freedom and reason

I have in the past pursued a strategy of voting for Democrats to keep Republicans out of office. The Democratic Party does not represent my interests and I have never been a member of the party, but they have in the past been better for working people, minorities, and women than have Republicans. At least that is what I have believed to be the case. Of course, I will not vote Republican in 2008. But I have decided that I will not vote Democrat. I am convinced that an Obama presidency will be worse for working people, minorities, and women.

Obama supports restrictions on abortion in a manner contrary to Roe v Wade, even mocking women who pursue abortions out of mental distress as having the blues. Obama agrees with the right-wing Supreme Court justices that there is an individual right to keep and bear arms to be found in the Bill of Rights, thus undermining the ability of state and local governments to defend communities from gun violence. Obama advocates expanding taxpayer funded religious organizations, a violation of the First Amendment, which requires government to remain segregated from religion. Obama defends Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Obama voted to expand the ability of the Executive branch to spy on Americans, undermining the Fourth Amendment. Obama has made speeches effectively calling for an end to the civil rights movement, blaming the victims of racism for their woes and telling them to pursue strategies that will keep them on the bottom of American society.

The fear that those voting for Obama have of McCain concern war and abortion. They’re afraid McCain will stay the course in Iraq, when we need to get out. And they especially fear that McCain will apppoint justices hostile to abortion rights. I fear these things, too. But, on the question of Iraq, I cannot trust Obama to withdraw the troops. He has made so many claims contradicted by fact or later reversed by his campaign that nothing he says is to be believed. He deceived the south-side Chicago community for years. I expect him to return from Iraq with a different opinion than held before he left. But even if he doesn’t flip-flop on this, he will if he is elected president. He has already stated that he will redeploy troops now in Iraq to Afganistan. His bellicosity on war with Iraq and his uncritical support for right-wing Israel policy in the region tells us that he does not represent a substantial departure from John McCain.

On the matter of abortion, here I have a genuine concern. But there are reasons to not make this election about a single issue. First, Obama has said he supports restrictions on abortion in a manner contrary to Roe v Wade and other federal laws. Abortion is not necessarily safe with this guy. He is insensitive to women’s issues generally. Second, and more important, John McCain, because he is white, male, and pro-life, will face stiff opposition from feminists and other concerned parties if he tries to appoint ideological justices. He may be able to accomplish it, but it will be difficult. Obama, on the other hand, with liberals sacrificing their core principles just to support this man out of a need for a symbolic accomplishment, and with his stated goals to bring Republicans and Democrats together on this and a range of issues, Obama is a risk for putting a centrist justice on the Court.

This brings us to the major reason why I cannot vote for Barack Obama for president: his politics is to erase differences of opinion for the sake of unity. He wants to bring everybody together and find a workable center. But there is no workable center. There is only right and wrong, and centering everything—which is already too far right—allows for a wealth of wrongs to be unloaded on the public and many more to remain. Restricting abortion is wrong. There is no center position on this. Either you support the right of women to be free from state control of their womb or you’re a tyrant who believes the government ought to force women to have babies. It’s an either-or that is clearly attached to a right-wrong. State control over the womb is the most extreme form of tryanny. Mixing church and state is wrong. There is no center position on this, either. Either you support the right of individuals to be free of religious control or you’re a tyrant who believes in forcing religion on people in programs funded by citizens. This is a secular society. Religious societies are tryanny. Religion has too much say-so already.

Take these two together and one can see the danger in Barack Obama. If we allow religious views to mix with state in the degree that he advocates, and if this means that the prevailing religious hegemony takes the leading role in shaping policy, and it will mean this, and that hegemony is Christianity, then abortion rights are immediately in crisis because the more intense a person’s Christianity the more intense is their desire to control women. Christianity as a form of social organization is a patriarchal nightmare for women. Homosexuals are also threatened by this development. 

The Second Amendment only grants states the right to arm men in the context of a well-regulated militia. This meaning of the amendment is unambiguous. It is worded in a way that makes perfectly clear the intentions of the framers. And since militias are ill-prepared to carry out any useful purpose—assuming we mean something different from the National Guard—there is no rational reason that any citizen should have a gun. Individuals own guns because there are no laws forbidding them to. There is no right that allows them to own guns. There is no center position on this. There is no compromising the Bill of Rights.

