Author: The FAR Platform

I’ve been reading posts on Facebook expressing relief that the El Paso shooter was not a Muslim. Above is a screen shot of the status of a co-editor of the political newsletter CounterPunch expressing this sentiment. One wonders whether he hopes, upon hearing news that another mass shooting has occurred, that a white nationalist is responsible. I included a comment by Kati Francis. St. Clair is not alone in this desire.

Why would people express such a sentiment? What is the agenda?

My newsfeed is bustling with memes proclaiming the “truth” that mass shooting is not a Muslim problem but a white male problem (as if Muslims aren’t white males). We’ve seen these memes before. We’ll see them again.

Islam is an ideology. Remind me, what ideology is “white male” again? Passive demographic categories, even in their intersections, are not motive generating. This doesn’t matter to those pushing the agenda.

This is the worst feature of identitarian politics—blaming the actions of individuals on their race and gender. It’s racist and sexist.

This time around progressives have a new angle: lay El Paso at the feet of President Trump, whose desire to slow the flow of migrants from Central America—a desire shared by millions of working class Americans—“inspires” hate crimes.

To be sure, the El Paso shooter subscribed to racist ideology. Make no mistake, this was an act of domestic terrorism. But progressives pretend as if only they grasp this truth. Rolling Stone’s sarcastic take: White Nationalist Violence has Nothing to do with White Nationalism.

It’s a lot like how Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Islam. For progressives, when Muslims act “in the name of Islam,” they “pervert the faith.” Crusius did not carry out an attack on humans “in the name of racism.” Racism authored Crusius’ actions. This is true of Islamic terrorism, as well.

Human beings act on the basis of belief and meaning concerning the things and relations they experience—or believe they experience—in life. Omar Mateen, a man who, in 2016, killed 49 people in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, was motivated by Islamic teachings and the desire for the return of the Caliphate, the Islamic Empire. Dylann Roof, responsible for the 2015 killing of black churchgoers in Charleston, held views similar to Patrick Crusius. White supremacists want a world of people who look like them. At least they want a world where white men call the shots. This resonates with Islam: everybody should be a Muslim—or at least Muslims should be on top.

The attempt to tie the albatross of racism around President Trump’s neck won’t work. There’s too much history here. Crusius’ actions are not new. Mass shootings didn’t begin with Trump. Nor do they depend on his rhetoric. Racist terrorism depends on a racist worldview. Just as Muslim terrorism depends on an Islamic worldview.

Yet the memes keep coming.

This must be said: Progressives get everything wrong about the phenomenon of mass shooting. At the core of their confusion—to be charitable for a moment I will call it confusion—is the fallacy that mass shooting is a “white male” problem.

On November 5th, 2017, in Sutherland Springs, Texas, Devin Patrick Kelley, a young man with a history of abusive behavior towards women, children, and animals, killed seven percent of the town that had gathered in a church to pray to their god. It was one of many mass killings in the United States in the post-Vietnam War period.

In the aftermath of the slaying, many on the left immediately exploited Kelley’s actions to push a perception—at the time already several years in the making, continually reinforced with each successive case, each case selected for illustrative purpose, curated in the service of the agenda—that mass shooting by white men is the “real problem.” But, alas, the real problem is rationalized by the mainstream media as “mental illness” because “white privilege.” At the same time, unfairly, mass shooting by Muslims is defined as “terrorism.”

Their complaint: Perceptions of mass shootings are driven by a racist double standard. Murder by whites is rationalized, while non-white killers are held accountable with motive assumed.

Ironically, the double standard sits on their doorstep.

Consider the following headlines, most written before Sutherland Springs: “Most of America’s Terrorists are White, and Not Muslim” (The Huffington Post 6.23.2017); “White American men are a bigger domestic terrorist threat than Muslim foreigners” (Vox 10.2.2017); “Why is it always a white guy? The roots of modern, violent rage” (Salon 11.1.2013); “White Men Have Committed More Mass Shootings Than Any Other Group” (Newsweek 10.2.2017). Even Teen Vogue (5.9.2017) joined the chorus of headlines with “White Male Terrorists are an Issue We Should Discuss.” (Except, of course, if the white male terrorist is Muslim.)

Take the Salon piece, excerpted from Michael Kimmel’s Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era. All is not well in white America, Kimmel opines: “There’s a mounting anger underneath those perfectly manicured lawns, and it erupts like small volcanoes in our homes, in our corporate offices, and on those peaceful suburban streets themselves.” The threat is not from Muslims, portrayed as a downtrodden racial minority, but from white males. The message to the majority white population: a mass murder could be brewing in your idyllic white-bread neighborhood. That’s where the real pathology dwells.

What’s the solution? Open borders and embrace Islam?

This line of thinking has generated a seemingly endless stream of memes, epitomized, for example, by the image of a hand holding a paint chip sampler to Kelley’s face, with the light end of the chips indicating mental illness and the darker end of the chips indicating terrorism. “Guess which one Kelley’s is?” we’re to ask ourselves.

Memes are reusable. Here it is using Stephen Paddock as the embodiment of white male threat:

We’re being invited to view mass shootings through the lens of race in a tightly controlled way. The function of the social media propaganda is to install in the population a reflex that sees coverage of violence as intrinsically racist. The propaganda racializes Islam to cover the range of mass killing in order to deny its ideological character at one end, to paint those who express concern about the Islamic form of violence as racist. You’re not to notice that Muslim terrorists kill for religiously-inspired political reasons. That might lead the public to worry about the spread of Islam in society—the worry the public is supposed to have about the spread of white nationalism. If Muslims are a race, then to draw any conclusions about them becomes racist. The only race the public is allowed to draw conclusions about is the white one. Especially if they are male.

The epitome of this approach is found in Naaz Modan’s “How America has Silently Accepted the Rage of White Men,” an op-ed, published by CNN, written on the occasion of the Las Vegas massacre perpetrated by Stephen Paddock, who, on October 1, 2017, killed 58 people and wounded 422 others. Modan writes:

“Mass shootings are a violent epidemic that have been met with fatal passivity for far too long. If mass shootings were perpetrated mostly by brown bodies, this would quickly be reframed and reformed as an immigration issue. If thousands died at the hands of black men, it would be used to excuse police brutality, minimize the Black Lives Matter movement and exacerbate the ‘raging black man’ stereotype. If mass shooters identified as Muslim, it would quickly become terrorism and catalyze defense and security expenditures. But because the shooter is white, it is downplayed, ignored, and nothing is done about it.”

The facts disprove Modan’s raw identitarian claims at every point. That CNN would publish such rubbish indicates an agenda.

The Los Angeles Times, in an article published yesterday, “Recent mass shootings in the US: A timeline,” gives us a terrific opportunity to show why corporate media framing is wrong. The article looks at the worst mass shootings over the last four years, its author, Carolina Miranda, identifying eighteen such incidents.

She begins with the most recent shooting, the August 4, 2019 shooting in Dayton, Ohio, that left 9 dead and numerous others injured. We don’t yet know the motive for this shooting. However, we do know that the perpetrator, Connor Betts, was white. He was shot and killed by police. The day before, Crusius carried out his attack in a Walmart on El Paso’s eastside leaving 20 dead and two wounded. Crusius, too, is white. He was taken into custody. (Progressives make a point of Crusius being taken alive, juxtaposing the photo of his arrest to that of a black man being choked to death by cops. They wonder aloud about the “special treatment,” yet another instance of “white privilege.” They said the same thing when Dylann Roof was arrested.)

The next two mass casualty events, the May 31, 2019 Virginia Beach shooting that left 12 dead and six wounded, and the February 15, 2019 Aurora, Illinois shooting that left 5 dead, were both perpetrated by black men. DeWayne Craddock was shot dead by the police. So was Gary Martin. These stories quickly faded in the media echo chamber. Very little was made of race in these cases.

Of the four mass shootings the LA Times locates in 2019, half of the perpetrators were white. One of them—Crusius—was motivated by white nationalist ideology.

Of course, Craddock and Martin’s race did not cause the deaths of 17 people. Craddock and Martin appear to have been motivated by workplace grievances. The notion that race is a causal force is a central tenet of racist thought. Racists believe that a man’s skin color explains his behavior. This is a false belief. It’s just as false when used to explain the behavior of white men. Crusius and Betts did not commit their crimes because they are white males. Whatever their motives, the facts do not allow for the conclusion that mass shooting is a “white male” problem. It’s hard to imagine what would even count as evidence for such a claim—outside of racist logic.

On October 27, 2018, in Pittsburgh, Robert Bowers entered the Tree of Life Synagogue and killed 11 people and wounded six others. He wounded four police officers before being shot and taken into custody. He was motivated by anti-Semitic hate. On June 12, 2016, in Orlando, Florida, Omar Mateen entered the Pulse nightclub and perpetrated the second worse mass shooting in modern US history. Mateen identified himself as “Islamic Soldier,” “Mujahideen,” and “Soldier of God.” He pledged his allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the militant jihadist group ISIS. He specifically cited the airstrike in Iraq that killed Abu Wahib, an ISIS commander as the trigger for carrying out the event. Yet, according to the LA Times: “Among the motives attributed to Mateen were racism and homophobia.” Why would Miranda leave Islam out of it? The agenda.

On December 2, 2015, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik killed 14 and wounded 22 others at a holiday potluck. On July 16 of that year Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez killed five military personnel at two military centers. In between, on October 1, Christopher Sean Harper-Mercer entered his writing class at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon and killed nine and injured nine. Law enforcement reported that he had white supremacist leanings. He specifically targeted Christian students. He shot Christians in the head. Those who were not Christian were shot in the leg and lived.

The rest of the LA Times list is just as diverse. Arian Cetin was from Turkey, so some would say he was non-white. Some are of Hispanic ancestry: Ramos, Cruz, and Santiago. Santiago does not appear white. In most cases, the motive remains unclear or does not involve racist or Islamic beliefs. Mental illness marks some cases.

Four years of mass shootings. Progressive claims that mass shootings are a “white male” problem, or that white nationalism is the only or main motive in mass shootings, collapses. It’s as if nobody bothered to look. They just receive opinions and repeat them. Rampant virtue signaling with no fact-checking.

For some readers of my blog, the LA Times list may feel like it lacks statistical rigor. What do the aggregate statistics tell us? I will define mass shooting as a perpetrator, using a gun, killing four or more victims at a public location during a 24-hour period. This is a standard definition. This is the standard the LA Times uses.

Consider that the percentage of non-Hispanic white people in the US population is 63 percent. With white Hispanics included, it’s 72 percent. Populations are approximately equally divided between male and female. Using figures from Mother Jones’ file of mass shooting events and the work of Grant Duwe, non-Hispanic white men make up between 54 and 63 percent of mass shootings. It follows, then, that whites males overall are either underrepresented in mass shootings or their representation in mass shootings excluding white Hispanics is proportional to their demographic representation. In other words, the claim that whites are overrepresented in mass shootings is false.

