Category: Uncategorized

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the freshman Congresswoman from New York who has claimed that United States Custom and Border Patrol is running concentration camps in the southwest United States while simultaneously refusing to vote to appropriate funds to provide humanitarian assistance to migrants, visited immigration detention facilities in El Paso, Texas as part of a large delegation of lawmakers organized by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and afterward made sensational claims about her experience. The Congresswoman saw exactly what she wanted to see. For starters, this case illustrates the power of belief in shaping perception.

One of Ocasio-Cortez’s more dramatic claims is that Border Patrol agents are forcing detainees to drink water from toilets. Initially I thought the Congresswoman was being deceitful; the claim is incredible. Learning more about what happened from multiple eyewitness accounts, a lengthy interview Ocasio-Cortez conducted with Mother Jones magazine, and the video explanation by Chief Patrol Agent of the Tucson Sector Roy Villarea, I now believe she made an embarrassing error, one she should own and for which she should apologize.

Ocasio-Cortez made her error because she is ignorant of standard facilities in prisons and detention centers. In the video, CBA Villarea demonstrates for the viewer the function of what Ocasio-Cortez thought was a toilet. It isn’t a stand-alone toilet but a sink-toilet combo (these units are sometimes combined with showers for even greater efficiency). The sink-toilet combo is widely regarded as more eco-friendly than the separate sink and toilet arrangement typically found in the more spacious bathrooms of American and European abodes (sink-toilet combo units are common in Japan where space is at a premium).

For most of you, the sink in your bathroom is next to the toilet and uses the same water line. If your bathroom is small, the space between sink and toilet may be a couple of feet or less. In the type of sink-toilet combo one might find in a prison or a detention facility, the sink is raised above the toilet and built into the same metal, porcelain, or plastic structure. Again, both use the same water line. In addition to being more eco-friendly, a facility can maximize space in a room by using this design. This design provides clean water for drinking and other uses. Migrants in these facilities learn what these are and how to use them.

Ocasio-Cortez grew up in a house in suburban Yorktown Heights, New York. Her father was an architect. She claims to be from the Bronx, but her family left the Bronx when she was only five years old. Yorktown Heights is 35 miles north in Westchester County. There she benefitted from good public schools and went to Boston University on a scholarship. Her diversity experience is rubbing elbows with fellow identitarians. Her wardrobe and accessories are high end. Her biography is not the hard-scrabble story she tells. She exploits her birthplace to manufacture that perception. But the reality of her life means that facilities at immigrant detention facilities are beyond her range of experience. Indeed, given her lifestyle, institutions caring for migrants would seem like harsh places by comparison. Her self-righteousness precluded her preparing for the visit.

Trusting that she saw or heard something that looked or sounded like detainees drinking from a toilet, Ocasio-Cortez did not see what she thought she saw or heard. (It should be noted that those who desire to enter the United States have a motive to lie and exaggerate to those they believe are sympathetic to their plight. Many of them are coached on how to act like refugees.) She thought detainees were being forced by CBP to drink out of toilets.

Ocasio-Cortez was primed to think this. She went into the experience expecting to see inhumane treatment. Her worldview frames the current government under Trump as fascistic and law enforcement professionals as authoritarian and cruel. This is why she believes immigrant detention facilities (which can be found in the most progressive and social democratic European states) are concentration camps and why she calls for the abolition of Immigration and Custom Enforcement, or ICE. She is on record actually saying: “According to concentration camp experts, people begin to die due to overcrowding, neglect, and shortage of resources.” She and her colleagues are accusing immigration authorities of killing children. In fact, CBP has saved thousands of people, many of them children, by taking them into custody and giving them water, food, and shelter. In her hyper focused state (eyewitnesses describe her demeanor as agitated and aggressive throughout her visit to El Paso facilities), informed by agenda and assumptions, uninformed about facilities and procedures, Ocasio-Cortez misunderstood what she saw and heard. Ocasio-Cortez confirmed what we already knew, namely that her psychology is that of the demagogue.

Ocasio-Cortez tells her story to Mother Jones (“The Whole Facility’s Culture Is Rotted From the Core”): “This was a cell that had no running water. This was the cell [where] the woman said she was told earlier today that the toilet water’s drinkable.” She admits that “CBP officers were like, ‘Oh, no, we have water out here, outside the cell, and if they need water they can tell us.’” So there was water in the sink or persons could ask for water. Ocasio-Cortez says that “women told me that they had drunk from the toilet.” What the women are told is that they can drink water from the sink. CBP agents speak Spanish, so there is no language barrier. Many migrants come from small villages and are unfamiliar with advanced technology. But human beings learn quickly through communication, observation, and participation. Ocasio-Cortez didn’t know what a sink-toilet combo looked like.

Other visitors to these facilities (with little fan fair) do not see or hear what Ocasio-Cortez thinks she saw and heard. The vast majority of Americans do not believe the United States government is a fascist state and so they do approach CBP with Ocasio-Cortez’s expectations and agenda. Samuel Rodriguez, a Christian minister currently serving as president of the largest Hispanic Christian Protestant organization in the world (the NHCLC/CONEL), was one of those who visited the same border detention center that Ocasio-Cortez visited. His testimony can be seen in the video below. It bears no resemblance to Ocasio-Cortez account.

Ocasio-Cortez should admit that she hadn’t studied the centers, the technology, personnel, training, etc., before visiting. She should correct the record about what she observed. This is embarrassing for her and potentially damaging to the credibility to the Democratic Party (which is not my concern, but a observation for those who might worry about such things). However, for the most part, the corporate media apparatus and bourgeois intelligentsia are defending her interpretations because they promote the goal of denationalization and free flow of cheap labor across nominal borders (see “The Koch Bothers and the Building of Grassroots Coalition to Advance Open Borders”). They, too, are accusing the United States government of running concentration camps.

The level of coordination in manufacturing false perceptions about the US government’s efforts to control borders and address a humanitarian crisis should be a wakeup call for those who believe the Democratic Party has the interests of workers in mind. I have written quite a bit on this. Two essays I encourage you to check out are “The Situation at the Border and How to Respond to it” and “Smearing Labor as Racist: The Globalist Project to Discredit the Working Class.” To summarize, generous immigration policy has devastated worker wages and organizations over the last several decades and, given Census Bureau projections of massive population growth over the next thirty years (if nothing is done to stem the tide of immigration, 100 million or more person will be added to the 320 million that already make us the third largest country in the world), in light of job loss from automation and globalization, things will only get worse. Of course, they will get worse for working people. The top echelon of the capitalist class have never been as rich as they are today.

A brief aside, watching all this, I can’t help but think about a recent cringe-worthy BBC interview of Naomi Wolf in which the host called Wolf out on a fundamental error she made in her latest book, Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalization of Love, concerning laws against same-sex relations. Wolf’s ideological frame, which runs rather antigovernment, primed her for falsely interpreting historical developments because she assumed what a convenient nineteenth century legal terms meant. I call this a Trump-level errors, after the US President’s penchant for not bothering to check whether what he is about to say is correct or not. He goes with what he believes is true, not with what he knows. Ocasio-Cortez can avoid the second-step in the Trump-level error process: refusing to acknowledge you fucked up. But I doubt she will. Narcissists resist admitting error. The more humble and reflective Wolf immediately owned her’s (in her defense, it was over the esoteric matter of the nineteenth century legal term “death recorded,” albeit still a fatal error for her thesis).

So far, my account of Ocasio-Cortez’s reflections on her experience has hailed from a place of charity. I am assuming she is mistaken not dishonest. But the problem goes deeper than the power of belief in shaping perception. There is dishonesty in the way House Democrats are approaching the migrant crisis (which they first denied and then claimed was manufactured before admitting to it). A concrete example of dishonesty was the stunt Ocasio-Cortez pulled last fall (before Russiagate made dwelling on the migrant crisis a distraction). She was photographed “weeping” while supposedly viewing children in cages (a popular Democratic Party meme). A wider shot revealed that there were no children. The Congresswoman was actually “crying” in front of a parking lot with a few law enforcement officers on the other side surrounded by a chain link fence.

Dishonesty disguises the goal of the Democratic Party to shrink the share of the population they believe bolsters conservative Republican representation in Congress and state government. Democratic Party politics are profoundly shaped by an obsession with race and ethnicity. I say this with no love for the Republican Party. At no point in my life have I ever supported or voted for a Republican in a partisan election. I am troubled by Ocasio-Cortez antics because I find politics based on race and ethnic concerns abhorrent. My politics revolve around individual liberties and rights, concerns over against which identity politics is antithetical.

Identity politics is what lies behind the Democratic party’s opposition to Trump reinstating the citizenship question on the decennial census. The constitutional basis for conducting the decennial census is to reapportion the US House of Representatives. Those states with large proportions of legal and illegal immigrants, who are disproportionately Hispanic, tend to be Democratic-majority states. State leaders do not want the federal government to differentiate between citizens and noncitizens because they are convinced this will change representation in Congress. Just as the antebellum South increased their number of seats in Congress by a third by counting three-fifths of slaves, the more than eleven million illegal aliens and the millions more legal immigrants if not differentiated from citizens greatly expands Democratic representation in Congress. Likewise, Democrats want open borders to counteract Republican electoral success.

Furthermore, there is evidence of delusional and paranoid thinking among Ocasio-Cortez and her colleagues, a group that includes representatives Norma Torres, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Veronica Escobar, Pramila Jayapal, and Ayanna Pressley. The worldview expressed in their rhetoric strikes me as gleaned from the reading lists that once adorned the Rage Against the Machine website back in the band’s heyday (for the record, I am a huge fan). While I appreciate the work of Noam Chomsky, William Blum, and others so listed, in the hands of such demagogues as Ocasio-Cortez, a generation raised on poststructuralist/postmodernist/postcolonialist epistemology, whose politics lack the sophistication to grasp critical theory beyond rank conspiracism, these ideas become the constituents of a paranoia mindset. The Congresswomen operates on a Manichean moral view of the world as good and evil. Ocasio-Cortez is one of the good ones. Those who disagree are evil. Moreover, circumscribing critical theory at the boundaries of Chomskyan political thought, a framework hostile to Marxism while sympathetic to anarchism and its cynical antigovernment orientation, makes a person appear woke without having to acquire the tools necessary to advocate for the proletarian masses. Ocasio-Cortez claims to be a democratic socialist but she expresses the cultural sensibilities of a neoliberal progressive. Ideology before theory is a fog machine. She is not good for the worker movement.

In her interview in Mother Jones, Ocasio-Cortez demonstrates a penchant for being uncertain about reality while proclaiming her moral virtue. She damns her own behavior by telling the magazine that Congressional Democrats went in attacking CBP for a news story that ProPublica had just broken concerning a Facebook group (called “I’m 10-15”) allegedly organized by past and present border patrol agents in which members shared offensive images and memes and made offensive comments about migrants and about Ocasio-Cortez and colleagues (calling them “scum buckets” and “hoes”). House Democrats had no information indicating that the Facebook group involved anybody at the facility, yet they raised the issue in the briefing room and insinuated that CBP agents present were responsible. CBP officials responded that there would an investigation and personnel would be disciplined if they engaged in misconduct. Norma Torres of California asked CBP if the Congressional delegation was safe, implying that CBP might harm members of Congress. Ocasio-Cortez fueled the hysterical mood saying, “We’re not talking about a couple of people planning this. There’s 9,500 current and former officers.” Planning what? This is what I mean by rank conspiracism. This is delusional thinking.