The same is true for the Fourth Amendment. Our right to privacy is the arguably the single most important right in the entire Constitution. You cannot comprise, as Obama did, on restricting the government from looking into our private lives. Read the amendment. There’s no wiggle room. There are no exceptions for national security. Obama voted away a fundamental right. This is the vote that made it impossible for me to vote for Obama. 

Back in July, Obama slammed the Supreme Court for upholding a ban on late-term abortion. He said it was part of a concerted effort to roll back women’s reproductive freedom. Now he supports a ban on late-term abortion. Feeling good about your endorsement NARAL?

Kerry’s supposed flip-flopping was largely an invention of Republicans. Obama’s flip-flopping is an invention of his desire to win the White House principle be damned. Obama was against the embargo on Cuba before he was for it. Obama was for decriminalizing marijuana before he was against it. Obama was against cracking down on businesses that hired illegal aliens before he was for it. Obama was for Jeremiah Wright before he was against him. Obama was against union contributions to presidential campaigns (calling them “special interests”) before he was for them (when unions started contributing to his campaign). Obama was for the DC gun ban (saying that is was constitutional) before he was against it (after the Supreme Court struck it down). Obama was against immunity for corporate evesdropping before he was for it.  Obama was for public financing of elections before he was against it. Obama was against the death penalty (voting against the death penalty for gang-related murder) before he was for it (for crimes that do not involve murder). Obama was for a gas tax holiday (voting for two of them in Illinois) before he was against it. Obama was against Nafta (said it was bad for workers and that he would force a negotiation) before he was for it (blames heated campaign rhetoric).

In light of these facts, there is no reason to suppose on the range of issues that concern me that McCain would be worse than Obama. Indeed, on some issues, Obama would be worse (the civil rights issue is most disturbing). 

I have been flirting with either the Green Party or the independent run of Ralph Nader. I need to think about it some more. Whatever my choice, if McCain wins, I will have no regrets.

Myrlie Evers-Williams, a leader in the NAACP, the wife of Medgar Evers who was gunned down by white supremacists, said yesterday that Barack and Michelle Obama are the target of a “political lynching” in the media. She told a NAACP luncheon that the news media is portraying the Obamas as unpatriotic radicals. She cited in particular The New Yorker cover spoofing attacks on the Obamas as an example (see below). Sadly, Evers-Williams could not miss the point more widely.

First, the establishment news is running Obama’s campaign. It is hardly lynching the Senator. This has been the most biased coverage in favor of a candidate I have ever seen. The media can hardly bring themselves to criticize him. The idea that Obama is the victim of a racially-motivated attack by the corporate media is—sorry, but there’s no other word to use—delusional. 

All you need to do is read the press accounts in the immediate moments of the release of The New Yorker cover. The establishment media collectively acted as Obama’s campaign spokespersons. They were so worried that it would hurt his chances to be president that they opened fire with both barrels on the magazine. To be sure, they’re trying to make it appear that they jumped the gun a little bit. The reality remains: they frenzied. We all saw it. They will write the moment out of history, but they can’t take it back for those of us who are paying attention. 

This was the same over-the-top reaction we saw when Jesse Jackson said Obama was talking down to black people. They panicked over that one, too, thinking that the black masses might start wondering if Obama was in fact talking down to them. Jesse, the white establishment was thinking, still has some clout. So they had to shout him down—even if he only whispered it near a mic he thought was off. This story is still running on strong legs.

Second, speaking of Obama’s condescension towards black Americans, the candidate is harming the black community with his white conservative personal responsibility rhetoric targeting the black family. He blames the victims of racism—and lynching has been a big part of black victimization—for the consequences of racism. Only blacks obsessed with sucking up to the establishment—Ward Connerly, Walter Williams, Bill Cosby—push that racist angle. Blacks are highly critical of the “Uncle Toms” who push this line. So why, instead of advancing a self-evidently paranoid line, isn’t Evers-Williams criticizing Obama for his racially-motivated attacks on the black family?

I am disappointed by the progressive leadership of the black community. To be sure, much of this stems from uncritical loyalty to the Democratic Party. But there’s more to it than that. It’s the worst type of identity politics when persons of an oppressed group support a perceived member of that group because they share a characteristic such as skin color. Blacks are overwhelmingly supporting Obama because he is perceived as a black man who is not a Republican. But, then again, is it partisanship? Would identity politics cause blacks to support a black Republican?

