social views. It is no secret that such condescension, if not outright contempt, is one of the most characteristic attitudes of white liberals toward their less privileged fellow-citizens. President Obama was not admonished for his unpresidential-like comments about the benightedness of gun and religion clingers. Liberal whites agree with him, and whiteness studies provides ready license for such contempt.

Image credit: Kevin Jackson

On Being White: A Series (5)

In my previous post I introduced James Baldwin's essay "On Being White ... and Other Lies," mentioning its foundational status for "whiteness studies." The rage Baldwin expressed there was personal, but it had some legitimacy. He wanted to sit at the table, so to speak, to be recognized by the greater culture, composed principally of whites, for the talented man he was. He went to Paris, then to the French Riviera, and had a seat at the table, where, among other things, he wrote a compellingly sensitive essay, “The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American,” published in 1959 in The New York Times Book Review. He had left America, he wrote then, in order not to become “merely a Negro; or, even merely a Negro writer. I wanted to find out in what way the specialness of my experience could be made to connect me with other people instead of dividing me from them.” But Paris also taught him that “there are no untroubled countries in this fearful troubled world.”

Within four years of the passage of the Civil Rights Act, in 1968, the year in which Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., were murdered and Andy Warhol was shot by a crazy woman representing a group called S.C.U.M., or Society for Cutting Up Men, blacks rioted for weeks in cities across the nation, with disastrous consequences that were still being felt in 1984. “On Being White” is the voice of a disappointed man, but in Baldwin’s accounting it is not the thinking people –– those delusional enough, like Baldwin, to imagine that social transformation would be achieved by single legislative act — were not the problem. It was because of working-class whites who had “got this way by their debasement of black people.” And because of them, as Baldwin wrote, the U.S. was ruled by a “stunning pantheon of the relentlessly mediocre … [and] has placed everyone now living into the hands of the most ignorant and powerful people the world has ever seen.” There follows the internationalist note: “… because they are white, they cannot allow themselves to be tormented by the suspicion that all men are brothers.”

That I considered the Central Park event in terms of “whiteness” is one effect of working in an academic environment for the past several decades. My sensitivity to the absence of blacks, however, has a lot to do with my own astonishment at finding myself at such events. I never attend a New York City Ballet performance or eat at Nougatine, indeed at any event that represent the deployment of a great amount of cultural capital, without feeling a bit like an interloper and, indeed, without being aware of the privilege of being present. I grew up in white-bread Middle America, and indeed white, in the 1950s. The only plays I ever saw before entering college were high school productions. Nothing in my background suggests that I would one day live in New York, earn a Ph.D., become a published writer. Marilyn Frye would claim that my ability to pass, so to speak, is an example of white privilege. But folks back in Louisville would certainly be surprised if they could see me now. I come from the class of people of whom Baldwin wrote in 1984. Like him, I also wanted to sit at the table.

On Being White: A Series (4)

As I wrote in my previous post, it is not the fellow-privileged who are the targets of whiteness studies. An indication of their agenda is the motto of a now-defunct journal entitled Race Traitor: “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.”

The word humanity indicates the hard-left orientation of most of these scholars. Some of them, like Roediger, are historians, but increasingly they hang out in university literature departments, where they nurse their rage over the failure of a socialist transformation of America: the capitalists and the warmongers have not been taken out and shot, the White House has not been occupied, the banks and corporations continue to make profits and reward stockholders. Once they saw themselves as the spokesmen of the working classes, but they have been let down. In their incarnation as whiteness scholars they now bear their fangs toward those who have stood athwart the revolution: the white working classes, who are routinely castigated, in the most poisonous rhetoric, as “racists,” “bigots,” and so on.

Nothing better demonstrates their contempt for American ideals — in contrast to their fealty toward "humanitarian" ones — than their attitude toward the immigrant groups that have peopled America — the Irish, the Germans, the Italians, and so on. While most of us — us whites, anyway — have been raised with the notion that our forefathers came here to escape the Old World and in the process became “American,” we now learn that the price of coming here was to become “white” and thereby justify black subjugation and degradation.

This was the premise of a short piece by James Baldwin, “On Being White … and Other Lies.” It is from 1984, two decades after the enactment of the Civil Rights Act. Just as A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf is a foundational text for feminist studies, so, too, Baldwin’s for the field of whiteness studies. As Baldwin noted, the different Old World peoples who settled the North American continent gave up their ethnic identities after their arrival. How true, how true. The result was the eradication of “community” — of German or French or even of the underworld. But it was worse than that: “White men — from Norway, for example, where they are Norwegians — became white; by slaughtering the cattle, poisoning the wells, torching the houses, massacring Native Americans, raping Black women.” American Jews, according to Baldwin, have paid the highest price, because they came from countries where they were not white, “and they came here, in part, because they were not white.”

Picture credit: One Archives Foundation