Later, when a CBP worker attempted to take a selfie with the delegation in the background (I have no opinion on whether this was appropriate), Ocasio-Cortez claims she said loudly to everybody in the pod of rooms, “It is extremely clear that you all have lost all control over the culture here in these facilities. You have lost complete control of the culture. Clearly they do not respect your authority or your leadership. It’s either that, or they just think or know that you are not going to do anything. And that you are just going to turn the other cheek as soon as we leave if they feel this bold and brazen to do something so egregious in front of their superiors. Multiple levels of superiors.” I can almost feel the room spinning around Ocasio-Cortez’s supreme confidence in her own acumen. We knew before this that Ocasio-Cortez was prone to histrionics. And we saw for ourselves the tone of her rhetoric from inside the car before it pulled away from the facility. She then tells Mother Jones: “And I was like, ‘You all have lost all control of this facility. And to tell us that we need to check our phones, and then to have this happen [referring to the border control agent taking a selfie]. Well, you—all rules are out the window.’” A CBP agent taking a picture of a Congressional delegation for the Congresswoman means that the facility was without rules. This is the person in whom a generation of young leftists have invested their confidence.

In its oversight capacity, the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security has identified problems at some of the facilities. These problems are due to a large influx of people crossing the southern border, some via illegal border crossings, others by presenting themselves to border control officers at a port of entry, housed in facilities not designed for long-term detention, and a political party controlling the House that resists adequate funding of border control, including humanitarian aid, and is dragging its feet on immigration law reform because they believe doing something about the crisis will harm their electoral fortunes. Of course very few people want to see people detained. But keep in mind that half of those released into the United States do not return for their immigration hearing. Nine of ten of those whose cases are heard are ineligible to enter the United States. There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that, of those who do not return, the rate of legitimate asylum claims is even lower. There has to be a vetting process if there are to be borders. Detainees have access to food, water, and other essentials of life. While some endure prolonged detention, detention is nonetheless temporary for everybody. They are waiting to be turned over to the Department of Health and Human Services, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or the criminal justice system.

I want to close this entry with two pro tips for social science students (although the general public can benefit from this, as well). I have a Ph.D. in sociology with specializations in criminology and criminal justice. I am a tenured professor who teaches and researches these subjects. I am an expert on confinement and carceral facilities. So these really are pro tips.

Pro-tip #1: When you tour a detention facility or any other facility, consider what the guide isn’t telling you. For guides, the daily experience is understood and routine. They often work from a FAQ script. Guides cannot always know what visitors don’t know or understand, especially when what visitors don’t understand is a rather ordinary thing that others hadn’t thought to ask about since they are likely to already know what that thing is.

Ocasio-Cortez apparently did ask some questions but did not understand the answers. In the Mother Jones interview, the Congresswoman said, “It was hard to suss out exactly what they [Border Control agents] were describing, but it seemed like their showers are inadequate, too, like they’re not normal showers.” It is a detention facility. From her privileged standpoint, she was horrified that detainees had “no conditioner for their hair.” Many of the women detained in these facilities were literally saved from dehydration, drowning, and heat stroke (see “Words and Pictures” and “The Border in 2014…. and Now”). They came hundreds of miles away, from villages without sewer systems or running water. They’re not looking to condition their hair.

Pro-tip #2: If you stow preconceived and ideological notions about what you will see and what it means, you will improve your powers of observation. And not by a little. This will allow you to make better informed judgments and avoid making embarrassing mistakes. This assumes you care about such things. Of course, if one is primed to think these facilities are concentration camps, then the video clips secretly recorded by Joaquin Castro in defiance of CBP policy will be seen as evidence bolstering the claim. When I watch that video, I see people in detention. Why they are in detention is the question that interests me. The answer to that question tells me what I am looking at.

I would like to believe that Ocasio-Cortez’s error is a rookie mistake. She was there on a “fact-finding” mission yet unprepared for finding facts. Or unwilling to accept them. House Democrats were really only interested in acquiring fodder for their anti-American propaganda and open-borders campaign (see “Immigration, Rule of Law, and the Peril of Ideology”). Ocasio-Cortez is not interested in presenting an objective account of her experience. She is a demagogue.

Let me actually close with this: Ocasio-Cortez is being presented as the future of the Democratic Party by her adoring fans. But she portends the party’s death. She and her colleagues are a disaster for the party. Whenever I get the attention of Democrats, I tell them that either they get behind Bernie Sanders and push his candidacy to the hilt, or they might as well vote third party. That’s what I do. It Bernie or bust for me. Sanders is the only person in the Democratic Party universe who can bring the party back to the interests of working people. And the last time we had a Democratic politician who represented working people, Americans elected him four times.

I know that, for a lot of people, because Crenshaw is a Republican and because this is Fox News, the views presented in this interview are wrong and bad. I know that, because my opinions don’t check partisan boxes in the ideologically prescribed manner, that I’m a problematic leftist. My views are heretical from a dogmatic point of view. For some, my nationalism comes as a surprise. They made assumptions based on the partisan ideological checklist. But I don’t work from a partisan ideological standpoint. I am partisan, of course, because I am pro-worker; but I work out my positions from evidence, logic, and principle. And that means that the judgments at which I arrive do not conform to dogma. I am not a fan of received opinion. It wouldn’t be dialectical.

So I have to express my frustration at seeing opinions that are so obvious and rational, as well pro-worker (even if that is not the intent⁠—since, in the end, what is pro-worker is determined by objective assessment), being disregarded while a narrative is advanced intended to make immigration laws the work of white supremacy, the enforcement of those laws akin to fascism, and plant the assumption that supporters and enforcers of law and order are motivated by racism. Congressman Dan Crenshaw is right: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her crowd don’t want any enforcement of immigration laws. Her supporters bristle when accused of wanting open borders, but that is what she wants. It would be, at least, the result if her desires became policy. And he is right, and I can find no polite way of putting it, that Ocasio-Cortez has left sane ground.

My view on all this is straightforward and I am not ashamed to say that, except for his position on private charity (albeit it would make for a good exercise in hypocrisy detection), it substantively aligns with Crenshaw’s. I believe in nation-states and the interstate system. I am not a globalist. I’m an advocate of national boundaries, national sovereignty, and the rule of law. On matters of law and government I am a liberal secularist, a proponent of civic nationalism and the democratic-republican form of self-governance. On matters of economics I am a socialist who makes judgments of policies based on assessments of working class interests using a method derived from historical materialism, the approach to critical political economy developed by the communist Karl Marx (who was himself a refugee). I make no apologies for being a Marxist and a socialist. Obviously Crenshaw would disagree with my views on political economy. But ultimately his argument is pro-worker because illegal immigration is harmful to working class communities as I have demonstrated in several entries on my blog.

I prioritize the interests of American workers in my analyses because, even though the proletariat has yet to capture the government machinery and establish a worker state, a democratic-republic is responsive to its citizens and this provides the grounds upon which workers can in principle organize. However bourgeois the United States and other western nations are, they are more free and democratic than illiberal and theocratic arrangements. Concerns for liberty and democracy converge in a rather simple rhetorical question: What is the point of having a sovereign country if the government that derives its consent from the governed not work to secure the interests of those governed? his is not an ideological position. Conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, when asked what is wrong with the market principle that rationalizes a situation in which an English worker loses his job to a more highly qualified foreign worker, responded by pointing out that the benefit of the nation-state to the English worker is protection of his interests against such a thing and that this is a perfectly reasonable expectation. After all, he has himself, his family, and his community to preserve. What does it mean to be a citizen of Great Britain if your government sacrifices your livelihood for the sake of global capitalist interests?

This is what so many on the left fail to recognize about the politics of Ocasio-Cortez and her ilk: they advocate the most extreme form of capitalist globalization, the form most devastating to the working class, where capital and labor go wherever the capitalists direct them for profit maximization, and then, wielding the assumed values of diversity and multiculturalism, accuse those who object to the destruction of their livelihoods and disorganization of their communities of racism. Identity politics is anti-proletarian, yet I see many self-proclaimed Marxists embracing its tenets, a false consciousness testifying to the power of the corporatist subjectivity created by the neoliberal ordering of cultural, economic, political, and social life.

Tomorrow we will celebrate the symbolic moment that established in principle the purpose of the United States of America. I feel very patriotic about this day because I love my country. I love my country because it is founded on principles I embrace as a secular humanist. It is because I am committed to human rights that I am committed to the promise of America. Despite its deist rhetoric, the Declaration of Independence is a demand for secular and democratic-republican government. It recognizes that we have rights and that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Inherent in this call is the establishment of an independent nation-state under the rule of law that is responsive to the people for whom it is established. The promise of the Declaration was realized in (as Christopher Hitchens liked to put it) a godless constitution with a bill of rights that announced a system of rights appropriate to a secular nation. America stands as an example to the nations of the world to put these principles to work in their own countries. It illustrates how a devotion to ideals, evidenced by a long struggle for justice, can improve the human condition.

The United States has always been a nation to which people from around the world have wanted to come. Tens of millions have immigrated here over the decades, many of them becoming citizens. I support legal immigration to the United States. I know you have heard me say this before, but my wife followed the rules. She is one of many who followed the rules, some of whom, like my wife, are no longer immigrants but now US citizens. It was one of the happiest days of my life to watch Mona take her citizenship oath. I thrilled to see how excited she was to vote in her first election. There are tens of thousands of rule-following persons who currently wait for permission to enter the United States (or other countries—people seem to not recognize that every country on the planet have immigration laws that they enforce).

If the United States officials decline a person’s request to enter the United States, either provisionally or finally, that person breaks the law if they enter the United States. If some harm befalls him crossing rivers or seas or claiming over or under security barriers, that not the fault of the laws or structures that restrict entry into the United States. The idea that because people want to come here so badly they will break the law and endanger their lives does not mean that law should be suspended. If a person who does not have permission to be in the Untied States, after assessing their circumstances, is found to have no legitimate reason to be here, he should be deported. Of course, there are extenuating circumstances. But to say there should be no effective intervention in lawbreaking is to effectively advocate for the end of immigration law. And, then, we do not have a country. 

I am a humanitarian. I want to see an end of needless human suffering. I want sufficient resources devoted to immigration control in order to resolve the problem of overcrowding in detention facilities while making sure that those who have not yet been given permission to stay in America are not released and disappear into a nation of more than 300 million people (where half will not show up to honor their end of the bargain—in a population where 9 out of 10 are found to not have a legitimate reason to be here). There is no right to come to America to live, work, or go to school. There is a right to leave one’s home country, but it a privilege to be in a country that is not your native home. There are obligations imposed upon those who seek that privilege.

I am more than happy for my government to accept and review requests to work and go to school or seek refuge here. Supporting immigration law and an orderly process of immigration is not anti-immigrant. But a lot of people have substituted humanitarian concern for virtue signaling. They operate with a Manichean identitarian agenda that has at its core a loathing of the United States and a belief that the national interests reflect white supremacy. They see immigration control as automatically nativist, racist, and xenophobic. In this light, immigration enforcement officials become fascists and detention facilities become concentration camps. Ideology thus makes people see and say things that have no basis in reality. Crenshaw is justified in his characterization of this point of view.

According to the CNN article “Senate, House headed for confrontation over border funding bill,” “Four liberal Democratic freshmen voted against the [border control/aid] measure: Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.” The Senate and House overwhelmingly approved versions of the Bill. The House Democrats relented to the Senate and Trumped signed the bill into law. The migrant crisis did not allow time for reconciliation.

Let me begin with a complaint. One would expect these four to vote this way. But why are their politics characterized as “liberal?” The rule of law, equality of opportunity, individual rights, freedom of speech, secularism and freedom of religion, all core features of liberalism, are hardly the ideals embraced by persons who call for the abolition of law enforcement agencies, believe in equality of result, assert group rights, demand political correctness, and condemn irreligious criticism as bigotry. Efforts to mainstream Islam can hardly be accurately characterized as a liberal political interest (see “The Democratic party and the Doctrine of Multiculturalism”).