Consider that 30 percent of Muslims in the US are white, mostly Arab, a group comprising the largest plurality of Muslims in the country. It is, in fact, these white Muslims who have committed some of the worst mass murders. Omar Mateen is Arab. Yet when explanations are sought in Muslim-perpetrated mass shootings, one risks being smeared as a racist or an Islamophobe. See, it is not that being Arab made Mateen a mass murderer. It is rather what Mateen believed that animated his actions.

(Ironically, those who want to make white males out to be the bad guys miss an opportunity to expand the pool by excluding Muslims from the white demographic statistics. I left them in. That means that, from the left identitarian standpoint, the underrepresentation of white males in mass shootings is even greater.)

What about the claim that atrocities by white males are falsely excused by mental illness? Duwe compiled an exhaustive set of numbers for mass public shootings, identifying 160 cases between 1915-2013. Of those, 97 involved shooters who had either been diagnosed with a serious mental illness or showed signs of one. “The 61% is actually a minimum estimate,” writes Duwe (see Mass Murder in the United States: A History).

When Modan writes, “If thousands died at the hands of black men, it would be used to excuse police brutality, minimize the Black Lives Matter movement and exacerbate the ‘raging black man’ stereotype,” one has to wonder on what planet she lives and whether facts matter on that planet. In 2015, the latest statistics Modan could have had on hand when she wrote her op-ed, there was an estimated 15,696 murders in the United States. Half of these murders were perpetrated by black men. The fact is that thousands do die at the hands of black men. Of course, Modan did not check the statistics before making her claim, but would she believe the skin color of these perpetrators had anything to do with their crimes? For the record, I don’t.

Nothing was made of Craddock’s race in the media. No onslaught of articles suggesting a lack of caution in previous explanations of mass shootings was forthcoming. Craddock’s actions quickly faded from public view. Why would Modan think that the existence of black mass shooters would provoke a “raging black man” stereotype in the media? If the corporate media is determined to paint a negative picture of black people, then why do they miss the opportunity to blame mass shootings on the black men who perpetrate them? Why, if this were the media’s goal, would they manufacture the perception that mass shooting is a white male problem? The facts suggest that progressives have a different agenda.

“If mass shooters identified as Muslim, it would quickly become terrorism and catalyze defense and security expenditures,” writes Modan. Muslims have killed scores of Americans (and Europeans) while screaming “God is great!” and pledging allegiance to terrorist organizations. Are we supposed to pretend that Islamic terrorism isn’t a problem? That we shouldn’t do something about it? That we should change the subject?

Progressive claims fail spectacularly in the light of facts. But facts do not matter here. Modan’s writings, like those of so many others, reflect an industry determined to make white men out to be America’s problem. The progressive left has a racism problem.

“When their son is walking down the street with a bag of M&Ms in his pocket, wearing a hoodie, his whiteness is what protects him from not being shot,” Kirsten Gillibrand said on July 31 in a CNN forum for Democrats vying for the nomination of their party.

The junior senator from New York was invoking Trayvon Martin’s death at the hands of George Zimmerman on February 2012 in Sanford, Florida. (Zimmerman was acquitted of murder charges.) Gillibrand was explaining how she possesses the ability to explain white privilege to “those white women in the suburbs who voted for Trump” (as if this were the reason suburban white women cast the vote they did).

Gillibrand followed the Martin tragedy with another example (apparently a composite): “When their child has a car that breaks down and he knocks on someone’s door for help and the door opens and the help is given, it’s his whiteness that protects him from being shot.” Perhaps she is referring mainly to an incident involving Brennan Walker, shot at by homeowner Jeffrey Ziegler. (Ziegler was convicted of of assault with intent to do great bodily harm.) 

The next day, Melanye Price, a political scientist at Prairie View A&M University (formerly at Rutgers), penned an op-ed for The New York Times praising Gillibrand’s approach titled “Kirsten Gillibrand is Right: Racism is About White People.”

Price draws the contrast between Gillibrand and the other Democrats in the forum: “when the moderators asked the other candidates about how they would deal with racial hostility, they all made the same rhetorical pivot, talking about blacks and other people of color instead. They decried urban blight, school segregation, health care disparities and problematic law enforcement.”

This is what the focus should be on: economic and social injustice. The candidates should not affirm a politics that portrays manifestations of basic humanity—clean and safe neighborhoods, good schools, universal and high quality health care, etc.—as “privileges.” These ought to be ordinary expectations in a free and democratic society common to all. With her rhetoric, Price suggests they represent a form of racism, even white nationalism. If we want to suppress racism and white supremacy, then what do we do with civil, politics, and social—indeed, human—rights meant for everybody?

Privilege is a special advantage, immunity, or right granted or available only to a particular person or group. For example, in the Jim Crow system, which was abolished over half a century ago, whites had access to exclusive and superior accommodations. In contemporary America, there are no special advantages, immunities, or rights that are granted to white citizens that are not also granted to citizens of every other race. There are white Americans who are as poor as poor black Americans. The capitalist system does not arrange for any worker special treatment on the basis of race.

Price writes, “As an African-American woman raised in the urban South, I am happy they’re willing to acknowledge these issues. But….” Such throat clearing reveals the identity politics corrupting the way in which many academics frame the problem of racial disparities. Whenever I hear something like this I run a test in my head: Imagine a white man beginning a sentence with: “As a white man raised in the rural south….” Then imagine that paired with an intention to blame all black people for something happening to white people in America. I submit that it is this tone that redirects resentment among segments of the American working class in a manner beneficial to capitalist elites and their functionaries. (It’s also why the American university is losing prestige.)

We don’t have to imagine where Price is going with her words. The rest of the sentence: “…all candidates should start to speak to white people about race and the ways that policies they take for granted are directly implicated in creating these social problems.” To be sure, citizens need to consider the implication of government policies in the social problems that affect people, including how they exacerbate racial and other group disparities (for example, how the importation of cheap foreign labor harms the livelihoods of American citizens, in particular its most vulnerable populations). But Price wants the candidates to follow Gillibrand’s lead and blame white Americans for the problems of black Americans. Price’s is a racially divisive politics.

In the examples Gillibrand cites, if anything protects white people in analogous situations, it’s their humanity, not their whiteness. They are not regarded with fear or loathing and subject to violence, not because they’re privileged, but because they’re recognized or regarded as equals. Violence and oppressions directed against blacks has declined in America over the decades because black Americans have had their humanity restored through the abolition of slavery and apartheid—actual systems of race privilege—and protection of civil and political rights, not because white Americans have seen their own liberties and rights suppressed.

Racism, as do all ideologies of that ilk (including religion), dehumanizes persons in order to subject them to inferior treatment and even lethal violence. These ideologies outlive their de jure framework. Zimmerman killed Martin because of what we presume Zimmerman believed about black people. That’s not privilege. That’s racism (if, in fact, race was his motive). The struggle for justice is against racism, the beliefs and behaviors that conceptualize blacks as inferior and justify mistreating them on that basis. The struggle for justice is about abolishing the system of social class that rests fundamentally upon the exploitation of human labor power. The rhetoric of white privilege miscasts the problem. It works to disunite people instead of seeking to unite them around a common problem. It’s a politics of resentment when a politics of solidarity is needed.

The fact is that whites have never been immune from police oppression, a central claim in the white privilege discourse. In 2016, Tony Timpa pleaded for help as Dallas police officers pinned his shoulders, knees and neck to the ground, suffocating him to death. Or perhaps what killed him was the powerful sedative injected into his body. In any case, he’s dead. And he was white. Even his membership in the yacht club (which the officers joked about) couldn’t save him. Charges brought against the officer were dismissed.

Timpa is a name on a very long list of dead white men. In 2016, Daniel Shaver was ordered to crawl on the floor by a Mesa, Arizona police officer before being shot five times with an AR-15. Like Timpa, Shaver died begging not to be harmed. In 2016, Andrew Thomas was shot in the neck and paralyzed following a traffic accident by a Paradise, California police officer. Thomas died three weeks later from septic shock. The officer was acquitted on the charge of manslaughter. In 2016, Dylan Noble was unarmed when Fresno police shot and killed him. The officers were not charged. These victims of bad policing hardly exhaust the cases of men who did not enjoy the privilege of whiteness.

White privilege is an element in anti-racist ideology, a rhetorical attempt to implicate all white people in racism, to make police officers appear as a force for the maintenance of a white supremacist system that systematically benefits whites at the expense of blacks. Yes, there are police officers who for various reasons shoot people for no good reason. And we should explore these and hold officers accountable if wrongdoing is found. We will likely find racism lurking behind some of these cases. However, the right to not be shot for no good reason is a human right. It is not a racial privilege.

White people do not benefit as a demographic unit from the mistreatment of black people. Racism, by dividing the proletariat, undermines the common interests of black and white workers to the benefit of capitalist elites. Implicating white workers in an ideology that benefits the bourgeoisie (who are not monolithically white) by suggesting that they, too, are privileged is anti-worker propaganda.

If the notion of Du Bois’s psychological wage for white workers is to be critiqued, the critique should be to show workers who think they enjoy such a privilege really don’t. But that’s hardly the work of diversity and inclusivity programming. That’s not what Jane Elliott does when she traumatizes white university students in what are essentially reeducation camps endeavoring to break the will of those who resist indoctrination. Elliott is a celebrated progressive. Burying class consciousness and disrupting class politics through identity politics is the work of progressivism. It has been doing this work for more than a century.

Presuming to speak for black people, Price ventures to instruct white people on how to talk about racism: “Here’s a solution for white people: Don’t answer questions on race by listing the struggles of people of color. Talk about what you can or will do to decrease support for white nationalism among whites.” As a human being, I don’t need Price’s instructions on how to talk about race. Indeed, I find offensive the suggestion that ways of talking about race should depend upon the imposition of race at all. Price’s identity in no way makes her analysis or her solution to the problems confronting Americans valid or useful.

As a sociologist who studies issues of race and politics (not as a white man raised in the rural south), I suggest something different. If we wish to decrease support for white nationalism, then centrist and leftist academics, activists, pundits, and politicians should stop blaming white people for things they’re not responsible for. Instead, they should join in popular work to cultivate critical understanding of the role economics and social class play in human affairs in order to build a proletarian movement effectively addressing the threats facing people: the ongoing and systematic exploitation of labor, the approaching environmental catastrophe, and the threat of nuclear annihilation.