* * *

If you’re having trouble grasping the point of the New Yorker cover, imagine that its target is the 9-11 Truth movement. Its followers believe Bush and Cheney ran a false flag operation on 9-11 in order to seize control of the government. The towers were brought down by controlled demolition. The planes were remote controlled. So forth. Imagine a cartoon cover on a conservative magazine—let’s make it a cover of the National Review—with Dick Cheney as the carnival barker behind the controls of something like a giant Oz machine, his hands on the dials and levers steering robot-controlled planes into towers. Bush is depicted just leaving the towers with wires and a cable splitter sticking out of his pocket. He’s fresh from having just planted the explosives that will bring down the towers in a controlled demolition. Let’s put a book about a goat in his hand. You could have a split scene with Rumsfeld directing a cruise missile into the side of the Pentagon. Barbara Olsen is being whisked away into another dimension by Men in Black. 

Anybody who sees this cover who believes the premise, well, then, the joke’s on them. Those who believe it’s not true will see it as satire—if they are prepared to play along. People are too sensitive about Obama. They aren’t prepared to play along.

I understand why the establishment media can’t bring itself to use the word. They have to make it so scary that it can’t be uttered, not even in an informative context. It’s like the secret name of God. We have to be reduced to first graders. “He said the ‘N-word.’” So I’ll repeat what Jackson said: “Barack … he’s talking down to black people … telling niggers how to behave.” 

Now, any fair-minded person knows what Jesse means by this. Whites and blacks who blame black people from the problems of poverty, joblessness, crime, and violence see blacks as “niggers” and the place they live as “Niggertown.” We all know the sentiments. Jackson is bringing some truth to the matter when he says that Obama is “telling niggers how to behave.” That is what Obama is doing. I’m sure each of you at some time or another has used the sarcastic angle of putting yourself in the other point of view and using the language from that standpoint. Jesse was speaking from Obama’s point of view. Jesse is being dramatic. It’s something he does.

Remember when the brilliant comedian Bill Hicks, in protesting the verdict in the Rodney King beating case, talked about Officers “Coon,” “Niggerhater,” and “Keepdarkiedown”? It’s called bitter sarcasm and it’s commonplace among those who know the way some people think about black people.

The “niggers down in Niggertown” line was uttered countless times in the South—and often in the Northeast. It’s easy to channel the sentiment if you’re familiar with history: “The niggers need to stop throwing trash out of their car windows, grow lawns, and fix their screen doors if they want white people to bring businesses back to Niggertown.” Etcetera.

The things Obama says about black people (about fried chicken and whatnot) are the things white bigots used to say all the time about black people. I know hundreds of other whites have heard this because when I heard it when they were standing around me—and getting upset when I disagreed with them! 

Jackson is simply switching “black” with “nigger” to make the point—a effective point if you want to get it. Folks need to stop pretending like they don’t know what’s going on here. Feigned outrage is transparent. 

This episode tells us more about how upset it makes Jackson—and I suspect a lot of other black leaders too afraid to say it in public—that Obama is engaging in racist attacks against the black community by blaming the conditions of blacks on black people, and, adding injury to insult, doing it in front of blacks so that whites can hear it and appreciate a black man saying what they wish they could say. They are rooting Obama on in his talking down to black people.

Watch every white journalists and every black person sucking up to Obama deliberately miss the point. Watch them warp the meaning of the word in this context—in reality, there is no ambiguity in Jesse’s usage of the word—to delegitimize Jackson.

Part of killing off the old civil rights movement once and for all is destroying its leaders. The propagandists of the ruling elite are having a field day with this. They have been waiting for years to banish Jackson to the margins of the movement for justice. (Let’s in ten years if Jackson is relevant at all.)

Racism is not only the belief that someone or group is inferior based on race. Race is a social construction that presupposes a segmentation of social reality. A society is racist to the extent that it divides groups based on selected phenotypic features and then differentially rewards and punishes members of those groups regardless of whether members of these groups realize this is happening to them or for them. Jackson is right when he says that key is structural inequality and that Obama is wrong when he argues that racism is largely a state of mind.