I raise this issue as an imperfect liberal. I am a socialist. That means that I disagree with the liberal value of capitalist markets. But I am committed to liberalism’s other values (these ones I listed above) and have explained elsewhere (see “The Contradiction in Liberalism”) that liberalism suffers from an internal contradiction (capitalism is at odds with personal liberty) and that resolving that contraction brings liberalism’s other values in line with freedom and justice. The George Orwell in me bristles when I see leftwing identitarians identified as such. But CNN is a propaganda outfit. Not just CNN, though. The New York Times and The Washington Post do this same thing. In fact, this labeling trick is rampant in corporate media. This is part of what is allowing conservatives to claim for themselves a liberal value such as free speech. And without apparent contradiction.

But I am writing this entry not merely to bitch about the corporate media misusing a word. The partisan character of the establishment media, not just party-wise, but, more crucially, establishment-wise, by which I mean a configuration of bourgeois fractions, uses this language to deepen a subjectivity that promotes politics that work against the interests of the working class. This CNN article illustrates this problem quite well. It shows how the habitual use of certain types of framing connect popular perception to elite agenda.

Perhaps nothing illustrations this better than the crisis at our border. I will begin with some facts. On the matter of deaths at the border, according to US Customs and Border Patrol, under the Obama administration there were 313 deaths in 2014, 251 in 2015, and 329 in 2016. In 2012, the remains of 463 migrants were found, a figure approaching death toll of 2005 (when close to 500 bodies were found). If those numbers surprise you, that doesn’t surprise me. There was little coverage of it in the media and no associated hysteria.

To compare, there were 294 deaths in 2017 (since these are fiscal year numbers, which begin on October 1, some of these deaths occurred on Obama’s watch) and 283 deaths in 2018. The media dutifully threw these numbers into the echo chamber and now the public is registering concern. (Rarely reported is the fact that, in 2017, the rescue/death ratio was 11:1, a fact I a reporting here because of the way CBP is being depicted as causing deaths rather than preventing them.)

The way the media puts faces to the statistics is with pictures and video (the ones they choose to share, of course). Photographs and videos are important records of human tragedy. The picture of the Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea after human smugglers crammed his family onto a tiny inflatable raft haunts me still. Because information indicated that Kurdi’s final destination was Canada, his death became an issue in the federal elections there, even though no Canadian had anything to do with the little boy’s death.

How these images are framed depends on agenda. When viewed in humanitarian terms, these pictures are a reminder of the risks associated with migration. Migration is a millennia-old human story and the elements can be deadly barriers to freedom and slavery. The leading causes of death at the southern US border are dehydration, drowning, heat stroke, and hyperthermia (the last is the most common cause). This is why it is always important to remember that encouraging migration can be a deadly invitation.

Much of the establishment media, however, framed the image of the bodies of Óscar Martínez and his daughter, who drowned attempting to illegally cross into the United States, as the fault of Donald Trump and its immigration policies. CNN and MSNBC are very clear about this: It is because Trump does not open the borders and let everybody cross that people die.

Yet the United States, like all other countries, has national borders and, like all other countries, regulates immigration for the sake of its citizens, who expect policies in the national interests to be enforced, not abdicated because other people recklessly attempt to illegally cross the border. The reasonable approach to solving the problems of people who leave their home countries is to help them in their home countries, not encourage them to embark upon a perilous journey to migrate to other countries.

For this reason we should applaud recent remarks by El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele, reported by the BBC, admitting that it is his country’s failures that are responsible for Óscar Martínez and his daughter’s deaths. We should also applaud the BBC for reporting the story in an objective manner that avoids falsely blaming the United States government in a way that inspires more migration. (To see that the BBC is engaged in a pattern of responsible reporting on this subject, see the article “US Immigration: Drowning exposes risks to illegal border crossings.”)

In the wake of the tragic drownings of bodies of Óscar Martínez and his daughter, Bukele told the BBC his government has to fix the issues that force people to migrate in the first place.

“We can blame any other country but what about our blame?” he said. “What country did they flee? Did they flee the United States? They fled El Salvador, they fled our country. It is our fault.” Bukele promised he would work to make El Salvador a safer and better place. 

Bukele has more respect for the truth than a lot of Americans. Unless evidence could be brought to bear sufficient for believing otherwise, I didn’t hold the Obama Administration responsible for the hundreds of migrant deaths annually that occurred on his watch (neither did those now complaining about Trump) and I don’t hold Trump accountable for the migrant deaths that occur under his administration.

However, the conditions in El Salvador are not the only thing responsible for migration. Those are push factors. But there are pull factors (see “The Situation at the Border”). Betraying their humanitarian claims, the Catholic Church and other religious groups play a major role in encouraging migration to the United States. The truth is that they seek congregants and opportunities to signal virtue. Business advocates, like the Koch brothers, play a major role in the movement of population (see “The Koch Brothers and the Building of a Grassroots Coalition to Advance Open Borders). They seek cheap labor and low wages to raise the profit rate. Immigration advocate and attorney are self-interested. And progressives must also take responsibility for encouraging Central Americans to defy an administration they obsessively desire to embarrass and delegitimize. Americans workers deserve better than this in their own country. 

The debate over the border depends on one’s choice of comrades. The questions I ask myself: Do I stand with the working class or do I stand with exploiters and moral entrepreneurs? Do I want migrants dying needlessly in the desert or in a river or do I want to see efforts made to improve the conditions of native existence? The progressive left is wrong on so many levels on this issue. And their errors are indicative of a much deeper problem, namely the tacit acceptance of neoliberal assumptions about open borders and market forces, which have created a subjectivity deceiving the rank-and-file into working at cross-purposes with the interests of those they are supposed to be fighting for. They have made a poor choice of comrades.

Perhaps, then, tagging social democrats and identitarians as “liberal” is designed to keep them close to bourgeois sensibilities, to keep them in the fold, and away from a position on the left where the contradiction between deep multiculturalism and globalization, on the one side, and the conditions for worker solidarity, on the other hand, can be resolved in a way that produces the grounds for a leftwing populist movement that threatens capitalist power.

In an essay in The Atlantic titled “AOC’s Generation Doesn’t Presume America’s Innocence,” Peter Beinart writes:

“American exceptionalism does not merely connote cultural and political uniqueness. It connotes moral superiority. Embedded in exceptionalist discourse is the belief that, because America has a special devotion to democracy and freedom, its sins are mostly incidental. The greatest evils humankind has witnessed, in places such as the Nazi death camps, are far removed from anything Americans would ever do. America’s adversaries commit crimes; America merely stumbles on its way to doing the right thing. This distinction means that, in mainstream political discourse, the ugliest terms—fascism, dictatorship, tyranny, terrorism, imperialism, genocide—are generally reserved for phenomena beyond America’s shores.”

Beinart also writes: “Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘concentration camps’ comment questions an old orthodoxy: that only other countries—and not the U.S.—are capable of evil.”

To begin with, people are guilty or innocent. It’s odd to say this about a country or a state. The confusion is analogous to the error of “state’s rights.” States don’t have rights. They have powers. People have rights.

Beinart’s rhetoric is a good example of the reification that haunts popular discourse. Such rhetoric can have dramatic consequences. Speaking this way makes bombing people easier. You aren’t bombing innocent people; you’re punishing a guilty country. The moral leader calculates collateral damage (soldiers call it “bug splat”) in a surgical strike; dehumanization is the consequence of personifying country and region. Remember Bush wrecking Afghanistan to get at al Qaeda?

But to say that America is exceptional is not the same thing as saying it is innocent. Nation-states, like people, can be exceptional. From the git-go, Beinart’s op-ed is problematic.

Secondly, American has a complex history. It’s hardly alone in that fact. But there’s a difference between recognizing that complexity and loathing America or routinely not appreciating what’s great about it.

If America were a person it’s hard to see any appreciation on the identitarian left for its remarkable history of reformation, a curious sentiment in light of a rhetoric of redemption, the legacy of Christian logic that, typical of that particular faith-belief, is only selectively and superficially observed. In truth, the framework AOC and her ilk deploy in reckoning justice for America is an essentially racialist one.

Demagogues like AOC are convinced that history obligates (albeit only some of) the living. In her telling, it’s as if nothing has ever really been achieved. Nor could it be considering who founded it and for whom it was founded. Its founding in genocide and slavery is its purpose. It needs replacing not reforming.

America-bashing has become the left’s pastime. It’s not a critique of capitalism—it’s not scientific socialism. It’s not a critique at all. Rather, it’s dogma conceiving of an America that is intrinsically evil because white European rational Protestants built it upon a foundation of reason. And so the desire to defend that foundation is nativist, racist, and xenophobic.

The identitarian left is comprised of progressives who deprecate progress. A godless constitution, with a bill of rights separating church and state attached, establishing the basis of scientific work and rapid development in technology, is no great moral achievement. Emancipating people from the centuries-old inherited system of chattel slavery, leading much of the West in recognizing the right of women to participate in their government, and of the right of men to marry other men and women to marry women, of shackling the police to the demands of liberty, of defending opinion from censorious desire, and a myriad of other accomplishments—if these are appreciated (certainly freedom from religion and speech are not), they must result from resistance to the idea of America, not as the progressive realization of American ideals.

But America is an exceptional country. The West is an exceptional civilization. People are freer in the West than anywhere else in the world. And the progress made, for example on the race question, is not because we refused the founding principles of our democratic republic, but because we challenged ourselves to honor them.

It is untrue that the imperialism of the capitalist class, enabled by the governments of the West, goes unrecognized, then and now. But what does seem to go unrecognized on the left is that opposition to imperialism is a western value. Our history books admit past slavery and genocide. Abolitionism and conventions against genocide and torture originated in the West. It is untrue that the US government is fascist and that, therefore, antifascist action is justified (anarchists will always find justification for “propaganda of the deed”).

The West established humane treatment of refugees and opened its countries to immigrants. The United States is the most generous country in the world when it comes to welcoming immigrants. It’s absurd to claim that borders and border control indicate evil by virtue of their existence or their existence in the West, that the immigration processing centers found in the US, Norway, Sweden, and elsewhere in the civilized world are “concentration camps.” But just as for anticommunist propagandists every prison in the former Soviet Union must carry the horrific tag of gulag, and every death the result of some decision Stalin made, so immigration processing centers must be concentration camps. Because the United States is a wicked nation.

To be sure, a great task remains: overthrowing capitalism. Capitalism is the source of modern imperialism and war. More fundamentally, it’s the contradiction keeping liberalism alienated from itself (for example, restricting the free exchange of ideas with the institution of copyright). But it is the very exceptionalism of the West that produced the United Nations and the recognition of human rights bringing peace and progress to its nations. That a project has problems does not condemn the project.

It’s often said that, from the vantage point of the North Pole, everywhere is south. Using this metaphor, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has noted the existence of a “Left Pole,” a vantage point from where any belief that doesn’t conform to dogma must be rightwing and therefore bad. AOC and her crowd live at the Left Pole.

In July of 2016, I published an op-ed in Truthout,  “Changing the Subject from the Realities of Death by Cop,” based on a longer February 2016 blog entry,  “Heather Mac Donald’s Red Herring,” that, among other things, takes issue with the tactic of downplaying the disproportionate shootings of black men by cops by changing the subject to the problem of “black-on-black” crime typical of neoconservative writers. I used Heather Mac Donald’s February 2016 op-ed, “The Myths of Black Lives Matter,” published in The Wall Street Journal, as the paradigm of this tack. The online publication of Mac Donald’s piece in July and my Truthout piece led to a timely appearance on the Project Censored radio program out of Berkeley, California, where I discussed the matter with hosts Mickey Huff and Peter Philips. Mac Donald’s op-ed is based on her book, The War on Cops, published that same year.

At the time, I was defending the Black Lives Matter movement against what I perceived as a rightwing effort to diminish the movement’s moral significance. I accused them of doing this by portraying the reluctance of black leaders and white liberals to admit the crisis of black-on-black crime as revealing more of a commitment to identity politics than to protecting blacks lives against violence. The number of black men dying at the hands of others black men compared to the number of black men dying at the hands of white cops, neoconservatives argued, suggested that a genuine commitment to black lives would reflect a different set of priorities. Since publicly engaging this argument, I have had a change of mind.