In criticizing Elijah Cummings, US Representative for Maryland’s gerrymandered 7th congressional district, which includes just over half of Baltimore City (most of the majority-black precincts of Baltimore County), for the way the congressman has handled oversight of federal government activities at the US southern border (Cummings is the chairman of the House Oversight Committee), Donald Trump tweeted that residents of the 7th district are worse off there than the migrants housed in immigrant detention facilities.

Trump’s tweet was inspired by a Fox News program in which Kimberly Klacik, a Republican strategist, accused Cummings of hypocrisy over his concern for the situation at the border in light of the conditions of his own district. Klacik had just returned from from Baltimore, describing it as “the most dangerous district in America.”

She had not intended to document Baltimore’s conditions. Her intent had been to interview residents to determine whether they were, as Cummings had suggested, scared of the President.

Klacik didn’t find residents scared of Trump. Instead, she found residents enraged over the conditions of their neighborhoods. “I go in and start talking to people,” she explained to the panel on Fox & Friends, “[and] I realized just what the living conditions are, for not just the residents but even the children and what they’ve been playing around.” She reported, “There’s abandoned row homes filled with trash, homeless addicts, empty needles that they have used, and it’s really right next door. So, it’s attracting rodents, cockroaches, you name it.” She has shared videos of her experience.

These characterizations, bringing to mind the popular American crime drama television series The Wire (2002-2008), its realism reflecting the work of former Baltimore police reporter David Simon, found their way into the language of Trump’s tweets, language the establishment media and members of the Democratic Party characterized as yet another instantiation of Trump’s racism.

The tweets are among the many Trump has shared taking issue with the manner in which Cummings and other Democrats have portrayed his presidency. During a hearing on conditions at the border, Cummings attacked acting Homeland Security chief Kevin McAleenan, saying, in reference to the border facilities, “None of us would have our children in that position. They are human beings.” Yet, as Klacik showed, the children in Cummings’ district live in extreme deprivation, routinely exposed to crime and drugs.

Cummings’ hypocrisy is noteworthy given the intensity of Democratic Party criticism of border control policy. It is expected that a president would defend his administration’s work by making something of the failure of his opponents to apply the same standards to the results of their urban policies.

What is more, Cummings and his Democratic peers claim the mantle of civil rights leaders. How is it that half a century after the great civil rights victories of the 1960s, with Democrats dominating central city politics, African Americans still struggle in impoverished racially-segregated inner city zones? Cummings has been in office since 1996.

So, really, Trump was repeating what Klacik had said on Fox & Friends. And Klacik was confirming what others have found.

In 2017, the BBC reported that 25 percent of residents of the city of Baltimore live in poverty. “If you want to know what poverty in America looks like, well this is it,” says BBC reporter Ian Pannell.

In 2015, The Washington Post reported that the average life expectancy in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods is nearly 20 years below the national average.

What about the claim that Baltimore is rat invested? In that BBC report, one of the residents tells Pannell that, in Baltimore, “despair is a way of living.” The city is “rat infested, regardless of what you do as a person living there, roaches, mice, an epidemic of bed bugs.” Fox News reports that, according to Orkin Pest Control, the ten most rat-infested cities are run by Democrats and Baltimore ranks sixth on the list (“Trump is Right”).

For many progressives, Fox News is racist. But The Washington Post? The BBC?

Is Klacik right about Cummings’ district being “the most dangerous district in America”? Yes. FBI statistics for 2017 placed Baltimore’s homicide rate well above that of any other large American metropolis, deadlier than Chicago and Detroit.

Violent crime is rampant in Baltimore. In video footage released by Baltimore City Police, youth are shown viciously attacking a 59-year-old man, who is Muslim, knocking off his religious headwear and pushing him to the ground several times before stomping him in the face until he is unconscious, his head repeatedly bouncing off the pavement. One of the youth then robs him. Had white youth attacked a Muslim man in this manner it would been obsessively covered by the establishment media. This level of violence is common in Baltimore.

The establishment media and partisan mischaracterization of Trump’s criticism of the conditions of blacks families living in Baltimore is a paradigm of the double standard.

On May 5, 2016, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders tweeted, “Residents of Baltimore’s poorest boroughs have lifespans shorter than people living under dictatorship in North Korea. That is a disgrace.”

Residents of Baltimore’s poorest boroughs have lifespans shorter than people living under dictatorship in North Korea. That is a disgrace.

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) May 5, 2016

North Korea is widely recognized as governed by a brutal regime that allegedly starves its citizens. Sanders is saying that the leadership of Baltimore is akin to Kim Jong Un and his regime. Of course, this is not a racist claim, but Democrats would have characterized the tweet as such if Trump had tweeted it.

Sanders is correct. According The Washington Post story I shared above, “Fourteen Baltimore neighborhoods have lower life expectancies than North Korea. Eight are doing worse than Syria.”

Sanders called Baltimore’s situation “a disgrace.” Presumably Sanders believes somebody is responsible for this disgrace. Who? Trump identified at least one of the responsible parties. He was smeared as a racist.

I want to reassure my readers that my objection to the way in which Trump’s tweets are mischaracterized (I wrote about about another instance of false accusation here: “Prejudice and Discrimination”) is not motivated by political support for this president. I am no fan of Trump’s presidency. Sadly, I have to provide this disclaimer because objectivity is so scarce these days.

Rather, my objection is motivated by opposition to the manner in which the establishment media and the Democratic Party wield the charge of racism to mislead the public about America and its people, as well as the Party’s record. (Frankly, in light of the Bob Mueller fiasco, there should be little doubt anymore about the Democrats’ lack of integrity.)

Democrats use the smear of racism to delegitimize their opponents, avoiding facts and argument while distracting the public from the failure of the Party to secure safe and healthy environments for their constituents. In smearing the president in this way, these forces provide cover for politicians who seem unwilling to perform the basic governmental tasks of establishing justice, insuring domestic tranquility, providing for public safety, promoting the general welfare, and securing liberty in the communities they represent.

But the problem goes beyond the Democrats’ misuse of the term to advance partisan politics. If everything is racist, then, in some sense, nothing is, since the term no longer differentiates anything. Put another way, the routine application of the term to things that are not racist renders it effectively meaningless as a useful descriptor, exposing it as an obvious smear that can be dismissed out of hand.

Democrats trivialize racism by making its use so absurd and arbitrary that it becomes difficult for some to know when it’s actually present. Racism is a serious matter and Democrats shouldn’t numb the public to the term through demagoguery.

Update 7.30.2019: The main claim that Trump’s criticism of Baltimore was racist depends on the word “infested.” This word is attached to a lot of phrases—“crime infected,” “drug invested,” “rodent invested”—that describe unacceptable neighborhood conditions. There is nothing racist about these utterances. But this has not stopped CNN from continuing to characterize Trump’s criticism as matter-of-fact racism. Perhaps a video of Elijah Cummings himself describing his community as “drug invested” and residents as “walking around like zombies.”

On November 5th, 2017, in Sutherland Springs, Texas, Devin Patrick Kelley, a young man with a history of abusive behavior towards women, children, and animals, killed seven percent of the town that had gathered in a church to pray to their god. It was one of many mass killings in the United States in the post-Vietnam War period.

In the aftermath, many on the left immediately exploited Kelley’s actions to push a perception—now several years in the making, continually reinforced with each illustrative case—that mass shooting by white men is the “real problem” but alas that the real problem is rationalized by the mainstream media and its audience as “mental illness” because “white privilege.”

At the same time, unfairly in their eyes, mass shooting by nonwhites, typically rendered as “Muslim,” is uniformly defined as “terrorism.” Their complaint is that perceptions of the perpetrators of mass shootings are driven by a racist double standard. Murder by whites is rationalized while non-white killers are held accountable with motives revealed.

Consider the following headlines, mostly written before Sutherland Springs: The Huffington Post (6.23.2017), “Most of America’s Terrorists are White, and Not Muslim”; Vox (10.2.2017), “White American men are a bigger domestic terrorist threat than Muslim foreigners”; Salon (11.1.2013), “Why is it always a white guy? The roots of modern, violent rage”; Newsweek (10.2.2017): “White Men Have Committed More Mass Shootings Than Any Other Group.” Even Teen Vogue (5.9.2017) joined the chorus of headlines: “White Male Terrorists are an Issue We Should Discuss” (except, of course, if the white male terrorist is Muslim).

Take the Salon piece, excerpted from Michael Kimmel’s Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era. All is not well, Kimmel opines: “There’s a mounting anger underneath those perfectly manicured lawns, and it erupts like small volcanoes in our homes, in our corporate offices, and on those peaceful suburban streets themselves.” The threat is not from Muslims, a downtrodden racial minority, but from white Christian males. The message to the majority white population: a mass murder could be living in your idyllic white-bread neighborhood.

This line of thinking has generated a seemingly endless stream of memes, epitomized, for example, by the image of a hand holding a paint chip sampler to Kelley’s face, with the light end of the chips indicating mental illness and the darker end of the chips indicating terrorism. “Guess which one Kelley’s is?” we’re to ask ourselves. The meme is reusable. Here’s the meme using Stephen Paddock as the embodiment of white male threat:

We’re being invited to view mass shootings through the lens of race, but not in the expected way. First, the goal is to put in the population a reflex that sees coverage of violence as intrinsically racist. The campaign racializes a religion (Islam) to cover the range of mass killing in order to deny its ideological character at one end. You’re not to notice that Muslim terrorists kill for religiously-inspired political reasons. That might lead the public to worry about the spread of Islam in society. You are to worry about white non-Muslim males (remember, by their definition, Muslims are not white).

The epitome of this approach is Naaz Modan’s “How America has Silently Accepted the Rage of White Men,” an op-ed, published by CNN, written on the occasion of the Las Vegas massacre perpetrated by Stephen Paddock, who, on October 1, 2017, killed 58 people and wounded 422 others. 

Modan writes: “Mass shootings are a violent epidemic that have been met with fatal passivity for far too long. If mass shootings were perpetrated mostly by brown bodies, this would quickly be reframed and reformed as an immigration issue. If thousands died at the hands of black men, it would be used to excuse police brutality, minimize the Black Lives Matter movement and exacerbate the ‘raging black man’ stereotype. If mass shooters identified as Muslim, it would quickly become terrorism and catalyze defense and security expenditures. But because the shooter is white, it is downplayed, ignored, and nothing is done about it.”

The facts disprove Modan’s claim.

Let’s define mass shooting as a perpetrator, using a gun, killing four or more victims at a public location during a 24-hour period. This is a standard definition.