Obama’s rhetoric seeks to dissimulate racism while keeping the divisions going. The result is that the capitalists and their functionaries maintain the status quo that privileges them. This is the central reason why Obama’s blame-the-victim approach is so successful for the perpetuation of racism and so devastating to the civil rights movement.

Jackson was using a slur to criticize Obama’s anti-black propaganda, a strategy that has become central to his campaign for president. Obama talks down to blacks in order to talk over them to the white audience whose votes he seeks. He wants whites to support him and he believes the best way to get this support is to say the racist things some white people think but are afraid to say in mixed company. 

Based on the research by David Sears and John McConahay, Joe Feagin, in his various writings on race, defines symbolic or modern racism as “white beliefs that serious racial discrimination does not exist today and that black Americans in particular are making illegitimate demands for social changes.” This definition, we are told, helps clarify the way the ideological racism evolves in order to maintain the status quo.

In the early period of racism, the ideology of racism had most people believing that the inequalities among racialized groups were rooted in race, a social construction pitched as a biological reality. Because groups had different natures, the argument went, inequalities between groups are explicable in terms of those differences. There are still many people who believe this.

Of course, the inequalities between racial groups is because of racism, a social system that organizes human populations into hierarchically-arranged groups based on differences in physical appearances and ancestry; the result is differentially rewarded or punished. These inequalities have nothing to do with nature. The ideology of racism, which attempts to naturalize a social construct, justifies unjust social arrangements. Thus racism is a complete ideology: it orders life in a particular way and justifies that order.

Scientists have since debunked the notion of racial nature (see, for example, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi, and Alberto Piazza’s 1996 The History and Geography of Human Genes). There are no races of humans in nature. With this debunking, the old ideology of racism received a serious blow to its legitimacy. But this did not bring an end to the ideology of racism. Nor, did it bring an end to the material system which that ideology justified. Racism as a objective force ordering group lives continues unabated.

What remains of the old ideology of racism is the notion that different racialized groups have superior and inferior cultural systems. And this idea of superiority and inferiority of cultural systems has been joined with the recognition of the reality that there are no natural differences to strengthen racism rather than weaken it. 

Since many Americans falsely conflate structural racism with the ideology of racism, they wrongly believe that, with the disappearance of the old ideology of racism, serious racial discrimination does not exist today and therefore black Americans are making illegitimate demands for social change. The belief that no serious racial discrimination exists today instructs whites to believe that the situation blacks face today is not caused by racism, but rather is caused by black people themselves. 

By reducing racism to the ideological system that justifies it and then proudly proclaiming that the ideology of racism is dead, yet still retaining the notion of superior and inferior cultural systems, a new racism has emerged that encourages victim blaming. It’s not that blaming the victim was not a component of the old ideology of racism. But in the new system, victim blaming mutates into an opportunity to reinforce the Protestant ethic. White Americans want blacks to have a better life, but, having done enough for blacks already, it’s time for blacks to lift themselves up.

The new racist ideology is far superior to the old one. The new racist ideology does not depend on so obviously false an assumption as intrinsic racial differences. The new ideology of racism allows white and black actors striving to maintain the status quo of whites on top and blacks on bottom to deny that they are racist. Indeed, it allows them to turn ideological racism into an expression of virtue and concern. It allows for a declaration of a colorblind society which self-evidently cannot be a racist society. With this system in force, those members of oppressed group who make grievances against white society are themselves said to be racist because they are making claims based on race.

This is the argument anyway. And it is compelling. At the same time, racial discrimination was much worse in earlier historical periods than it is today. De jure segregation has been abolished and there are many African Americans living in affluence (while the majority of poor people remain white). It is therefore possible that some black Americans are making illegitimate demands for social change. But if one says this, then he is guilty of symbolic racism. Is it possible to recognize that America has made great strides in race relations while admitting there is more to do without having this observation smeared as racist?

The claim of a post-racial order in a society where racialized groups are not longer hierarchically organized is self-evidently false. Racism persists. But to claim that criticism of the claims made by members of the black community and their allies constitutes a new racism is problematic. One can be ignorant or wrong or disagreeable without being racist.  