Even while I was criticizing Mac Donald and the neoconservative tack, my appreciation for Black Lives Matter had already been diminished by its resort to such tactics as racially-exclusive event organizing and interfering with speaking events focused on other matters. I was troubled when, in July 2015, Black Lives Matter activists commandeered the stage at a town hall event organized by the progressive Netroots Nation conference, interrupting Martin O’Malley in order to push the issue of police killings of black men. This disruptive tactic was used again in August at a pro-Social Security rally in Seattle where Bernie Sanders was speaking. The tactic of disrupting public events runs counter to my civil rights and liberties commitments. I advocate a politics of equality based on individualism; with the exception of social class, exclusivity based on group identity disappears persons into collectivities led by self-appointed leaders or moral entrepreneurs. Moreover, he heckler’s veto interferes with the free exchange of opinion.

Then came the 2014 incorporation of BLM, which had found its voice with the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the Trayvon Martin killing and #BlackLivesMatter, into the larger Movement for Black Lives, which advocates reparations for blacks and dilutes the problem of police violence and economic injustice with postmodernist rhetoric of intersectionality. Even though the larger movement was inspired by a growing awareness of the disproportionate number of black deaths at the hands of police officer, spurred by protests surrounding the shooting of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, the promise of BLM risked being hijacked by identitarians for other purposes. The loss of focus was evidenced, for example, by the movement taking up the plight of Arabs in the Jewish-occupied territories in Palestine. This move was not only a distraction but resurrected the old tension between black and Jewish communities (see Race, Ethnicity, Religion, and the Problem of Conceptual Conflation and Inflation).

However, it wasn’t until I watched a video on YouTube of linguist John McWhorter using death by cop as an example in interrogating antiracism that I came to understand that, all the other problems of the movement aside, the core premise of Black Lives Matters, namely that death by cop is the work of racial bias in policing, is problematic. The video is an extract of a debate organized by Reason Magazine between McWhorter, an associate professor at Columbia University, and Nikhil Singh, who teaches at NYU, recorded in New York City on November 14, 2018. You can find the full debate on YouTube, but here is the relevant portion:

I want to stress that McWhorter’s argument does not reach the conclusion I reach in the present blog entry but rather pointed me in the direction of that conclusion by questioning the soundness of the claim that racial disparities in death by cop result from cops operating on the basis of anti-black prejudice and hooking this up in an implied but compelling manner to the problem of murder in America’s central cities.

One of the points McWhorter makes that struck me in particular is how we think about black overrepresentation in welfare utilization, an issue I often address in my sociology classes when the subject turns to the problem of poverty. Consider the following statistics gathered at the height of the welfare reform debate in the mid-1990s (from Robert A. Moffitt and Peter T. Gottschalk chapter “Ethnic and Racial Differences in Welfare Receipt in the United States,” in the 2001 book America Becoming: Racial Trends and Their Consequences).

TABLE: Participation Rates of Households in Means-Tested Welfare Programs, 1994–1996 (percent)

	AFDC	Food Stamps	Medicaid	Housing Assistance
Hispanic	11.8	20.1	24.5	9.1
Non-Hispanic White	2.7	5.7	8.3	3.5
Non-Hispanic Black	14.0	23.3	27.0	15.3

I taught introductory sociology as a graduate teaching associate in the mid-1990s, and when conservative students would note black overrepresentation in welfare utilization as evidence of a deficit of black self-reliance, progressive students pushed back by noting that the majority of those on public assistance are white. I would then get into the difference between frequencies and proportions. Both groups of students we able to leave class feeling as if their arguments enjoyed support.

At first it seems as though McWhorter is about to contradict himself, since it sounds like his argument concerning police shootings is that, numerically, more whites are killed by police than are blacks, while at the same time quoting statistics showing that blacks are overrepresented in death by cop incidents. But then he notes that, because poverty affects a greater proportion of black people than white people, and that structural racism is a reasonable explanation for this disparity, disproportionality in welfare utilization is not a remarkable fact. It follows, then, that if poverty makes it more likely for a person to encounter a policeman, and if greater frequency of interactions with the police increases the probability that one will be killed by police, then structural racism, not racially-biased policing, may be the better explanation for black overrepresentation in death by cop.

I made a similar point logic-wise to reporter Paul Srubas in a March 19, 2006 article in the Green Bay Press Gazette concerning racial disparities in drug busts. In Green Bay at that time, statistics showed that blacks were sixteen times more likely to have been arrested for drugs than whites.  Srubas was asking the role of racism in the pattern of arrests. “I don’t think cops are being consciously racist,” I responded; “it’s a product of where they are patrolling.” And where cops patrol, I explained further, reflects class-based patterns of policing, which, as a matter of course, disproportionately snare blacks in the dragnet. The police official being interviewed for balance took exception to analysis saying that race and ethnicity had nothing to do with it. Clearly race has something to do with it. Scientific surveys consistently find that blacks are no more likely to use illegal drugs than are whites, yet blacks represent one third of arrests, one-half of all convictions, and approximately three-quarters of all those sent to prison for drugs. The question is how race figures into the dynamic.

McWhorter then shifts to a discussion of antiracism as religion, as faith-belief, and notes that one of the elements of faith-belief is avoidance of commentary by others, out of respect for scared topics, concerning certain problems in a community because of the expectation that they will be perceived as offensive, even blasphemous. I take it that his point is that avoiding sacred cows functions to diminish the significance of problems at the expense of members of that community.

For example, and this example is my own, recognition of the hijab as representing the extreme sexualization of male-female interaction in Islam, a burden that impacts women disproportionately since they’re the ones expected to keep the male libido in check by adhering to strict modesty rules of dress and segregation, is seen as insulting to Muslims and will kick up the ire of that community, particularly among its female adherents. Consequently, people don’t go there. But this stifles feminist critique of oppressive Islamic gender rules and that is a victory for the patriarchy. Another example (again, my own) is the inappropriateness of pointing out the impotence of prayer or the function of prayer as self-interested attempts to assuage anxiety or signal virtue. Christopher Hitchens’ observation that it is acceptable for the faithful to actively encourage deathbed conversions yet unacceptable, even downright hateful, to talk a sick and dying man out of his expectation of an afterlife, is a useful illustration of the way faith-belief is privileged and functions to protect the supposed integrity of dogma by deterring and shaming its critics. (Yet another problem is the way slogans like “Black Lives Matter” and “Support Our Troops” put critics in position of sounding like they affirming the opposite, as if they they don’t believe black lives matter.)

The failure to deal with the alarming number of black men who die at the hands of other black men, McWhorter contends, is an example of the suspension of disbelief, acting to bracket logic and substitute for it dogma that denies the problem. An etiquette comes into play when the problem of violence in black communities is raised, notes Mcwhorter, especially when trying to understand why police violence is held up as a much greater threat to black men than violence in black communities, the suppression of which is the function of law enforcement. If you bring it up at all, you’re supposed to stop pushing the matter when you don’t get a satisfactory answer. Of course, most are reluctant to even ask the question because of the risk of being criticized. Heather Mac Donald, a committed atheist, a woman particularly resistant to the power of faith-belief (see “In-Depth with Heather Mac Donald” on C-SPAN), does not suffer from such reluctance. (What one comes to understand when taking time to listen to Mac Donald on the issues is that what we today call neoconservatism is really stalwart dedication to secular liberalism of the bourgeois variety. Disagreements over which class should be in charge of society does not automatically affirm or obviate the soundness of claims being made.)

In my Truthout op-ed, I write, “The BLM protest is not about black-on-black crime, but about racial disparities in death by cop. Decrying black-on-black homicide after every high-profile killing of a civilian by a cop has become cliché for conservative pundits (and almost obligatory for liberals who want to be taken seriously). But it is entirely beside the point.” I can see now that what I am dismissing here is that black-on-black crime matters and the usefulness of questioning why a movement claiming that black lives matter would not put central to its struggle a phenomenon that causes many times more black deaths than cop shootings. It matters because of the following facts: In 2015, civilian white killers took 229 civilian black lives. The Washington Post puts the numbers of black people shot by the police that at 258. Of those, more than 85 percent were armed. In comparison, 2,380 black civilians were killed by other black civilians. Black-on-black murder accounts for half of all murder cases in the United States annually, mostly at the hands of male perpetrators. Black males comprise less than six percent of the US population. That is a crisis and dismissing it because neoconservatives point it out for whatever reason is an exercise in antiracist thought stopping. At the time I declared myself an antiracist. I have since left the religion.

Denying the extent of lethal violence in black communities by understandably resisting what may be a red herring spawned by neoconservative desire to defend the integrity of American policing is at the same time a failure on the part of a movement that claims to defend black lives to acknowledge the greater threat to those lives. Moreover, the thought-stopping exercise of attacking Mac Donald and her ilk causes observers to fail to see how both the racial disproportionality in death by cop and the extraordinarily high frequency of death of black men at the hands of other black men have the same underlying cause: structural inequality disproportionately affecting black communities. If concerted government action could bring into proportion with other murder-victim ratios the black-on-black ratio, then the racial disproportionality in death by cop would largely resolve itself since the root cause—crime and violence caused by structural inequality—would be eliminated. In other words, the attack on Mac Donald is itself a red herring.

“Note that this does not mean that the Irish, Italians, Jews, Poles, Arabs, and so on didn’t face discrimination, hostility, assertions of inferiority and occasionally even violence. They did. But historically, they were also considered white.” —David Bernstein

“Our civilization is built on two foundations. One of them is awareness of the individual human being’s absolute value independent of race, religion, and social background. The other is the freedom to think and express one’s thoughts.” —Bruce Bawer

There is no such thing as biological race. That populations share genes with greater or lesser frequency is explained by a mundane fact: people tend to mate with people they live around. As a result, their offspring will generally look more like them than they will the parents of unrelated or less related offspring. The further apart the families, the more dissimilar the offspring will appear. Yet, even in migration, people tend to reproduce with those who look like the people from the places they left. Because of this, the appearance of so-called racial types enjoys stability over time and space. The same is true with language and dialect. People who live around each other will tend to sound like each other. They will also carry themselves similarly. And so on. But that does not mean they are a racial type.

As was obvious in my recent entry about the impact Kenan Malik’s 1996 The Meaning of Race (“Kenan Malik: Assimilation, Multiculturalism, and Immigration”) had on me, awareness that there is no such thing as biological race is not a recent development. At the same time, this good news has still a ways to travel. For the definitive demolition of race as a biological entity, I urge readers to pick up Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi, and Alberto Piazza’s The History and Geography of Human Genes, also published in 1996. History and Geography appeared shortly after the appearance of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life and J. Philippe Rushton’s Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective, both published in 1994, and knocked down the premise these books share: that human variation can be explained by the three-races-of-man model (the model taken for granted in my 1970 World Book Encyclopedia). Compiling decades of population genetics research and devising a clock to date the natural history of our species, Cavalli-Sforza and associates reconstruct the origins of human populations and the routes people took to spread the genome across the planet. Consequently, they show that race is confused with ancestry.

The work of Cavalli-Sforza and associates was buttressed that same year by the publication of an expanded edition of The Mismeasure of Man (originally published in 1981), a classic work of debunking by evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould taking on the position that “the social and economic differences between human groups—primarily races, classes, and sexes—arise from inherited, inborn distinctions and that society, in this sense, is an accurate reflection of biology,” what is often referred to by proponents as “race realism.” The Mismeasure of Man was expanded to directly rebut the arguments advanced in The Bell Curve. Readers interested in this topic should also check out Richard Lewontin’s 2006 article “Confusion About Human Races,” as well as his 1984 Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature (along with Steven Rose and Leon Kamin) and his 1991 Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA for more in-depth treatments of the topic. (Gould and Lewontin were colleagues at Harvard and widely regarded as pioneers in their respective fields in evolutionary biology.)