Consider that the percentage of non-Hispanic white people in the US population is 63 percent. With white Hispanics included, it’s 72 percent. Populations are approximately equal dividing between male and female. Non-Hispanic white men make up between 54 and 63 percent of mass shootings. It follows that whites males overall are either underrepresented in mass shootings or their representation in mass shootings excluding white Hispanics is proportional to their demographic numbers. The claim that whites are overrepresented in mass shootings is false.

Consider also that 30 percent of Muslims in the US are white, a group comprising the largest plurality of Muslims in the country. That means that among the non-Hispanic whites, there are a significant number of Muslims, and it is, in fact, these white Muslims who have committed some of the worst mass murders. Yet when explanations are sought in Muslim-perpetrated mass shootings, one risks being smears as a racist or an Islamophobe. (Ironically, those who want to make white people out to be the bad guys miss an opportunity by excluding Muslims from the white demographic statistics.)

Moreover, the claim that whites are falsely excused by mental illness is betrayed by research conducted by Grant Duwe who compiled an exhaustive set of numbers for mass public shootings, identifying 160 cases between 1915-2013. Of those, 97 involved shooters who had either been diagnosed with a serious mental illness or showed signs of one. “The 61% is actually a minimum estimate,” writes Duwe. (See Mass Murder in the United States: A History.)

* * *

When Maas Modan writes, “If thousands died at the hands of black men, it would be used to excuse police brutality, minimize the Black Lives Matter movement and exacerbate the ‘raging black man’ stereotype,” one has to wonder on what planet she lives on and whether facts matter on that planet.

In 2015, there was an estimated 15,696 murders in the United States. Half of them were perpetrated by black men. The fact is that thousands do die at the hands of black men. Does Modan believe their blackness had anything to do with it? (For the record, I don’t. Structural inequality and a culture of violence are responsible for the plight of major cities, such as Baltimore, St. Louis, and New Orleans.)

On May 31, 2019, DeWayne Craddock killed twelve people at a Virginia Beach municipal building. Nothing was made of Craddock’s race in the media. There was no onslaught of articles suggesting a lack of caution in previous explanations of mass shootings. Craddock’s actions quickly faded from public view.

“If mass shooters identified as Muslim, it would quickly become terrorism and catalyze defense and security expenditures.” Muslims have killed scores of Americans (and Europeans) while screaming “God is great!” and pledging allegiance to terrorist organizations. Are we supposed to pretend that Islamic terrorism isn’t a problem? That we shouldn’t do something about it? That we should change the subject? Why do leftwingers like Modan want to change the subject or confuse the public? 

Despite being factually wrong, the ideological effort to make a despised demographic category responsible for mass murder distracts the public from focusing on the real cause of mass murder.

One major source of mass murder is the desire for patriarchal violence generated by faith in the Abrahamic tradition, primary Christianity and Islam, which, globally, comprise 3.8 billion people (more than half of the world’s population). Christianity and Islam are drivers in a culture of masculinity and attendant heterosexism that engenders the subordination of women to men, advocates the use of violence against women, and fuels the persecution of gays.

Although the vast majority of men who assault their wives and families do not perpetrate mass shootings or terrorist actions, nor do all mass shooters and terrorists have a history of assaulting their wives and families, an association between the two is highly probable and there is empirical support for the relationship between worldview and violence. Patriarchal religions tend to sanction child abuse. Both Christianity and Islam advocate beating children. Islam advocates the strict subordination of women to men. In Islam, this includes formal instruction to beat disobedience wives.

A worldview condoning violence against women and children lies behind blowing up women and girls at a concert (Abedi) and massacring gays at a nightclub (Mateen), shooting children at a school (Lanza), and a church (Kelley). Moreover, in a culture of violence, where guns are fetishized and tied to masculinity, violence and abuse are more likely.

These factors do not exhaust the constellation of sources that make mass shootings more likely. Nonetheless, there is a need to step up criticism of patriarchal worldviews, as well as advocacy for strict control over the distribution and possession of guns, in order to save lives. Crucially, it’s not just mass shootings that result from patriarchal worldview and violent gun culture; most killings of women and children lie outside the scope of mass shootings and terrorist events.

We must admit that there is a problem of violence where religious fundamentalism has a purchase. We have to stop enabling this culture by apologizing for it.

Smashing it would be a much better strategy.

Today, the concepts of “white privilege” and “white fragility” are portrayed as facts of modern life. In truth, these are, ontologically speaking, little more than religious-like constructs—phantoms with no sociological reality. But, as practice, they are powerful political weapons.

That is not to say that there is no race prejudice or race discrimination. These are very real phenomena. To which this essay will attest.

Let’s define “privilege” in the standard way: a special right or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group. Now consider a white man who doesn’t get pulled over by the cops while going about his business in a law abiding way.

In her influential essay, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Indivisible Knapsack,” Perry McIntosh famously uses this example: “If a traffic cop pulls me over . . . , I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race.” But that is not an example of privilege. Not being singled out because of one’s race is the way things are supposed to go. As a straightforward matter of definition, not being pulled over is not a special right or immunity. It’s a liberty all individuals enjoy under the law.

McIntosh’s essay proceeds in this way. It is built upon a false premise. If there is a law that says only white people can use a certain facility, and that facility is superior to the facility black people are permitted to use, then justice demands opening access to the superior facility to persons regardless of race. Separate is not equal and thus separate facilities violate principle. The United States dismantled apartheid because equality demanded the abolition of segregation laws. If however, after granting access to all regardless of race, a white person tries to block the way for black people, then justice demands disciplining or punishing that individual.

In either case, if an individual is not enjoying a right or an immunity, and there is no legitimate reason to deny him his right, then he is the victim of an injustice. But these are different situations. In the first instance, white people enjoy a privilege: race-exclusive access to a public resource. This is a violation of the principle of equal treatment. In the second instance, white people do not enjoy an exclusive privilege; everybody enjoys the privilege. The white person denying the black person access is not acting on a privilege—he has been granted no such thing—but is engaging in an act of race discrimination. He is in fact illegally violating the black person’s privilege.

In today’s America there are no special rights or immunities based on race. The United States has determined in principle that race-based privilege is illegal (the specter of reparations haunts us, of course). Indeed, to claim there is white privilege is to assert fiction as fact. It is to act as if the previous order is the present order. To be sure, discrimination and bias are wrong, and they still exist, but they are not the result of privilege; they are its violation.

In the absence of any legal structure that privileges white people, the rhetoric of white privilege portrays a just state of affairs—a state of affairs achieved by Americans of all races—as an unjust state of affairs. An ideology transmogrifies the privilege of all law-abiding persons to go about their day unmolested—a universal right articulated in law—as a special right or immunity. In doing so, it deviantizes the status quo, a normality based upon equality, falsely portraying it as a racial privilege that implicates all whites, and then uses this false claim to demand remedies that necessarily construct a special class of persons based on race. The move commits the injustice it condemns.

Instead of focusing on the injustice of discrimination when it does occur, the pretense that apartheid exists in a different form makes the absence of prejudice and bias appear unjust. Clever language shapes this perception. The situation is de facto, we are told, even while admitting it is not de jure; its existence does not depend on what people do (there is no need to identify perpetrators in this standpoint) but rather to point to statistical averages used to construct a myth of group advantage and agency and therefore collective—and even intergenerational—responsibility.

Because this is neither rational nor constitutional (perhaps they are not always the same thing), the strategy resorts to emotionalism to gain popular support. The goal is to make those who are not likely to experience prejudice and bias in their lives (disproportionately white people) feel guilty and ashamed for enjoying the privilege all share as citizens of the United States, paradoxically but especially in light of the suffering of others they had no part in inflicting. Even the deeds of the dead are said to work through the demographics of the living.

As somebody who grew up in a Christian community in Tennessee, I understand the lure. I understand it sociologically, as well. This is powerful stuff. A man signals virtue to others in confessing his sins. Virtue signaling is morally praiseworthy. Man is a moral creature, if not always a rational one. It’s a very old attitude, one strengthened by the appeal of brokenness. After all, how can a man enjoy the ecstasy of salvation unless he is first fallen? Satan sets man back so man can transcend the barriers Satan emplaces and thus demonstrate the unfolding of righteousness. Never mind the circularity. It’s the way religion works. A man admits his privilege—his collective and inherited transgression—because he has finally seen the light and he wants others to hear his upright message. Have you heard the good news? Hallelujah! I was blind but now I see! I was asleep but now I am woke!

Like prayer, it’s a performance that imposes no costs, a soothing ritual that comes with powerful strokes and a sense of belonging. Amen, brother! Let’s make some placards and stand at the back of the crowd to show our continuing inadequacies in the face of authentic suffering. The fallen always fall shot of the glory of the righteous. Maybe later we can punch a Nazi in the nose to prove just how devoted we are (or at least defend the zealot who does). It’s amazing to be a congregant in a community of fellow travelers possessing a received doctrine revealing great and transcendent truths spoken in a ritual vocabulary that only the awakened can truly understand.

More “us” versus “them.” Being part of a religion or a religious-like movement means you get to look down on all the people who don’t get the elusive truth that you specially possess. The infidel. The heretic. The deplorable. They are weak (fragile). That’s why they resist the gospel. They’re not ready because Satan (racism) has hardened their heart. They have first to admit their problem. Only then can they get well. Their denial is proof of their sin. They need convincing. Shaming. Castigating. Call them out. And isolate them.

Such a world especially prizes is the testimonial of the stubborn man who finally came around in Bible study (the diversity and equity seminar). This is the most effective technique in brainwashing: one of your comrades, already broken, passionately tell you that your country really is the Great Satan. And since the church of white privilege is a secular religion, there is no First Amendment to protect you. They can force you as a condition of employment to come to the Jesus meeting, to memorize and chant the dogma (or mouse click boxes on computerized tutorials with contrived scenarios), and then look for signs of faith-feigning. You didn’t you use the ritual words. Rinse. Repeat. We need your eyes and ears. Dissent and risk ostracization, disciplinary action, even excommunication and banishment. If a man isn’t broken, break him. So you can fix him. Make him sick. So you can heal him.

McIntosh’s invisible knapsack is invisible for the same reason Abraham’s God is invisible. And that’s what makes it so powerful as a political movement.

It must be troubling to postmodern types to recognize—as you can tell they do at some level given how shrill they have become—that Omar and the Squad will fade in time, not because of racism, but because they do not really stand with working people. 

If they did, their politics would look very different. And the masses would be behind them. 

You cannot be for working people and push identitarian politics. You cannot claim to be a democratic socialist while confusing the proletariat with deep disuniting cultural pluralism—unless of course “democratic socialism” is just a ruse to confuse the masses. The politics of division is characteristic of all fake socialism—and actually-existing capitalism. 