This wave of debunking held for a while, but, as Angela Saini discusses in “The Disturbing Return of Scientific Racism,” published recently in WIRED UK, those who wish race were an actual biological reality keep trying to make their wishes appear as reality. It’s hard to let a useful ideology go.

I do hope readers of this blog will take some time out of their day and read Saini’s piece even if they don’t check out the other materials. Debunking race is one of the more important projects of the rational left. I have personally been involved for a number of years in thinking about the problems of scientific racism and sociobiology (see, for example, my essay “The Myth of Extraordinary Evil: A Challenge to Evolutionary Theories of Genocide and Xenophobia,” based on a paper I presented at the Mid-South Sociological Meetings in 2009). It is vital that we stay on top of this problem. Race realism is a project of the contemporary political right, espoused by members of what Eric Weinstein tagged the Intellectual Dark Web, the offspring of secular elements of neoconservatism, a stealth repackaging of the Progressive Era Anglo-Saxon racialism that inspired the lethal pseudoscience advanced by ethnic Germans during the National Socialist period in Central Europe. Social media algorithms homogenizing content have provided not only easy access to race realist discourse, but a mechanism for virtually trapping regular visitors in that universe. (See The New York Times story on Caleb Kane and Jimmy Dore’s conversation with Kane about the article.)

Debunking helps combat not only the race essentialism of the right, but also the race essentialism of the left, whose antiracism reifies assumptions about racially exclusive identities (see Adolphe Reed Jr.’s . “Antiracism: a Neoliberal Alternative to a Left”). The paradox of the postmodern left, which has abandoned class politics for identity, is to accept the premise that racial groups are an organic basis for collective action, that grouped averages stand in place of concrete individuals. While race essentialism has proven successful for rightwing politics, which effectively exploits race resentment to build popular support, it is, for leftwing politics, a disorganizing ideology, as it fractures consciousness about the material basis of a genuine emancipatory politics: social class and class struggle. As Walter Benjamin pointed out in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the core principle of fascism is to give the people not their right, which is democratic control over the forces of production, but racial and ethnical aesthetics. It is, therefore, strange to see the left embracing identity in this way, and it explains the rise of authoritarianism on the left, seen in mobbing and violence, as well as censorious desire. The task of the left is to expose the false dogma of identity, not put it central to its praxis.

In a forthcoming blog entry, I will explore further the difference between contesting concepts for increasing their validity, on the one hand, and, on the other, the practice of making concepts slippery for ideological purposes in thinking about sex and gender. That essay will be a deep epistemological critique of third wave feminism. The current entry reflects on arguments I have made recently to clarify the concepts of race, ethnicity, and religion in order to gain rational separation from popular understandings of these notions, on the one hand, and rigorous scientific delineation of concepts, on the other. I explain how sociologists understand race as socially constructed—a human invention that is culturally-historically produced, situated, and transformed. I emphasize that my discipline of sociology endeavors to develop theories and methods that resist reification. Reification is defined as the problem of treating concepts representing things as the things themselves. It is the error of treating as real abstractions used to explain and understand concrete things. However, for some political types, contesting concepts has an ideological purpose: to make concepts slippery for ideological projects. The latter is at work on variants of the right and the left.

* * *

Applied to categories of living things, the term race first occurs in the late sixteenth century and refers to breeding stocks of animals (and plants). Thus, at its inception, it refers to biology and increasingly applied to people with the development of scientific rationalism. By the seventeenth century, we find race being used to refer to physical or phenotypical traits, as well as associated capacities and proclivities, as a core concept in the developing science of evolutionary biology. As theory, albeit informally today, the discourse of natural history conceptualizes the various species as naturally sorting into biological categories lying between subspecies and strains, varieties, or subraces. Just as different races or breeds of dogs have different capacities and propensities (hunting dogs differ from herding dogs not only in appearance), so do people possess different capacities and propensities depending on their racial classification, which is based on appearance. Both the terms describing this view applied to people, racism and racialism, appear in the early twentieth century. Race is thus a product of the practical science of animal husbandry caught up in the context of the modern scientific revolution and used by bourgeois elites to fracture the proletariat for economic and political advantage.

The application of the concept of race with respect to Homo sapiens fell away from mainstream science following the eugenical horrors of Nazi-style fascism, but remained lurking at its periphery. As a reaction to the evolution of the West towards social democracy and possibly democratic socialism in the post-war period, racialism enjoyed something of a renaissance on the political right. In the 1970s, psychologists Arthur Jensen (UC-Berkeley) and Richard Herrnstein (Harvard) used their reputations to push the argument that race was real and that racial groups were differentiated among other things by intelligence, which they held was largely innate and heritable.

By the 1990s, racialism was finding its way into mainstream thought. Herrnstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve is representative of academic-sounding scholarship that claims intelligence is unequally distributed across racial groups. Rushton’s Race, Evolution, and Behavior claims that biological race determines cultural and moral outcomes. Blacks, whites, and Orientals (his word choice)—Negroids, Caucasoids, and Mongoloids—are differentiated not only biologically (cranial capacity, density of cortical neurons, size of genitalia, etc.) but in cultural achievements, sexual promiscuity, crime rates, and so on. Claiming to operate in an objective Darwinian framework, Rushton (a psychologist) argues that blacks and whites have different reproductive strategies, the former pursuing the r-selection strategy of large litter sizes and less parental attention, the latter the K-selection strategy of small litter sizes and more parental attention. Neo-Darwinianism is a set up for the old eugenics argument that social welfare programs allow inferior racial types that would otherwise be weeded out through natural selection to artificially perpetuate their kind, producing, perhaps unintentionally, dysgenesis, or the degradation of the superior races.

There is a massive racist literature in between and following the rise of racialism and sociobiology, with evolutionary psychology representing the latest manifestation of race realism. I have considered devoting a blog entry to destroying this absurd and hateful point of view. But, then, the aforementioned—Gould, Lewontin and his army, Malik, Saini, Cavalli-Sforza and his army, and many others—have already done this, so I will for the time being direct you their way. The point I want to make here is that it is not true that the concept of intrinsic race has always been a flexible notion meaning different things in different times. It originated to describe organisms in a biological way and it continues in this usage. Moreover, the races as we understand them today, while certainly subject to social evolution, enjoy remarkably stable cultural histories, and this is what gives the racialist literature face validity. Crucially, then, the stability in racial categories over the long term contradicts the premise of whiteness studies which, with its roots in historicism, presupposes that which it claims is constructed. I next turn to the literature on whiteness and the postmodern mindscape of identity politics that lays a veneer of academic credibility over its pretensions.

* * *

According to the original chief proponent of whiteness studies, Theodore Allen, initiated by his 1975 pamphlet Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race, British colonists invented whiteness in the late-seventeenth-early-eighteenth century in the American colonies as an hegemonic strategy disorganizing the working class by manufacturing racial loyalties that disrupted class solidarity. So far so good. However, influenced by postmodern emphasis on power of discourse and narrative in reality construction, this view was expanded in a body of literature arguing that the whiteness that was at first narrowly constructed to apply to white British workers only over a long period of time came to include other Europeans (thus greatly shrinking the number of “actual” white people in history). George Lipsitz gave this a useful hook in his 1995 essay, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the ‘White’ Problem in American Studies” (American Quarterly, 47 (3, 1995): 369-387) that resonated among my peers in graduate school in the 1990s. Allen’s formulation was highly influential among New Left types and led to the widespread adoption of the “white privilege” rhetoric that we hear assumed by the establishment progressives.

Perhaps more than any other work, David Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, published in 1991, establishes the foundation of whiteness studies. The Wages of Whiteness was considered the go-to during my graduate school stint (1996-2000), and whiteness studies, along with critical race theory, influenced me greatly during the production of my doctoral dissertation. I reflect on this experience in the entry “Committing the Crime it Condemns,” but I want to add here that I never published my dissertation in book form because I came to doubt this literature not long after graduation. (I moreover became concerned with anti-environmentalism and the Iraq War, work that constituted the basis of my successful case for tenure at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.) I was satisfied with my historical analysis, echoed a few months later in Loïc Wacquant’s “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh,” published in Punishment and Society (in 2001) and years later in Michele Alexander’s 2010 The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The social science in my dissertation was sound. It was the moral claims that framed what I intended as a work in interested sociology about which I became unsure.

A year after I left graduate school, in an article published in International Labor and Working-Class History (“Whiteness and the Historian’s Imagination”) the same year as Wacquant’s article on the deadly symbiosis, labor historian Eric Arnesen dismantled whiteness studies, accusing it of the historically decontextualizing practice of “keyword literalism.” Arnesen’s article greatly influenced the evolution of my thinking. He identifies why whiteness studies has proved so seductive: “whiteness has become a blank screen onto which those who claim to analyze it can project their own meanings.” More devastating is his critique of motive, namely that whiteness studies (in a way analogous to the reaction to authoritarian socialism that produced devotees to the emerging neoconservative movement in the 1960s-1970s) represents a collective reaction on the left reflecting disappointment in the failures of the socialist movement to make an ideal socialist society and of whites to transcend racism and nationalism. He notes, for example, David Roediger’s admission that his The Wages of Whiteness was written in reaction to working class support for Reaganism and the politics of the New Right. This insight helps us understand why, in response to the new wave of rightwing populism, rather than jettisoning its race (and gender) politics, the left recedes ever further into the futile politics of identity.

I highly recommend Arnesen’s article to you (it lies behind a paywall, so I suggest seeing if your local library has access to the the journals of Cambridge University Press). However, the claims of overdeveloped whiteness studies can be rather easily debunked without resorting to the academic literature. For example, in his March 2017 article “Sorry, but the Irish were always ‘white’ (and so were Italians, Jews and so on),” published in The Washington Post, David Bernstein, law professor at the George Mason University and contributor to the useful legal blog, The Volokh Conspiracy, shows how asking simple questions exposes the distortions of ideologically-driven academic literature:

Were members of the group allowed to go to “whites-only” schools in the South, or otherwise partake of the advantages that accrued to whites under Jim Crow? Were they ever segregated in schools by law, anywhere in the United States, such that “whites” went to one school, and the group in question was relegated to another? When laws banned interracial marriage in many states (not just in the South), if a white Anglo-Saxon wanted to marry a member of the group, would that have been against the law? Some labor unions restricted their membership to whites. Did such unions exclude members of the group in question? Were members of the group ever entirely excluded from being able to immigrate to the United States, or face special bans or restrictions in becoming citizens?

“If you use such objective tests,” Bernstein writes, “you find that Irish, Jews, Italians and other white ethnics were indeed considered white by law and by custom.” Bernstein goes on to note something I have pointed out to people in the past, that “some lighter-skinned African Americans of mixed heritage ‘passed’ as white by claiming they were of Arab descent and that explained their relative swarthiness,” and that this in turn shows “that Arab Americans, another group whose ‘whiteness’ has been questioned, were considered white.” Persons of African, Asian, and Native American descent, on the other hand, did not enjoy access to white institutions. These distinctions are centuries old. What Bernstein shows without explicitly saying so is that ethnicity, which emerges from cultural space-time, organized around language, custom, and a sense of national belonging, is not analogous to race, an externally-imposed hierarchal-arranged control system based on biological categories.

I hasten to add one criticism of Bernstein’s piece. Bernstein argues that his method stands apart from the ahistorical sociological method of defining “whiteness” as persons “fully socially accepted as the equals of Americans of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic stock.” Correctly, he exposes, even if not intentionally, the aim of whiteness studies: to make whites out to be a minority in the trans-Atlantic space-time by treating white ethnics as historically nonwhite, as well as the approach that allows for the conceptual slipperiness that underpins this academic standpoint. Nonetheless, in one respect, he is punching at a straw man: this is not how sociologists define whiteness. Neither racialists nor the general public define whiteness in this way, either. This is a construction of whiteness studies and works as a background assumption in the white privilege rhetoric, which enjoys widespread purchase among modern progressives. Thus the notion of attaching the exclusivity of whiteness to national groups who perpetrated colonialism and genocide has emerged as part of an ideological project, gaining substantial traction with postmodernist turn in political discourse. But just as conceptual slipperiness has a political purpose, so does maintaining conceptual clarity has a political purpose; the difference is that the latter is political without being ideological. This is the value in clarifying conceptual vocabulary and theoretical frameworks.

* * *

What we can see, then, is that, despite the concept of race referring to biological entities, there are those who find it advantageous to expand the meaning of racism to include cultural things. We see this in the selective extension of the charge of racism to smear cultural criticism the left doesn’t like. For example, if I criticize the culture of a people living in a particular geographical location, and the people living there are perceived as racially homogenous, then my criticism of the culture risks being accused of racism—if it is not directed at white people.[1] But the accusation of racism in the case of cultural criticism could only be valid if the criticism assumed that the culture criticized is an expression of the capacities and propensities of the race of the people living there. Ironically, assuming culture is a projection of race is a tenet of racism itself!

I reject the concept of intrinsic race, therefore it would be incorrect to suppose that any cultural criticism I make reflects an underlying racist sentiment. My cultural criticisms conceptualize culture—which sociologists define as the values and habits of a people living in a particular type of society—as an set of phenomena emerging from and sustained by associated historical and material conditions. This is a basic understanding in Marxism, the general framework in which I work. So, while it is racist to say that somebody should be distrusted because of his phenotypic profile, it is not racist to say somebody should be distrusted because of his cultural (or religious) orientation. For example, if I am concerned about neo-Nazis, which I most certainly am, it is not because they are, with rare exception, racially white (I am racially white, as well), but because neo-Nazis subscribe to fascist and racist culture and ideology. I moreover object to their cooptation of cultural icons and symbols, such as the incorporation of ancient Nordic imagery into racist symbology, that did not originally contain white supremacists notions. Moreover, it would be absurd to defend white supremacy on the grounds that it offends white people who subscribe to it. There is nothing racist about opposition to a fascistic, sexist, heterosexist ideology. Yet we hear all the time that opposition to Islam is racist.

Consider the blog entry I made several weeks ago in which I analyzed the problems of the Central American culture of violence and expressed concerns, based on evidence, about Central American migration to the United States and its potential to exacerbate crime rates (“The Northern Triangle, the Migrant Flow, and the Risk of Criminal Violence”). Some on the left might smear such an analysis as racist. But I make no claims about race at all in that essay. Race is not assumed or implied. Neither is ethnicity. The unfortunate reality is that some places are dangerous to travel to and a big part of the reason is the culture associated with those places. In contrast, there are regions and societies that enjoy higher levels of cultural development, by which I mean they are better for human development and wellbeing, which are safe to travel to.

In the more highly developed cultures, women are not second class citizens, homosexuals are free to be themselves, and persons can practice whatever religion or no religion at all. In these societies, group and interpersonal forms of violence are exceptional. Yet many have been intimidated into refraining from stating the truth about this for fear of being called “racist.” But one has to expand the concept of race in defiance of its centuries-old meaning to manufacture a claim that criticism of cultures inadequate to human needs and rights is automatically racist. Surely, it has not escaped the reader’ attention that those who make this claim can be extraordinarily hypocritical. Why, if it is so wrong to criticize culture, is it so easy to criticize the culture associated with white-majority societies? Here the critique explicitly goes after a race. Some left identitarians even reject science because it is the work of white culture, while accusing critics of sorcery and superstition as racist (see, for example, dreadful essay by Current Affairs writer Aisling McCrea, “The Magical Thinking of Guys of Love Logic”). What is the desired goal of this politics? It cannot possibility be to dismantle racism.

A useful instance of the suppression of a social problem by linking culture to race is found in the problem of crime and violence in the central cities of the United States. African Americans are overrepresented in property and violent crime in both of the primary data sources criminologists use to determine the extent of crime and violence. For example, according to the Uniform Crime Report, in 2017 arrests for murder in American cities were much higher for blacks (4,074) than for whites (2,701). The vast majority of those murders were committed by males (6,243 male compared to 815 female). African American males are less than six percent of the population. These facts indicate significant overrepresentation of blacks in murder (as perpetrator and victims). Robbery by blacks (34,367 in 2017) exceeded robbery by whites (26,633 that same year). Arrests for weapons possession was approximately equal for whites (49,387) and blacks (46,137), overwhelming involving males. The Uniform Crime Report has been criticized for relying on police reporting; however, the National Crime Victimization Survey, while indicating that approximately half of crimes detected by its method are reported to the police, find the measures nonetheless correspond, meaning that underreporting by the FBI does not significant affect the racial distribution of criminal violence.

However, it would be a mistake to suppose that black males are overrepresented in street crime because of their race. Black males are overrepresented in crime and violence because they are more likely to live in central city areas marked by a culture of violence and lawlessness. And this culture is the product of persistent inequalities of wealth and power not genetics. Capitalist relations of production are the root cause of the problem. Race has no effects because it is not a real thing (this is why the IQ studies must be wrong). So when the Center for American Progress warns of “The Dangerous Racialization of Crime in U.S. News Media,” they are only half right. It is wrong to suggest that it’s the mainstream media creating a false perception about the overrepresentation of blacks in criminal violence. African Americans are overrepresented in criminal victimization. The Center for American Progress is (accidentally) right to describe the reporting as “racialization” of the crime problem. However, the desire to deny black overrepresentation in criminal violence causes the Center for American Progress to hide the relationship between the inequality systematically generated by capitalism and criminal violence in America’s central cities. Thus the class dynamic is erased by the left identitarian impulse.

Can we finally admit this basic point: variable cultural conditions have nothing to with the race of the people living there? If we are non-racist we have to. (And, yes, there is such a thing as non-racism once we let go of the irrational cosmic sense of identity where you are either a racist or an antiracist.) The truth is that the West is a great place to live, which is why so many people are eager to come here, even to endure the concentration camps westerners euphemistically call “immigrant detention facilities” (see “Migrant Detention Facilities are Not Fascist Concentration Camps”). But the West isn’t a great place to live because white people are the majority; it is a great place to live, even with its faults (which are many) because of its culture of secularism and personal freedom.[2] But it is not great everywhere, and this is because we still have to transcend the inequalities of capitalism, and that won’t happen as long as the left is diverted from its historic mission by identitarian politics.

Since variability in the conditions of existence is due in large measure to the difference cultures produce and sustain through the behavior of their agents—human beings—there is an urgent problem to consider: the recklessness of ignoring the fact of humans as culture-bearing vehicles when developing immigration policies. Patterned attitudes and behavior are products of inculturation. Because human beings are the bearers of the cultures they are socialized to carry, their values and habits come with them. Therefore, it is not necessarily an expression of racism or xenophobia to worry about individuals from other cultures; it depends on the culture and the relationship of the individual in question to that culture. What else explains these tendencies? Certainly not race, since, again, race is not an actual thing. Clearly, then, smearing such considerations as racist is a tactic aiming at undermining an immigration policy that considers the culture-ideology of the place of origin in order to protect a nation’s inhabitants and advance the national interest, which would, ideally, advance the interests of working families. These are civic nationalist not ethnonationalist concerns. As I have made clear in my blog entries, consistent with orthodox Marxism, I am a proponent of the nation-state and civic nationalism. What I am not is a third worldists or a race identitarian. That racism is confused with culture and irreligious criticisms in popular consciousness is a spectacular propaganda achievement of bourgeois cultural managers.

Paradoxically perhaps, the progressive left already recognizes individual attitudes and behaviors are cultural products. However, in their way of seeing the world, these patterns are essentialized as race and the defense of them clothed in antiracist fashion. The most obvious example is the claim of “white privilege,” something that all whites have by virtue of being white. It used to be the case that those racialized as whites were seen as historically privileged and groups wanted to be included in the structures that whites benefited from by eliminating racial system and becoming recognized as individuals with equal access to the nation’s institutions (which presupposes nation-states). That was the traditional civil rights approach—the Old Left way. Now whites are seen collectively as pariah and the goal is to dismantle the culture of secular liberalism as an expression of white supremacy, while reifying race as essential. So, while we can rationally draw a distinction between multiracialism and multiculturalism, for the left these are conflated and become causal and celebrated as diversity. This is the cultural strategy adapted by neoliberalism. It is an alchemy that then allows the smearing of opponents of multiculturalism (designed to undermine common culture) as opponents of multiracialism. (In various conversations the reader can find on YouTube, conservative scholar Victor Davis Hansen admirably explains this distinction and its effects throughout history.) To make my argument clear, I have no problem with dismantling whiteness. However, I see eliminating whiteness as a step in emancipating individuals from the system of racism altogether, not as a reconfiguration of racial oppression that makes demands on individuals on the basis of race.

* * *

In the current political context, the pariah status of whiteness has produced some curious effects. Such is the perceived advantage in defining oneself as nonwhite in order to escape the collective responsibility that comes with the pariah identity, some Jews have taken to publicly denying their whiteness. Here Bernstein is right to point out that the definition of whiteness is ideologically narrowed to persons “fully socially accepted as the equals of Americans of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic stock.” Those whites are responsible for the horrors of the world. Those whites owe the world reparations, which comes also in the form of open borders, on account of this “truth” (whiteness is often assumed in claims made on the West; see “Reparations and Open Borders.”) Some Jews have felt the sting of that line of thinking and don’t want to be lumped with the racialized bearers of those alleged horrors. After all, in the white privilege view, all whites carry around their necks the cosmic albatross of racism.

Seth Frantzman, writing in The Jerusalem Post, (“Now they call us ‘White Jews’,” December 26, 2018), cautions his readers about the whitening of Jews. He calls it the “new American antisemitism” and it is a “creeping hatred.” “The labeling of Jews as ‘white’ and debates on how to ‘treat Jews,’ as if Jews are packages in a supermarket,” he writes, “is a form of dehumanizing rhetoric designed to force Jewish people into a binary of ‘white/non-white’ that is currently trendy in US discussions.” He continues, “The new toxic discussion taking place primarily in the United States is designed to label Jews as ‘white supremacists.’” Triggering Frantzman are things said by Tamika Mallory, leader of the Women’s March, to The New York Times about what marchers had been discussing, principally that “white Jews, as white people, uphold white supremacy.” Frantzman also quotes Rebecca Vilkomerson who tweeted: “We white Jews especially need to recognize that centering our own status as victims here is a power move, as well as a way to avoid self-reflection on our relative status in a white supremacist world.” The jargon of identity politics at its finest!

A March 27, 2019 Jewish Journal carried the headline “We’re not White, We Define Ourselves.” In the essay, Karen Lehman Bloch writes that she defines her race based on DNA and the “plethora of genetic research showing that, lo and behold, just like our Sephardic and Mizrahic brothers and sisters, the DNA of Ashkenazim shows an irrefutable connection to the Levant—meaning we’re not white.” Yet populations from the Levant are white according to centuries old racial understanding. Her essay is accompanied by pictures of prominent Jews suggesting that this proves Jews aren’t white. But nobody in the pictures supplied would be considered nonwhite in the West except by white supremacists which are, contrary to white privilege rhetoric, rare. Of course that doesn’t mean that race is biological. It means that a consensus formed a long time ago that people native to West Asia (and North Africa) are white. Bloch is not only claiming to define herself (something that has become fashionable in the postmodern culture); she is claiming to revise the history of racial theory in a personal way. She has so convinced herself of this that she was taken aback by Jews who criticized her for denying Jewish whiteness.