No genuine socialist fails to grasp this truth: that racial, ethnic, religious, and other divisive ideologies fracture the proletariat. When a woman tells “black faces” that they must be a “black voice,” and “Muslim faces” that they must be a “Muslim voice,” she is instructing people oppressed by capitalism to abandon the historic mission of the proletariat—which must necessarily be against racialism and theism to be genuine—and instead adopt the bourgeoise tactic of distracting the masses and diverting the class struggle. Such rhetoric is not merely a dead end. It is a reactionary progressive strategy to subvert the right of workers to collectively control their destiny. (You only need to study the history of progressivism to know what I am talking about.)

Omar (deformed by Jew-hatred) and her ilk (racialists through and through) operate from a bad theory of history because they not only fail to put social class central to their analysis-such-as-is, but they reject materialism itself. Their politics are unscientific. Their thought undialectical. They are ideologues when we need scientists. Demagogues when we need dialecticians. 

They fail to heed the communists’ admonition that the proletariat must first settle accounts with its own national bourgeoisie, an admonition issuing from a firm grasp of history that the worker movement must build through the interstate system an international socialist movement from a position of strength—that this cannot happen without solidarity rooted in a common culture, shared values, and the struggle to achieve a worker state in the most powerful capitalist nations, the most advanced democratic systems, those systems with protections for individual liberty and human rights. 

Third worldism (albeit here really more of a posturing) is not just a failure. It’s a disaster. You only need to ask: Where is power’s center of gravity? Answer: It’s in the belly of the beast. 

Newt Gingrich thinks Omar and the Squad exhibit anti-American communist sentiment. The Georgian is only half right. There is no communism (or socialism) here. Only anti-Americanism—a deep contempt for secularism, individualism, and for working people, whom they regard as reactionary and stupid. The people see this. It’s why they elected Trump over Clinton. The Squad only guarantees more of the same. 

Without class analysis, without a commitment to a common culture, to democracy, to civil liberties and rights, there is no actual proletarian politics—there is not democratic socialism.

Those who support identitarianism inevitably make a poor choice of comrades because they suffer from a deep false consciousness, a profound misunderstanding of the way the world works. Tragically, the rest of us suffer with them.

Objectively, Omar and her ilk are allied with the neoliberal corporatist even if this is not their intent. They prize diversity over justice, equity over equality, political correctness over free thought, open borders over the republic, and the administrative state over democracy. 

Our allies are the working people of secular societies—democracy, however flawed, as it nonetheless is at the highest level of social development. 

Marx and Engels were right: Capitalism spawns its grave diggers. But identitarians are digging in the wrong graveyard. They are not digging a grave for the capitalist class, but for the worker struggle.

Omar and her ilk, whether by aim or by function, subvert the ground upon which a successful counter-hegemonic movement could be made. They function as sheep dogs for the bureaucratic corporate elite (again, whether intentionally, who can tell). They are celebrated by the establishment media because they serve the interests of the establishment. 

Of course, they are up against the masses of Americans who love their country and love their freedom (but who suffer from their own false consciousness, which I need to critique here). 

The Squad will fade away. But they will buy time for the bourgeoisie by keeping America divided—time the bourgeoisie desperately need to think up new ways to keep the proletariat away from class analysis and populist struggle.

In his 1943 essay, “Looking back on the Spanish War,” George Orwell expressed the following concern about the pervasive use of propaganda to achieve political ends: “This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history . . . . Yet, after all, some kind of history will be written, and after those who actually remember the war are dead, it will be universally accepted. So for all practical purposes the lie will have become the truth.”

Today, in the postmodern identity wars, lies in the form of confusion and conflation are, in the hands of leftwing propagandists, made into new truths. Concepts—racism, chauvinism, ethnicism—referring to different things in reasonable accounts, are, as propaganda, melded together, one becoming the other, with determined persons wielding the term that enjoys consensus in place of the term that shouldn’t, depriving opponents of a legitimate standpoint of criticism. Control of language allows for the construction of false understandings. False understandings are used to shape politics.

Consider the notion of “cultural racism.” Cultural racism is said to be a form of racism in which individuals criticize the culture associated with a race of people. As I explain below, racism is the belief that individuals identified with racial categories are differentiated by abilities and dispositions that organize them into superior and inferior types. Culture is not an expression of a biological thing. It is symbolic system learned by individuals and then acted upon for good or ill. Indeed, paradoxically, part of racist theory is to suppose culture is attributable to the race of persons associated with it. Yet we have people accusing others of racism because they criticize symbols and rituals. Leftists steer clear of criticizing the culture of violence in American inner cities because it is associated with black and brown peoples. To ask why black people murder other black people at an astronomical rate is to ask a racist question. In any case, white people are to blame. Cultural racism is a propaganda term designed to delegitimize criticism by making it appear as a contemptible form of speech.

Prejudice refers to a type of opinion, a preconceived notion about some one or some thing without basis in fact or reason. When it is about an individual, it is an opinion about that person based on some ascribed characteristic of that person—race, sex, sexual orientation, nationality, ethnicity, religion. Crucially, to be prejudice, it must be substantially without basis in fact or reason. Discrimination refers to a type of action in which persons are treated differently based on race, sex, nationality, or religion. It must be an action or, with great caution exercised in making such determinations, a circumstance. For example, the opinion that a person sees the world a certain way because of his skin color is an expression of race prejudice. How could skin color reveal such a thing? An action that keeps a person out of a restaurant because of his skin color is race discrimination; there is no rational reason for excluding persons from pubic accommodations on account of skin color.

Sociologists have long recognize that prejudice and discrimination can operate relatively independently. A person can hold a prejudice without discriminating against other persons. For example, a man may believe another man is inferior to himself because his skin is of a different color, while at the same treat the man just as he would treat a man of his own skin color. Such a man is a prejudiced non-discriminator. It is also possible to be a non-prejudice discriminator. To be sure, often discrimination is based directly on prejudice, but this is not always true. Rarely is popular thought this reflective.

Of the two phenomena, discrimination is the more serious offense because it affects another person in some substantial way, by, for example, denying him some good or experience to which he is entitled. Prejudice by itself, while it may provide a motive for action, mostly remains opinion, not action. As such, it is not really an offense at all, although it can certainly be offensive. To punish persons for opinions is to practice thought crime, the sure mark of an unfree society. So, as offensive as race prejudice may be, the appropriate response to it is tolerance (which does not rule out criticism). The modern leftist is more concerned with prejudice than with discrimination. And they misunderstand of the former.

I am using race prejudice and race discrimination as examples. These are manifestations of racism. Racism as prejudice is the belief that individuals identified with racial categories are differentiated by abilities and dispositions and that the human species can be rank ordered into superior and inferior types according to these. Racism is a species of ideology. (See “Race, Ethnicity, Religion, and the Problem of Conceptual Conflation and Inflation.”) Racism as discrimination occurs when individuals are mistreated or excluded on the basis of this ideological species. In its worst form, racism is a system of law and policy the structures human behavior in accordance with it. The United States and European societies have abolished the worst manifestations of racism. However, today, the left uses the logic of racism as the template for all types of prejudice and discrimination, which leads to deeply flawed judgment, reckless accusations, and disproportionate action—as well as to the illusion that western society is deeply morally flawed. The West is not, in point of fact, racist. It is the most open and free civilization in world history, the wellspring of human rights.

Of course, racism does not encompass all forms of prejudice and discrimination. Prejudice and discrimination with respect to sex is common. We call this sexism. Sexism as prejudice is the belief that men and women have abilities and dispositions that can be ranked ordered into superior and inferior types. Sexism is different from racism in character in that men and women are physiologically different, whereas there are no real differences between members of different races. However, the opinion that women can be rank ordered in a general way is not based on fact and is therefore substantially irrational. Treating men and women differently in a way that disadvantages one or the other is sex or gender discrimination. Related to sex and gender discrimination is discrimination based on sexual orientation, what is often called “homophobia.” I prefer the term heterosexism since this type of discrimination disadvantages same-sex relations while privileging opposite-sex relations. This terms avoids the psychiatrization of a form of oppressive social relations.

Another form of prejudice and discrimination is chauvinism. Chauvinism is an exaggerated or belligerent belief in one’s nationality as superior to other nationalities. For example, when France refused to join the United States in George W. Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, American chauvinists expressed chauvinism against the French (manifested in such silliness as renaming French fries “freedom fries”). Chauvinism is different from racism in that belief in the superiority of one’s nation may be based on valid reasons, whereas opinions based on race can never be based on reason or facts. Racism is entirely irrational. Claims of national superiority are by degrees rational to the extent that they are based of facts. For example, the United States is a better country in which to reside if one is homosexuals compared to the country of Iran. From the standpoint of human rights, the United States is superior to Iran (the United States is superior to Iran for a number of reasons). Knowing a person is white tells one nothing about that person’s attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, or dispositions. Knowing a person is a man might indicate something. Knowing a person’s nationality indicates even more. Knowing his religion (which I get to below) is to know him rather well. It is prejudice given degree of irrationalism.

To the extent that nation is conveyed in an ethnic sense, the term chauvinism can be used to cover ethnicity, but it is not ideal. That doesn’t make ethnic prejudice a species of racism. The concept of ethnicity covers more than nationality in a world organized as nation-states. For example, a Palestinian can claim to comprise a nation in an ethnic sense. If there were a country called Palestine, then ethnicity and nation might be coextensive. But ethnicity and nationality are rarely so. A nation-state can be made up of many ethnicities (for example, the United States, which is one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world). Moreover, many nation-states are ethnically Arab-majority. While an Egyptian man is Egyptian in terms of his nationality, he is Arab in terms of his ethnicity. He can suffer discrimination for either or both depending on the form that discrimination takes.

Because of these issues, ethnicism is an ideal term to capture prejudice and discrimination based on ethnic category. Crucially, chauvinism and ethnicism are not forms of racism; they are when irrational forms of prejudice and discrimination, but they are not based on race ideology. Chauvinism makes judgments on the basis of nationality, while ethnicism makes judgments on the basis of culture, for which facts may be produced for both prejudices. That is, they may not be completely irrational. Racism makes a judgment on the basis of biology for which there are no facts. Racism is entirely irrational. Concern for the Arabization of a European community is not the same thing as opposition to the presence of black people in Europe. Concern for Arabization is ethnicist, and this may be a bad thing, but it is not a racist thing. Opposing the presence of persons because they are black is racist. Are Africans racist for worrying about European colonization? Perhaps they are ethnicist. They are not racist unless they oppose this because they loathe white people.

One might wonder why such distinctions matter if its prejudice that is being expressed. Distinctions matter because truth matters. Common understanding depends on terminological precision. Not everything is an expression of racism, and it is ideological to condemn something as racist when it is not even if it is bad. It is an attempt to make one thing as bad as another. Ethnicity is a real thing, a cultural system with a common language, traditions, customs, norms, and so on. There is something to judge here. What are a culture’s attitudes towards women? Homosexuals? And so on. Race is not a real thing; it is a category invented by race ideology. There is nothing to judge. It has no agency. Racism is on the level of heterosexism; there is no fact one can produce that justifies concern over homosexuality.

Finally, there is religious prejudice and discrimination. For example, a Christian might view every Muslim with suspicion. This is often called religious bigotry. Religious bigotry is the least irrational of the prejudices. Knowing a person is a Muslim tells one a lot about what the person who identifies as such thinks and does. If the doctrine is objectionable, given that dogma comes in the form of persons, one may have cause to worry about the devotees. Rational antitheist opinion is an expression of the desire to prevent religious bigotry from harming others. Indeed, religion is analogous to racism and other oppressive ideologies, such as fascism. (See “Muslims are Not a Race. So Why are Academics and Journalists Treating Them as if They are?”)

At the same time, excluding individuals from access to institutions on the basis of their religious beliefs is discriminatory, since this a form of thought control. A free society allows people to hold opinions however offensive and objectionable. Yes, that includes even fascists. What a free society does not allow is the imposition of offensive and objectionable opinions as actions affecting people. For example antifa. You crush them. Indeed, western society could do a much better job of defending the right of people to be free from religious practices. As well as cultural practices. By the time we get to religion on our prejudice cotinuum, we have established a qualitative gulf between passive demographic categories as race and sex, on the one end, and religion on the other end. Nationality and ethnicity resemble much more religion since they are ideational and practical products of social relations.

All of these forms of prejudice and discrimination must be kept distinct because they involve different things and because conflating them is propaganda aiming to intellectually and morally disarm rational men. Yet there is a tendency on the left these days, as well as in the establishment media, to conflate chauvinism, ethnicism, and even antitheism with racism. Again, this is done in order to make lesser prejudices appear as more serious ones. This is why the term fascism is so easily thrown at people who are not fascist at all but merely conservative (patriotic working people worried about the fate of the country and way of life they love). The way to check ones rhetoric is to ask whether conflating sexism with racism makes any sense. One would have thought that checking rhetoric with religion was a useful method, but the way in which Islam has been racialized is making that an increasingly difficult proposition, a fact that illustrates the very problem I am tacking in this essay.

Insisting on conceptual clarity and linguistic precision is a prophylactic against various projects gas lighting populations. For example, while immigration restrictions may be motivated by racism, there is nothing about opposition to immigration that makes it intrinsically racist. To level a charge of racism, one must first establish the motive. There is nothing racist about concern over the Islamization of western society. Islam is an oppressive ideology that degrades women and persecutes homosexuals. To shame those who are concerned about Islam by calling them racist is an attempt to make Islam immune from criticism. It is to leave oneself completely incapable of making rational argument in defense of freedom to allow the conflation of irreligious criticism with the charge of racism. This disarming rhetoric has been weaponized by the postmodern left.

We find another example in the reaction to a recent tweet by the President of the United States is telling members of Congress known as “the Squad”—one assumes he was referring to Ilhan Omar, born in Somalia, Rashida Tlaib, born to Palestinian refugees in Detroit, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose mother was born in Puerto Rico, and possibility Ayanna Pressley, the descendent of African slaves—to go back to the countries from whence they came. He found it “interesting” that these person “who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all),” were “now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run.” Somalia, which has generated a stream of refugees over the decades, and the Palestinian territories, ruled by the Islamist group Hamas, are among the more corrupt and inept governments anywhere in the world. Omar is fond of using her Somali roots and Muslim identity as a calling card. Tlaib proudly identifies as Palestinian. It was probably with this in mind that the president suggested, “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done.”

Trump’s comment was not unprovoked. The congresswomen have portrayed his government as fascist and racist, Border Patrol agents as cruel and heartless, and immigration detention facilities as concentration camps where women are forced to drink from toilets. Tlaib once gleefully announced their goal of impeaching the “motherfucker.” Their identitarian standpoint is unambiguous. On the day Trump was tweeting his controversial comments, Pressley, speaking at the Netroots Nation conference, sandwiched between Omar and Tlaib, nodding and smiling in agreement, said to Uncle Toms and secularists, “We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice.”

Trump’s words are chauvinistic, a variant of the “Love it or leave it” rhetoric conservatives hurled at Vietnam War protestors. The next day, Trump made this clear when he told White House reporters that “if somebody has a problem with our country, if somebody doesn’t want to be in our country, they should leave.” Nonetheless, the establishment media relentlessly avoided the word chauvinism while manufacturing the perception that Trump’s comments were racist. In doing do, they continued the project to expand the concept of racism to encompass other types of prejudice for propagandistic purposes. (The president’s comments were problematic enough without mischaracterizing them.)

One might ask if the same thing were said about the president’s wife, Melania, who is an immigrant (born in Slovenia, then part of Yugoslavia), would anybody find it racist? The response I get when I point this is out: “She is white.” But why does that matter? Whites can be victims of racism, too. (Two of four members of the Squad are white.) What all this is about is the cultural managers changing the perceived character of a chauvinistic expression in order to find more evidence that the president is racist. But of course, the president is racist. Hasn’t this been rather obvious since at least the 1990s? Watch the video below which is highly suggestive of a racist worldview.

Not only did cultural managers work to manufacture a perception of a racist tweet, on July 15, the US House of Representatives passed with 235 votes a lengthy nonbonding resolution that officially determines what language is to be considered racist, attributes claims to the president that go beyond the evidence, and sketches an official (and childlike) version of United States history, replete with certainty about what the founders intended (“a haven of refugees for people fleeing from religious and political persecution”). No dissenting views were included in the story. No reference was made at all to the decades of sharp restrictions on immigration that marked the years of greatest growth, prosperity, and progress in the country’s history.

In his 1843 essay, “What is Fascism?” Orwell writes, “It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print.” He laments that no precise definition of the term will be forthcoming because ideologues of various types will not permit it. Imprecision is too useful for the production of propaganda to hold oneself to a falsifiable proposition. “All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword,” writes Orwell. The same can be said for the word “racism.” And while I recognize that I cannot as one person stop the rampant misuse of language, I can as a social scientist insist on using the language correctly.

Finally, it’s not about determining what race really is. That’s like trying to determine how many angels dance on the head of a pin. There are no such things. The task of social science is to determine the character of ideological and practical oppressive systems and not fudge their conceptual and empirical boundaries to save them for propagandistic purposes. If you do not understand that the former is the task for Freedom and Reason: A Path Through Late Capitalism, then you need to work a lot harder at trying to understand the arguments.

New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez believed she had found a smoking gun when she introduced into the Congressional Record an April 23, 2018 memo advocating “zero tolerance” signed by Thomas Homan, former Acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director (2017-2018). She clearly didn’t know what she was getting into when she called out Homan in a Congressional hearing on border zero tolerance policy held on July 12, 2019. Homan, a former police officer in West Carthage, New York, and then an Immigration and Naturalization Service officer, where he served as a border patrol agent, an investigator, and a supervisor, schooled Ocasio-Cortez on the law and the obvious.

Homan referenced 8 United States Code 1325, the law of the land establishing criminal offenses relating to improper entry into the United States by an alien. The text of the law is unambiguous: “Any alien who (1) enters or attempts to enter the United States at any time or place other than as designated by immigration officers, or (2) eludes examination or inspection by immigration officers, or (3) attempts to enter or obtains entry to the United States by a willfully false or misleading representation or the willful concealment of a material fact, shall, for the first commission of any such offense, be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than 6 months, or both, and, for a subsequent commission of any such offense, be fined under title 18, or imprisoned not more than 2 years, or both.” First offense is a misdemeanor. Second offense is a felony. Both are criminal offenses.

The 8 USC 1325 was enhanced in 1996 by Congress attaching lengthy entry bans for violators similar to those found in European countries. For example, if an alien is found to reside in the United States without authorization for more than a year, he is deported and barred for entering the country for a decade. The 1996 amendment was necessary to empower immigration officials in the face of a sharp increase in the number of apprehensions on the US-Mexico border. The Clinton Administration aggressively enforced immigration laws, deporting 12 million illegal aliens during his two terms, as well as investing in barriers, personnel, and detention facilities.

The nation entered the new millennium with more than 1.6 million apprehensions along the southern border annually. This ebbed considerably after that until 2004 when the number again passed the one million apprehensions mark. This promoted more legislation in 2006 to tighten border control. More barriers, more personnel, more detention facilities. During his two terms, President George W. Bush deported 10 million illegal aliens. This strategy, which Obama continued, with six million deported during his two terms, resulted in substantial reduction in apprehensions.

Because of aggressive immigration policy, which enjoyed bipartisan support during this period. Trump entered office with the lowest level of apprehensions along the southern border of any recent president. However, the numbers began to grow again during the first full fiscal year of his presidency. Anticipating a new crisis, Trump moved aggressively to stem the tide. I discuss this in a series of blog entries written over the last few years. I have also spent considerable time explaining why national borders are integral to democracy and the worker struggle. I became aware that the subjectivity created by neoliberal globalization was making my points increasingly difficult for persons I regard as comrades to grasp.

A burgeoning migrant crisis is the context of Homan’s tenure as Acting ICE Director (a position he would resign in June of 2018). In that position, Homan was asked to implement policies that were hardly novel. Indeed, these measures, however muted under Trump (previous administrations have been far more aggressive), were nonetheless in keeping with the path established by US governments decades before. Homan informed Ocasio-Cortez that he was acting under the guidance of then US Attorney General Jeff Sessions with respect to the law. The memo he had signed was an endorsement of zero tolerance in an attempt to deter persons from attempting to cross the border. Family separation is a consequence of enforcing zero tolerance, he explained. If you have not already, watch the exchange at the top of this entry.

Homan is right. On September 27, 2018, I said the same thing (read the first two paragraphs of my blog entry “Law Enforcement and Family Separation”). I wrote that entry because I was surprised that so much was being made of family separation given the routine nature of the phenomenon as law enforcement practice. Of course, nobody wants to see families separated. But the media was not only not explaining the policy to the public in a forthright manner, they were twisting facts in an attempt to delegitimize a president they did not believe should hold office. I did not want Trump to be president, either. But he was fairly elected. This was establishment-manufactured fear. They knew they were creating a false perception.

The establishment media and cultural managers kept repeating that, whereas family separation was a Trump Administration policy, family separation was never an Obama policy (Obama was, after all, a “class act”). But either family separation was policy under Obama or it wasn’t policy under Trump. The logic behind this claim is straightforward: if you believe that the effects of policy detaining or deporting immigrants who are illegally here is part of the policy, then Obama’s policy was to separate families. Family separation under Trump was an effect of his policy. Do you see? Put another way, whether some effect is policy depends on whether you include the effects of policy as part of the policy itself. You can’t have it both ways. (It doesn’t matter what I think about this.) 