It isn’t until roughly midway through the article that Bloch’s motive becomes obvious: she experiences the same anxiety that moves Frantzman’s complaint. It’s the “current practitioners of identity politics,” Bloch writes, that have forced her to push back against the alleged whitening of Jews. “Jews have been told: We are inexorably white and thus responsible for colonialism, the slave trade and mass incarceration,” she writes. “We are white supremacists, and thus responsible for all racism and oppression.” If a person is not white then she cannot be held accountable for these things that white people did and do. “We are white and thus incapable of being persecuted—past and present.” Obviously, this is a real problem if one wants to be persecuted—past and present. There is advantage in victimhood (see McCrea’s “Reclaiming Victimhood,” in Current Affairs). By denying one’s whiteness, one can claim that advantage. Bloch then responds to Vilkomerson: “The Holocaust was a white-on-white crime and thus of little import. We should stop ‘centering’ ourselves! As part of the white European ruling caste, we are the primary beneficiaries of white privilege.”

Generalizing its anxiety, the organizers of the Woman’s March, the movement itself provoked by the success of rightwing populism in the 2016 election cycle (a success I pin on the failures of the left), stoked by elite concern about establishment hegemony, and informed by Black Lives Matter, cuts a wide swath with the white privilege scythe. This testifies to the power of the black identity movement. In 2016, Black Lives Matter included in their platform the following: “The U.S. justifies and advances the global war on terror via its alliance with Israel and is complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people.” BLM described Israel as an “apartheid state,” condemning settlements and the “apartheid wall.” Many Jews expressed concern with the pairing of BLM criticism of whiteness with the Jewish state’s national security measures. Indeed, the rhetoric surrounding Israeli security policy has widespread application. Condemnation of the security barriers in Israel is, in part, the reason why discussions of the security barrier along the US southern border, which existed uncontroversially for decades since the early 1990s, have become so shrill of late. All this has come with Nazi imagery paired with Israeli and US security policy. Joined by leftwing pro-Islamic sympathy, this rhetoric is an ingredient in the antipathies fueling an increase in antisemitism and hate crimes against Jews across the West, a phenomenon that some on the left falsely dismiss as exaggerated.

Under these conditions, especially given the conflation of Jews with Zionists and Israel, it is expected that some Jews will wish to deny their whiteness. “We are responsible for tragedies like New Zealand, especially if we dare to call out anti-Semitism (which doesn’t really exist because we are white),” Bloch writes with a palpable fear. She objects to being white because being white is a terrible thing. It implicates her in centuries of exploitation and oppression. It makes Jews responsible for the deeds of those who are classified as white by the racial theory that Bloch believes she can revise while claiming for herself the power to define her race (ask Rachel Dolezal how transracialism worked out for her). Bloch does not want to be white because it allegedly comes with privileges, and privileges used to be desirable, but now (however unevenly distributed across social class reality they are) they implicate one in having to make good on debts owed to non-whites demanding things on the basis of collective and historic victimization. Unlike many on the left, Bloch does not relish this debt. In this climate, it is therefore better to be nonwhite. So now Ashkenazim is a race. If she is white, then Bloch cannot be a victim of anti-Semitism. Moreover, if Jews are white, then there can be no anti-Semitism, she worries, thus historically racializing her religion and her ethnicity, Bloch claims that, because of race, Jews were persecuted in the Spanish Inquisition, despite the fact that racism did not exist then. At one point, Bloch asks: “do you ever hear the term white Muslim?” Since Muslims are considered white (except by some racists), the redundancy is not uttered in the West. Why would it be?

Bloch’s error is twofold. First, is the error of thinking DNA indicates race. As we have established, DNA is ancestry. Race doesn’t exist as a biological thing. We reject race realism. To be sure, while antisemitism is widely regarded as a form of racism, Semite, which is a language group, is not analogous to race, and this problem is not solved by noting that the term was never used to apply to Semitic people broadly. Historically, antisemitism emerged as a scholarly sounding word for Jew-hatred, which is loathing of Jews as an ethnic and religious group. One understand why there was a need to coin a term for the phenomenon; Jew-hatred is a special case of hatred. Instead of seeing Jews as an inferior race, Jews are feared for their cleverness as a people. Jew-hatred sees Jews as intrinsically evil, bent on controlling the world. It is a conspiracy theory inextricably bound up in theological notions that inhere in both the Christian and the Muslim world. To be sure, its intensity comes with the force of racism. But Jews are nonetheless white. Bernie Sanders is a white man. So is Joe Lieberman. And so on. Second, is the error that individuals on the basis of racial identity are responsible for the deeds of other individuals with whom they share that identity. This is an ancient and irrational conception of responsibility that must be jettisoned. An individual cannot be held responsible for the deeds of those who share his phenotypic characteristics, for these in themselves carry no explanatory power. To think otherwise is to embrace the heart of racism. Antiracism works on the same principle. (See “For the Good of Your Soul Tribal Stigma and the God of Reparations.”)

It is a testament to the irrational state of our contemporary political culture that denying whiteness is seen as a way of avoiding responsibility for things one did not do or could not have done. A far more sensible perspective on this matter is put forward by Ariel Sobel in the January 8, 2019 Forward: “Can We Finally Admit that Jews Can Be Both White and Oppressed?” One might be moved to say the same about Muslims. Or Christians. Try these identities out in the framework of the headline.

I leave this section with a disclaimer: if I have missed some deep sarcasm in Frantzman and Bloch’s work, that’s on me.

* * *

So, if I do not believe race is a biological reality, then why do I insist that Arabs are white? This was a question recently put to me. Without benefit of a lengthy explanation of my argument, it is a reasonable question (this is why I have written this blog entry). I have never claimed that anybody is white in a biological sense. Race is a meaningless construct in human biology. I have pointed out that West Asians and North Africans have historically been racialized as white. But that is a very different claim than saying they a part of a racial type. Earlier, I noted Bernstein’s observation, which I have made myself in the past, namely “that Arab Americans, another group whose ‘whiteness’ has been questioned, were considered white.” I have pointed out that mulattos, as mixed raced persons of white and black heritage were referred to in the past, often claimed to be from Egypt in order to pass as white. I have noted that both the US and UK census have, with rare exception, racially coded Arab populations as white. The whiteness of Arabs is consistent with the socially constructed nature of race, and the stability in this construction speaks to the persistence of common sense racial perception.

My concern is not with racializing people biologically. My concern is over why there is an effort to racially recode Arabs as nonwhite. I am interested in the politics of this. What lies behind the desire to redefine an ethnicity as a race? One suspects that, at least to some extent, the desire shares reasons with the desire of some Jews to deny their whiteness. But in the case of race merchants in the Arab community, there is more at work here. The related question of why Muslims are being racialized bears on this. But one cannot explore these questions, which are very current politically, without recognizing how these populations have been defined in the past and by what method they are being so defined.

Today’s left pursues the othering of Arabs and Muslims most aggressively. They do this with Jews, as well, since Jews are thought of as from this part of the world. The construct of “white Jew” is a product of this way of thinking (to because there, in point of fact, black Jews). Readers may have seen the meme floated on various social media that claims that Jesus, a brown-skinned Middle Eastern man, almost certainly a Jew, was transformed into a white man by white Christians who desperately want to make Jesus one of them (some black Churches have made Jesus out to be a black man for this reason). Europeans “whitewashed” Jesus, the claim goes. The background on this is an old but a rather exclusive story. Ernest Renan’s 1863 book Life of Jesus used the Gospel of John to claim that Jesus purified his character, purging Jewish (or Semitic) traits to become an Aryan. Renan held that the Semitic race of which Middle Eastern Jews were a part, with one exception, was inferior to the Aryan race. The one exception was the Ashkenazim. They were not Semitic, Europeans who converted to Judaism. In contrast, Bloch says that DNA evidence shows the Ashkenazim are Semitic and thus racially different from Aryans and she uses this to escape whiteness (in her own mind). Hitler saw in Renan support for his own views. But most Europeans have never deployed Hitlerian racial designations. Whatever their racial views, they regard Hitlerian racism as abhorrent (European culture is the culture that produced human rights, after all). Rather Europeans depend on common sense understanding of race. Were Jesus a real person, he would have dwelled in Palestine in the first century of the common epoch, under Roman rule, and would have been, had he not been Sub-Saharin African or East Asian, perceived by most observers as white. Same with Muhammad.

It is true that in some particularly ignorant strains of right-wing reaction we see an abstract racialization of Arabs conveyed by the term “sand nigger.” I saw this firsthand in the South as a high school student during the Islamic Revolution. My peers were angry over the Iranian hostage crisis. It afforded them an opportunity to engage in patriotic chest thumping. One night at the rock quarry, I chastised classmates who were trying to scare up a mob to go find and beat up Iranians. I mocked them: “How would know one if you saw one?” Yes, I know that Iranians are not Arabs. But my peers didn’t. Their ignorance does no damage to my point since Iranians, who are of Persian descent, are white, too (moreover, the language spoken by Iranians is European). Arabs (and Persians) are considered white unless the person under consideration has not already been sorted into another racial box. Those who are coded as nonwhite are not thought of as Arab or Persian (although they may be). Famous Arabs and those with substantial Arab descent, such people as Casey Kasem, Diane Rehm, Tony Shalhoub, Selma Hayek, Frank Zappa, and many more, are regarded as racially white. When we watched the Sinbad movies as kids, we all knew the characters were Arabs and Muslim. That was part of what was so interesting about them. The characters referred to Allah and the universe was inhabited by the region’s supernatural entities (and some from other regions–unlike Thomas Bulfinch, Ray Ray Harryhausen was not an especially deft mythicist) and carried a magical character. The actors were brown skinned. They spoke with accents. They were exotic in the Anglo-American gaze. But that gaze never cast them as nonwhite.

We see a similar thing with perceptions of Mexicans. The US census has categories for white and nonwhite Hispanics, clearly recognizing the difference between race and ethnicity. Hispanic is not a race. It is a language group. There are black people who speak Spanish and white people who speak Spanish. Of course there is an effort to racialize white Hispanics, as well. This has confused the progressive media. For example the Huffington Post complained in 2013 that “the FBI only tabulates arrest data by race, with categories for white, black, Asian or Pacific Islander, and American Indian or Alaska Native. Latinos, who can belong to any race provided they have Latin American heritage, effectively vanish from the agency’s published records.” But Hispanics don’t disappear, as they are reckoned as whatever race with which they identity. But for progressives brown is the new black. The leftwing desire to racialize Hispanics helps us understand why efforts to control immigration are widely smeared as racist even while it is obvious that immigrant is not a racial category (nor are immigrants automatically Hispanic). Much of the resistance to Hispanic culture is not because Hispanics are seen as a race, but because there are objections to values and practices attributed to them (for one thing, they are majority Catholic). However, not everything Hispanic is rejected! Hispanic food, music, and fashion are quite popular among Anglo-Americans. Thus one can be concerned about Central Americans illegally crossing the border because they are coming from the most violent culture in North America without holding any racial animus towards Central Americans as people. But beware: you may be accused of racism if you express concern over the spread of crime with the movement of these populations into the United States, even when the phenomenon is well documented. (See “What is the Relationship of Immigration to Crime?” “Democrats are Being Disingenuous on the Role of Security Fencing in Reducing Illegal Immigration and Crime,” and the aforementioned “The Northern Triangle, the Migrant Flow, and the Risk of Criminal Violence.”

The most extreme form of postmodernist expansion of the concept of race is the racialization of Muslims (“Muslims are Not a Race. So why are Academics and Journalists Treating Them as if They are?”). The racialization of Muslims comes from two main sources: (1) leftwing identity merchants who fetishize Islam because of its anti-western and especially anti-American character (whether this is universal among Muslims is beside the point) and because of a general desire to fracture the world into an ever-growing matrix of intersecting essence-boxes; and (2) Islamists who see advantage in Muslims being perceived as a racial minority, hence the propaganda term “Islamophobia,” deceitfully riffing on terms like “Homophobia” and “Negrophobia,” both terms referring to who people are, not what people believe. (See “Islamophobia has no Place on the Left.”) To be sure race, ethnicity, and religion can be intersecting identities. A man can be a black Arab Muslim. He is racially black, culturally Arab (speaks, eats, and so on, Arabic), and a follower of Muhammad. But the tactic of treating a religion or an ethnicity (nation in that sense) as a race is fallacious and propagandistic. That various segments of the public would confuse these things does not overturn scientific epistemology and the greater historical picture. We are explaining why they are confusing things.