If one is consistent, and intent and effect is what they mean by policy, then this follows: given there is a significant likelihood that when a person is taken into custody in the United States, whether it is for illegally crossing the border, domestic violence, burglarizing a home, or any other criminal offense for which an arrest is effected, and the person taken into custody has children, family separation is by consequence policy throughout the United States, occurring on a daily basis, and occurring far more often to citizens than to immigrants.

Given this fact, why are politicians like Ocasio-Cortez neglecting families being separated everywhere every day in the United States? It’s happening in the communities of color that they claim to care so much about. Of course, it’s happening in white communities, as well. Why is Ocasio-Cortez advocating a double standard that discriminates against citizens and legal residents by advocating non-enforcement of the law against illegal aliens? 

Let me say this again: Politicians and establishment media focus on the tragedy of families being separated at the border while completely ignoring the tragedy of families being separated every day in America, in our cities, our suburbs, our rural communities. You know what I am talking about if you have ever watched Cops. Yet this escapes the progressive gaze. Why? Frankly, because there is nothing there that makes for good virtue signaling. News organizations could take their cameras and ride along with police officers and record disturbing video of family separation all day long. But that’s not newsworthy. Because there’s no agenda.

Doubt me? Nobody is suggesting that we should stop the police attempting to take a man into custody for breaking and entering because he will be separated from his children. Even as a child screams in terror as law enforcement rips her from the arms of her father and puts the man in the back of the police car, we understand that this is happening because of what her father did. She can’t be detained with him. That would be cruel. An adult male facility is no place for a little girl. She may be turned over to CPS. She may enter the foster care system. Everybody recognizes that it’s the father’s fault this is happening to her. He shouldn’t have been breaking the law. The officers are doing their duty in effecting the rule of law in a constitutional republic. This is not controversial.

Progressives don’t want you to worry about family separation per se. It’s never been a big deal to them. Or to you, frankly. It’s ordinary. It’s a matter of course. Progressives want you to support their agenda for open borders, and so they use emotionalism and propaganda tactics to shape your perception and cultivate your opinion. They want you to believe that family separation is only something that happens at the border, that it is not normal. They want to make family separation appear extraordinary. Then you will think, “What monster separates families?” Well, the law enforcement officials who protect you and your communities — and they do it every day as a matter of procedure.

Why are immigrant detention facilities portrayed as concentration camps when they so obviously aren’t? (“Migrant Detention Facilities are Not Fascist Concentration Camps.”) Progressives need you to associate border control with the worst possible thing imaginable, so they pick the Holocaust. Timothy Snyder’s recent piece in Slate: “It Can Happen Here” is paradigmatic. Snyder, a history professor at Yale and member of the Council of Foreign Relations, a neoliberal / neoconservative think tank at the center of the denationalization project, expresses disappointment with the Holocaust Museum chastising those who hijack the Holocaust for their political ends. He calls it a “moral threat.”

But what Ocasio-Cortez and her ilk (and Snyder) are really doing is exploiting the Holocaust to create a moral panic. There is no relationship between border control and genocide, yet they drag the horrors of the Nazi death machine into their polemics to shape public perception. In their bizarro world, CBP and ICE are morphed into the SS and Gestapo. The President becomes a nascent fascist dictator. Transporting families for deportation conjures images of Jews forced onto train cars. The goal is to get you to ask yourself false guilt-engendering questions like “Did we really mean it when we said ‘Never again’?” We’re on a slippery slop to something like the Judeocide in their telling. Yet we have yet to see even the first step. Because it’s not at all like the Holocaust.

In the 1920s, the United States sharply restricted immigration, turning away millions, deporting scores more — no Holocaust. President Bill Clinton built barriers and camps, deported 12 million illegal immigrants — no Holocaust. Bush and Obama built more barriers and more camps, between them deporting 16 million illegal immigrants — no Holocaust. Trump’s border control policy is anemic in comparison. Why is this comparison being made in the first place? Why did the Holocaust Museum have to check the hyperbolic rhetoric of TDS sufferers with plain truth?

Part of this is the false belief that history repeats itself, that we can use the past as a guide to predict the future generically. Bad historical theory begets bad politics. The world is a very different place than it was in the 1920s-1940s. Even if we supposed history gave us some ability to forecast, the facts of previous paragraph are not helpful for those who wish to push the second-coming-of-Hitler line. It’s mass manipulation in spite of the lessons of history. It comes off as a form of gas-lighting, an effort to make the public believe something is happening that isn’t really happening — all for the sake of an open borders agenda.

From the very beginning I thought, because of how crude it was, that this would never work. Why open borders is desirable is because labor markets are tightening with the long economic expansion and tightening labor markets risk a fall in the rate of profit. Capitalists need cheap labor. They don’t care about borders or workers. The nation-state is not integral to them. Profits are. And profits depend on the exploitation and marginalization of labor everywhere. What leftwing mind doesn’t grasp this? But I had not fully understood how far the left has moved away from class-based political analysis and struggle and how much they have fallen for the trick of neoliberal-styled cultural pluralism and emotionalism.

This is what neoliberal propaganda in the age of identity politics looks like. Ocasio-Cortez and her posse are functionaries for the transnational power elite in tune with the message of the cultural managers. At the same time, the Democratic leadership of both the House (Pelosi) and the Senate (Schumer) shut down the government to avoid doing something about a crisis they initially denied was a crisis at all before claiming it was a manufactured crisis. Even when the party leadership had to come around (if only because 2020 is looking disastrous for them), Ocasio-Cortez and her crowd refused to vote for aid to help migrants. Then Ocasio-Cortez pulled her stunt at the border (“Ocasio-Cortez and the Powers of Expectation and Identity”).

This is fake humanitarianism. What matters is making the president look bad in order to advance open borders and gain power in 2020. For this, migrants suffer. But I don’t think Americans are going to fall for it. I think Ocasio-Cortez lives in a small universe with a weak gravitational pull. The Democratic Party is posed to fly apart. The downside is that this keeps voters away from Bernie Sanders. Ocasio-Cortez and crew have claimed the label “democratic socialism.” They taint him.

The world is organized politically as an interstate system, as a global system of nation-states with integral boundaries. In regionalized arrangements, for example in the case of the European Union, member states may relax borders to allow free movement of citizens and residents across them. Nonetheless, all the states in this system, more than 190 of them across the planet, have immigration rules. There is a popular expectation that safety and welfare of citizens and residents should be a top priority of responsive states.

It is well known that the corporate practice of offshoring production to take advantage of cheap labor exposes citizens of developed countries to competition, disorganizes their communities, weakens labor unions, and lowers wages and living standards. This is the effect of globalization.

What is less well known, at least popularly, is that immigration is a globalization strategy; instead of seeing their jobs leave their communities, native-born workers face competition from cheaper foreign labor in their communities. As a result, there are fewer good paying jobs and wages and living standards suffer. Public services are overextended by a larger proportion of the population utilizing them. Housing shortages and neighborhood overcrowding compromise the quality of life. With inequality there is more crime and violence and general disorder. Community disorganization results.

As part of the system regulating the pace and volume of immigration, North American and European states, which have historically been the most generous in allowing migrants into their countries, the United States in particular (admitting more than one million immigrants annually to live, work, and go to school), have detention facilities in which migrants irregularly crossing borders are processed in order to determine their status. Even the most progressive social democratic states, such as Sweden, a country I am currently studying, have detention facilities similar to the ones found in the United States.

It is necessary to vet immigrants to a country, and those that irregularly cross borders are of special concern as they have not been pre-approved to enter. Many migrants do not have legitimate claims of asylum. In the United States, for example, the ratio of illegitimate to legitimate claims is 10:1. Only half of those who are released from detention before being fully processed return for their hearings. This means that a large number of those irregularly entering our country with no legitimate reason to be here are disappearing into the vast population of the third largest country in the world. A significant percentage of migrants criminals and gang members, especially those coming from the Northern Triangle, the world region with the highest rates of criminal violence.

The alternative to migrant detention facilities is to open borders and allow migrants to freely enter countries and go wherever they wish. If one country compared to another country has superior infrastructure, public education, social welfare services, etc., then people from the country with inferior conditions will migrate to take advantage of the conditions other people built for their communities.

The United States, the third largest country in the world, currently has more than 320 million people living within its boundaries. It is projected to add 100 million more by 2050. Just the environmental impact of such a large number of people alone will create widespread social problems.

A slow, orderly pace of immigration avoids the problems associated with large-scale immigration. Therefore, while detention facilities are undesirable, just as any types of confinement is undesirable, the alternative creates more and greater problems.

The solution is not to abolish immigration rules or the institution of border control and migrant care, but to reform the system. Many of the problems associated with detention are a result of the pace and volume of the flows. When migrant flows are heavy, detention facilities experience overcrowding and migrants may endure periods of prolonged confinement. The pace and volume of the flows is what border control systems grapple with everyday. We can reduce overcrowding by more comprehensively securing borders and expanding the network of facilities taking care and processing migrants.

The quality of the facilities and the process thus depends on the support of governments and the quality of leadership and personnel. The system also benefits from restraint on the part of politicians and opinion makers to not mislead the public about what policies entail.

For example, children who are allegedly separated from their parents are often not the children of the persons claim to be their parents. Moreover, when criminality is involved, it is inappropriate for children to accompany adults into more restrictive environments. Sensational reports of family separation leave out critical information about what the process of protecting children involves. Preying on emotionalism, such as portraying as maltreatment crying children in unfamiliar circumstances, is propaganda not information.

Even in well-funded and well-operated facilities, there will be some discomfort for detainees. Detainees are surrounded by people they do not know, having to exist in a manner with which they are unfamiliar, deprive the freedom of movement human beings desire. Uniformed and speaking in a command voice, CBP personnel can be intimidating.

The manner in which migrant safety is secured is necessarily a form of confinement if we agree to integral national borders. Detention is temporary, but any amount of time spent in confinement and uncertainty will be an unpleasant experience. This is true everywhere.

I am not fan of penal slavery. I routinely criticize forced labor programs in my criminal justice courses. I am skeptical of the modern prison generally; too many people confined for too long for offenses that do not rise to the seriousness that a prison term should signal.

However, to the extent that prisons are not forced labor camps, productive work by prisoners may be beneficial — for them and for society. Done the right way, prison labor is simultaneously rehabilitative, restitutive, and restorative. An effective antidote to the isolation that exacerbates the problem of prisonization, work can help prisoners transition to life in a free society.

Because of the relationship between prison and labor markets, increased use of prison labor signals improving economic conditions. Historically, improving economic conditions enhance the social worth of prisoners. This is due to the unique character of the labor commodity: people come with it. Rising commodity prices make persons more valuable.

The political economy of modern carceral institution may be conceptualized as a pendulum oscillating between amplitudes of repression/retribution and rehabilitation/restitution. Amplitude is correlative with long economic waves of contraction and expansion. When the economy is in a slump, punishment is more repressive/retributive. Law and order become harsh and prisoners are warehoused. Rehabilitation is associated with a booming economy.

These swings are associated with popular moods. A conservative mood accompanies the swing towards repression. These moments tends towards the authoritarian and feature rightwing politics. A swing towards rehabilitation is associated with a more liberal mood, marked by tolerance and an emphasis on liberty. Ideological selection of social scientific theories about crime and violence shifts in the oscillation, as well. Economic dynamics produce a deep intersubjectivity that is often remote to personal consciousness; attitudes are swept up and carried with the currents.

The United States today is in the thrall of an optimistic, libertarian mood. Many states, along with the federal government, are reforming or moving to reform their carceral systems. Some states are sending delegations to Norway to learn about that country’s extraordinarily low rates of recidivism. The Drug War is drawing down, marked by the legalization of cannabis and growing sympathy for those affected by opioids.

All this suggests a decarceration trend and the need for work for those formerly warehoused in the vast US prison archipelago. However, there is a countervailing force, prompted by misguided humanitarian sympathy and a project of denationalization, that could slow the rate at which the surplus surplus labor force is shrinking: the desire to maintain high levels of immigration to the United States.

* * *

We have seen in the leftwing press concern about the use of prison labor in agricultural production, for example, “Convicts are returning to farming – anti-immigrantpolicies are the reason,” in The Conversation. The story frame is that the reduction in migrant workers flows compels farmers to utilize prison labor as substitution. Estimates of the market find that as much as seventy percent of farm labor is comprised of migrant workers. There are an estimated eleven million illegal aliens in the United States, a large proportion of them from Central America and Mexico. Around a million and a half of them work in agriculture. Because of the vulnerability of this population, the average wage remains low, around $10 per hour. Farmers seek an alternative source of labor for this price or less. They are turning to prison labor.

Two concerns of the left thus intersect. First, because of widespread poverty and criminal violence in Central American and Mexico, access to markets and social services in the United States is proffered to migrants as a humanitarian gesture. A movement calling for governments to relax enforcement of national boundaries has been gathering for a number of years. At its extreme, the movement calls for closing immigrant detention facilities, halting deportations, and even abolishing law enforcement agencies. This movement is supported by forces on the political right representing business interests (such as the Koch brothers), as well as religious groups, in particular the Catholic Church, which runs more than 120 shelters along the migrant trail through Mexico, providing shelter, food, and clothing, as well as legal assistance, to hundreds of thousands migrants annually.

Second, because of its well documented cruelty and racial character, prison labor is a badge of slavery. With the collapse of Reconstruction after the Civil War, the nation saw the practice of convict leasing become widespread in the South. Former slaves and their offspring were transported in mobile cages to perform difficult work. Discipline in the labor camps was harsh. During its heyday, around ninety percent of convicts leased by governments were African American. For misdemeanant chain gangs, the black percentage approached one hundred. The conditions under which convicts were treated prompted historical David M. Oshinsky to title his 1996 book on the subject Worse than Slavery.

Although I am of the left, I disagree with the demand for open borders. Moreover, while we must reckon the effects of race on labor markets, in bother the past and the present, we cannot assume a priori that prison labor is a manifestation of racial caste. Instead of relying on foreign labor, farmers could hire populations prone to higher incarceration rates. Instead of ghettoizing African Americans and Latinos in socially disorganized central cities with few opportunities and substandard housing, racially integrated communities could be constructed around sites of agricultural production. Reorganizing social life in this manner could reduce crime while providing dignity to hundreds of thousands of marginalized, disproportionally black American workers. Such a development would likely be disruptive to the culture of violence that presently marks inner city communities.

This approach to crime could go a long way to solving the problem of mass incarceration. today, the United States confines in its jails and prisons more than two million persons. At least two-thirds of incarcerated persons are unemployed or earning less than $5,000 a year when they commit the crime for which they are sentenced. The remaining third are typically only marginally better off. Strong labor force attachment is powerfully crime preventive, particularly for the types of crime for which prison are more likely, i.e. the Index Crimes of aggravated assault, burglary, homicide, motor vehicle theft, and robbery. Gainful employment not only allow people to meet their material needs and wants, but also promotes law-abidingness. It has been known for more than a century and a half that economic insecurity demoralizes members of the working class, who are then more likely to turn to crime and violence to get the things they need and want and to vent their anger and frustration. There is a famous saying in criminology, attributed to historian Henry Thomas Buckle, who wrote in 1840, “Society prepares the crime, the criminal commits it.”

Economic insecurity is produced by several forces, including changing preferences in commodity markets, the automation and mechanization of work, organizational efficiencies, offshoring of production, and immigration. Offshoring and immigration are two aspects of the same strategy; capitalists can either move factories and farms to where desired labor supplies are or they can import labor to the factories and farms. Both practices displace workers and disorganize communities. Currently, the United States allows some one million foreign-born persons to legally enter the country annually to live, work, and go to school. The proportion of foreign-born persons in the United States is presently around 13.5 percent of the population, approximately the same proportion of foreign-born in the early twentieth century that compelled the government to emplace sharp restrictions on immigration in the 1920s.

Although rarely acknowledged by governments, whose structural function is to facilitate economic growth and development, capitalist exploitation of transnational labor flows is a source of inequality and joblessness in the United States. Even less acknowledged is the evidence showing that inequality and joblessness are sources of crime and violence. There are other forces that militate against the criminogenic effect of labor market conditions, such as the degree to which modern life is virtually lived, but this does not remove the criminogenic conditions. Economic planning with a focus on the fortunes of native-born workers could greatly enhance the social life of working people.

The exciting news is that we are in the midst of a long economic expansion, with an associated drop in the unemployment rate. The popular mood associated with economic expansion fosters a general liberal attitude towards punishment in which the public is more responsive to reforming the system in the direction of rehabilitation over repression. This situation has produced a willingness among politicians in several states to reduce the severity of criminal penalties, dismantle or roll back enforcement of drug prohibition regimes, and open up their carceral institutions to treatment and rehabilitation regimes, including models of restorative justice. As the United States moves along this path, prison-prone populations may transition into the workforce, especially with concerted government action.

But if the country continues the current pace of immigration, or increases the flow, the positive effects on prison-prone populations will be limited and even reversed, especially when the economy contracts again. Boom and bust, the respiration of the beast, are intrinsic features of the capitalist economic system. We are probably close to the exhale.

* * *

In their landmark work Punishment and Social Structure, first published in 1939, and based on Rusche’s 1933 analysis of labor markets and penal sanction, Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer develop a critical political economy of punishment and rehabilitation based on the dynamic of capitalist labor markets (I discuss this briefly under “Myth #2” in a November 2018 entry “PBS and Immigration Apologetics“). Rusche and Kirchheimer observed that prison conditions improved in times of labor scarcity because the price of the labor commodity rises and along with it the relative worth of the bearer of that commodity, which is in turn associated with a turn in penal philosophy and practice towards reform/rehabilitation over against repression/retribution.

One of the key elements of their thesis is that, under capitalism, the price of commodities (labor is a commodity in the capitalist mode of production and its price is the wage) is a function of supply and demand. When there is a surplus of labor, the price of the labor commodity falls; with labor scarcity, the price of the labor commodity rises. Since the labor commodity is value producing, the cheaper the labor commodity, the smaller proportion of the total value of the commodity is taken up by variable capital (the labor input) and the greater the surplus value, which, if successfully realized, generates greater profits. Because the labor commodity comes with the laborer, the conditions of the latter improve with the rising price of his commodity. This is why labor unions impact the rate of profit: collective bargaining secures higher wages. This is the reason Wall Street doesn’t like strong job reports, and major shifts in investment are promoted by reports of rising wages. To compensate, central bankers increase the price of money to slow investment that may result in more and better paying jobs.

Capitalism uses the variable size of the working population as a mechanism to regulate the price of the labor commodity. Capitalists desire a growing population during periods of economic expansion. Functionaries of this class are concerned when women regulate their reproductive capacity for personal rather than public (as the bourgeoisie defines it) ends. When domestic fertility rates are low, capitalists promote immigration to push down the price of labor by creating surpluses in the labor commodity. This strategy works in both low-wage labor-intensive and high-wage capital-intensive industries across agricultural, manufacturing, and services sectors in private and public enterprises.

Labor surpluses come with problems. They generate inequality and poverty, and these are correlative with social disorganization, political unrest, and crime and violence. Thus prisons appear in history alongside industrialization and the appearance of large surplus population — and all the attendant problems these entail — as means of population control.

* * *

The United States is in the midst of an unusually robust economic expansion. Jobless has fallen to levels unseen in decades. This expansion threatens to produce upward pressure on wages. The decimation of labor unions over the last fifty years has kept wages from rising rapidly, but capitalists remain concerned. They are always on the lookout for signs of inflation, that growth in prices that erodes their return on investment. Indeed, the decimation of labor unions was the result of an organized effort by concerned capitalists, beginning in the late 1940s with legislation that weakened unions, initiating the spread of “right-to-work” laws to numerous states, and followed by the government opening the US economy to world trade and immigration in the 1960s-70s. Met by popular opposition to immigration, the government periodically cracks down on illegal immigration, throwing the working class a bone while maintaining an high annual rate of legal immigration. But they desire a change in popular opinion back to one of apathy on the national question.

Popular opposition to immigration, focused by the election of Donald Trump, is making it difficult to keep the nation open to the free flow of illegal immigrants for low-wage agricultural work. When they aren’t denying that there is a problem, Democrats strive to turn public opinion against Trump’s immigration stance by generating propaganda about the conditions at the border. Their argument is that the crisis at the border is not because migrants are lured to the United States by big business in search of cheap labor and religious organizations in search of congregants prone to dependency, but because of government efforts to slow immigration. The desire of the former is antithetical to the public good as defined by working class interests.

In the meantime, as the labor force continues to shrink relative to demand, we are seeing a drive to reform the prison system in order to utilize the labor it contains. Just as Rusche and Kirchheimer predicted, labor shortages are increasing the worth of prisoners. So, while prison labor is less than desirable (albeit better than warehousing human beings in Supermax prisons), the need for it is a positive indicator of improving conditions for working people. We need to keep to this path, the path supported by democratic populism.