An analogy feels appropriate here. Christians complain about anti-Christian prejudice and discrimination in order to prevent the marginalization and therefore its continued strength and relevance in the culture of Christianity and the values and habits that come with that ideology. Imagine if Christians convinced the public that they are a race or an ethnicity and then thwart irreligious criticisms by crying racism or ethnicism. We would point out with no controversy that Christians are not a race, even while agreeing that race is not biological. Indeed, Christianity is so obviously not a race or an ethnicity (it is as racially and ethnically diverse as Islam), Christians dare not work that angle, whch is why the term “Christophobia” never caught fire even in Christian-majority countries. Perhaps this is because multiculturalism doesn’t elevate Christians. But Muslims depend very much on multiculturalism to elevate their ideology and they have a receptive audience on the identitarian left.

There is a longstanding tendency on the left to make criticisms of nonwestern culture out to be a form of racism. Criticism of western culture is, on the other hand, invited and encouraged. The left does not hesitate to accept the invitation and to encourage others to join them. It tells us a lot that it would instantly be seen as ludicrous to suggest that criticism of western culture is racist. Indeed, criticism of other cultures has become one of worst things a white person can do. It is an Islamist strategy to piggyback on racial oppression to manufacture a victim status. Postmodern conceptual slipperiness allows for this piggybacking. It is insulting those—Africans, American Indians, and Asia—who actually suffer racism. Recoding Arabs as white and anti-Muslim sentiment as “racist” reflects the need to stymie resistance to Arabization and Islamization of western civilization. That you read that last sentence with some discomfort testifies to the efficacy of this tactic.

Race is not biological reality. It is a social construct, an operating feature of the ideology of racism. The system adapts over time, but it has been remarkably consistent over the centuries. If you task a computer with running a factor analysis on genetic dissimilarity, it will produce factors that resemble the racial classification system developed centuries ago. This consistency speaks not to biological race but to the persistent effects of the racial system and common sense understandings of it. Our shared racial understanding is what Thomas Kuhn would call paradigmatic. So when I say that Arabs are white, I mean they are white according to a centuries old racial classification system that in many places carries the force of law and almost everywhere constitutes common sense. Ethnicity is a cultural category that includes language, cuisine, music, art, etc. It is one of two meanings of “nation.” As with race, ancestry is a big part of it. There is anti-Arab and anti-Mexican bigotry and discrimination. But it is not racism. A religion is a system of beliefs referencing supernatural beings or forces. There is also the reality of anti-Christian and anti-Islamic discrimination. But one cannot make anti-religious bigotry a form of racism. Moreover, while ethnic prejudice is problematic, irreligious criticism is noble and necessary. This is why the construct “Islamophobia” is particularly obnoxious: it suggest that there is something wrong with criticism of Islam. It is precisely this freedom, the freedom to critique oppressive thought, that the multiculturalists seek to rob us of. 

* * *

Racists argue that there really are such things as races. But we know that race is a social-historical construct. Therefore we study not race per se, but racism, even when we are debunking the notion of biological race by climbing down into the trenches with race realists. This requires that we work from valid conceptualizations in order to study change over time. To use an analogy, people define social class in all sorts of ways, but historical materialists define social class as production relations, that is a person’s relationship to the means of production (which may locate a person in multiple relations). Then we study the changing class structure over time by using these concepts. If we keep our concepts consistent, then we not only have a basis for objective theorization of social change and group dynamics, but we can elaborate the intellectual tools to combat efforts to mainstream extreme ideologies like Islam and postmodernism, which seek to change our definitions of things, as well as our values (such as secularism and liberalism), in order to undermine them. 

Imprecision and conceptual inflation are not just the result of intellectual sloppiness but often are propaganda tactics. It is evidence of a tendency. The academic conflation of Islam with race is an obvious example. The expansion of the meaning of racism to encompass culture and religion reflects the problem of conceptual inflation. Moreover, there is obfuscation about the origins of race as a concept and racism as an ideology in order to facilitate inflation. The concept of race was initially developed and for centuries used to describe things that are biological or result from biology. In the twentieth century is was fallaciously expanded to include ethnic or cultural identities. More recently, it was fallaciously expanded to include optimistic speech that racism is not as much of a problem as it used to be (the so-called New Racism, which interferes with the guilt of original sin). And, of course, the concept of race is currently undergoing further expansion to selectively and fallaciously encompass religious identity.

There is a need to deflate the concept of racism and circumscribe its usage to what it originally referred to, namely a false theory about human variation and the practice of treating people differently—hierarchically—based on these differences, and then relegate that theory to the dustbin of intellectual history along with flat-earthism and geocentrism. We need to keep it to its original meaning to avoid the conceptual inflation that the entrepreneurs of identity politics use to either extend or deepen oppressive relations (such as racializing ethnicities in order to deprive them of their rights) or stifle criticism of things not covered under the concept (such as culture and religion). All of which keeps us from the historical task of the working class: to overthrow capitalism and replace it with democratic socialist arrangements.

Endnotes

[1] There is of course an exception. I am even allowed to racialize classist intent as long as white people are the target, hence the easy use of the “white trash” slur. It is okay on the left today to speak about white people in the most demeaning manner conceivable and to attribute racist motive to their politics (for an example of the latter see John Blake’s messy CNN article, “In the census-citizenship case, the Supreme Court may once against affirm ‘white rule’,” citing approvingly the assessment of Ibram X. Kendi, founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University, implicating, albeit implicitly, working class whites who suffer amid mass immigration in the white supremacist “impulse” that sustained Jim Crow segregation in the South). There has been some elite reflection on the acceptability of racializing poor white bashing. Last year around this time NPR carried the useful segment “Why it’s Time to Retire the Disparaging Term ‘White Trash’.” Moreover, the leftwing populist Bernie Sanders was loathe to embrace identity politics in the 2016 election cycle until Black Lives Matter activists, seeing an easy target, commandeered the stage at one of his political rallies (the sympathetic make easy targets).

[2] I hasten to add that my view on these matters differs from the sense conveyed by the work of Ricardo Duchesne, a historical sociologist at the University of New Brunswick who elected for early retirement in the face of a censorious onslaught for linking civic nationalism to ethnic identity. This linking is also the mark of such neoconservatives as Douglas Murray, the author of the recent The Strange Death of Europe. I do not credit secularism and liberalism to whiteness but to the unique historical and cultural trajectory of European civilization driven by the social forces associated with capitalism. Wary of making claims of inevitability, any alleged racial, or ethic group, for that matter, in the context that produced the modern West could have produced modernity. Indeed, the West was made by many ethnicities. At the same time, the cultural character of the West is unique and this is why, for example, the Islamic government of Iran views the United States as the “Great Satan”: the West promises something that, if its inhabitants are committed to its core values, will end the authoritarian religious oppression of the masses. That means that clerics lose their privileges and status along with their pathological desire to control human personality. As Barnard Lewis famously pointed out, the clerics are bent on negating the threat to their power.

Over the last few months I have had three comrades who I have known for more than two decades unfriend me on Facebook over (in order of the unfriending): (1) skepticism about the bourgeois media narrative concerning gas attacks in Syria, (2) analysis of immigration from orthodox Marxist ideas about class struggle in nation-states, and (3) identification of Islam as a motive in some terrorist attacks. I will miss seeing their posts in my Facebook feed. I friended and followed them because, while I disagree with each of them on many things, I also benefitted from reading what they had to say. They write well and are interesting and witty. I knew each of them well before the existence of Facebook. I have learned much from them over the years.

The objection to skepticism of capitalist war aims and identifying ideological motives in mass violence—taking up (1) and (3)—throws me. The latter objection is especially curious given that Marx’s first major essay was on the importance of grasping religion as an explanation for action. Marx would have fit right in with the Christopher Hitchens of the modern world. While I recognize that Hitchens and the so-called New Atheists were loathed by many Marxists on account of their support for the Iraq war (I didn’t agree with them on that issue, either), it doesn’t make them wrong on everything or, obviously, change Marxist thought. To be frank about it, I suppose I do know what explains it, namely loathing of the West and allyship with its enemies, but that doesn’t follow from Marxism, and these are Marxists (one of whom is “Unrepentant,” his blog’s name tells its readers), so it remains a curious thing.

Enough with (1) and (3). I understand more the objection concerning immigration, because Marx’s assertion that “workingmen have no country” is routinely taken out of context and used as a slogan and many Marxists are too lazy to look into it. Had that comrade hung around a bit longer, I could have educated him, albeit he would, in an honest moment, be the first to tell you he has nothing left to learn about this (or anything other) subject. I am sure my readers don’t suffer from such hubris.

Marx uttered that phrase because the proletariat had not yet overthrown the bourgeoisie and established a worker state. It is clear in the Communist Manifesto that the proletariat has first to settle accounts with its national bourgeoisie. And in other writings, Marx identified the nation-state as the locus of the emancipation of property and religion from the state that set the stage for proletarian revolution. Moreover, Marxist economic thought, as a critique of bourgeois political economy (which, preceding dialectically, only negates the wrong bits), makes unavoidable the conclusion that immigration is a lever capitalists use to undermine the economic and political power of the working class. Really, even without Marx, this should be obvious with even a cursory grasp of market forces—when ones thoughts are not confused by other commitments, of course.

In reflecting on this today, I chalk up these misunderstandings to the depth to which many Marxists have embraced identity politics and multiculturalism, such anti-worker sentiments being the result of the third worldism that many Marxists adopted in the cultural revolutionary moment of New Left turn. Given that, I wonder why they wanted to be my friends or put up with me for as long as they did, since I am actually the unrepentant one (not out of habit). My guess is that my training in international political economy and my interventions on various leftwing and progressive listservs over the decades gives the impression that I am sympathetic to progressive politics. To be sure, there was always tension there as they did not quite seem to know from where I was coming, this because I actually took the time to read the source material and the best interpretations of it and did not throw myself into journalism and sloganeering where I would have to dim my lights to be appreciated.

The last fifteen years or so does find me shifting in my politics as I have been sorting through all that I have learned and continue learning, retaining and elaborating what makes sense and jettisoning that which is inconsistent with what a reasonable person can know about the world. I loath ideology, so I am constantly engaged in self-examination. One grows through critical reflection. I guess I can understand how disconcerting it can be for people who have become habitual in thought or practice cerebral hygiene to interact with somebody who still engages in a ruthless criticism of everything existing.

The country is receiving some good news from the Uniform Crime Report, published annually by the Federal Bureau of Investigations. Rates of the violent crimes of murder, robbery, and aggravated assault, as well as rates of the property crimes of burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft have decreased since 2017. Moreover, the rates for the crimes have dropped in cities of all sizes. These statistics cover 300 million Americans, which is the vast majority of the nation’s population. The decrease occurred in all regions of the United States. The only exceptions were rape and aggravated assault for the West and rape for the Northeast (albeit by less than a percentage point in the Northeast).

After increases in violence crime 2014-2017, the nation saw a sharp decline in 2018 in criminal violence. Moreover, the downward trend in property crime was markedly accelerated in 2018 compared to previous years. There are numerous reasons for the good numbers, but chief among them is the greatly improved economic conditions the nation has enjoyed of late. Violent crime is especially sensitive to economic pressures, especially as they affect inner city populations. It is too soon to tell whether the country is back on track with the record declines in crime and violence it has enjoyed over the last several decades, but the new figures are promising.