I had a chance to review a documentary by Marco Williams, Banished (2007) for Teaching Sociology. This is a version of that review. Those of us who teach race and ethnic relations routinely encounter difficulty explaining to our students the causes of the present conditions of black Americans, for example, why blacks are more likely to live in poverty than whites. As sociologists, we teach what the evidence and our theories tell us, namely that the situation of black America is the result of a dynamic process of cumulative disadvantages emplaced by white supremacy and perpetuated by the inertia of history. We typically deliver this information as texts, charts, and statistics, abstract forms of knowledge that our students often find difficult to process. Sociologists want for methods of presenting material that connect with our students’ lay understandings, strategies that make the subject matter live for them. 

Banished is a smart and engaging film about racial cleansing in the United States that brings the sociology of racism to life for the lay person. Banished traces the outline of racial terrorism: the alleged violation of a young white woman, the lynching of the alleged black perpetrator or perpetrators, the removal of black residents from the community by violent means and the criminal confiscation of their property. Many of the places that experienced racial cleansing, the so-called “sunset towns,” remain, often proudly, all-white or virtually all-white communities, with many blacks too uneasy to return to claim what they feel is rightfully theirs, and many more resigned to the belief, reinforced by those in authority, that the moment to bring legal action has long since passed. By emphasizing the intersections of history and biography, Banished exposes students to more than the history of racial violence in a white-dominated social order; students also see how the racialized structure of power perpetuates the state of inequality and the denial of justice shapes the future.

Three white communities focus Williams’ film: Forsyth, Georgia, Pierce City, Missouri, and Harrison, Arkansas. Elliot Jaspin, whose superb Buried in the Bitter Waters (2007) documents these and other cases, appears throughout the documentary. Teachers who use Banished in the classroom might well consider assigning Jaspin’s book as one of the course texts. His research lends the voice of authority to the film, reassuring viewers that the cases Williams selects are not extraordinary, but rather examples of a clear pattern of racial terrorism in American history. Several central questions guide Jaspin’s study and these inform Williams’ documentary: What happened to the people who lived in these communities and their descendants? What happened to their property? How have they made do? How do whites and blacks negotiate yesterday? What can they do today that would make tomorrow different?

Jaspin documents that before whites racially cleansed Forsyth, Georgia in 1912, the black population there numbered 1,098. Within a matter of months, it had dropped to 30. By the 1930 census, there was only one black person living in Forsyth. The county remains almost all-white (fewer than five percent of residents are black). To call attention to this history, black and white civil rights activists organized a march on Forsyth in 1987 on the inauguration of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. White supremacists met the bus carrying the marchers. Reminiscent of the attacks on blacks marching for civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s, whites pelted the Forsyth marchers with rocks and garbage. Fallout from the march compelled the governor of Georgia to organize a bi-racial commission, headed by white attorney Phil Bettis, to study the issue of racial reconciliation. The commission quickly polarized over the issue of whether the community should compensate black families for the loss of their property. The sides never came together. White members of the commission refused to acknowledge that whites had banished blacks from Forsyth. The participants presented their conclusions to the governor in a segregated report. 

Williams personalizes the segment by concentrating on the legacy of a man named Morgan Strickland and his descendants’ determination to locate the property he allegedly sold to the white persons whose names appear on the deeds. Leola Strickland Evans, ninety-five at the time of the filming of the documentary in 2005, lived in Forsyth County as a child, her presence debunking the claim that banishment directly affects no living persons. Williams films the Stricklands visiting the family graveyard in Forsyth. They find it littered with the trash of a white family living in a house nearby. After cleaning the graves and planting flowers, the Stricklands travel to city hall to look at the deeds. They find no record of Morgan having legally sold his land. 

Williams looks further into the circumstances of how whites came to possess Morgan Strickland’s property. Jaspin documents the dirty truth: Strickland had not sold his property; whites, using the legal technique of adverse possession, stole it. After driving blacks from Forsyth, whites needed to occupy the land for only seven years, after which time title attorneys granted them legal title to it.  Williams arranges a meeting between Jaspin and Phil Bettis to discuss the matter. Bettis is a title attorney involved in passing black property to generations of white families. This is the same Phil Bettis who had headed the governor’s failed bi-racial commission back in 1987. Their encounter produces one of the more compelling moments in the film, as Bettis, refusing to accept any responsibility for a crime affecting generations of Stricklands, takes strong exception to Jaspin’s characterization of banishment in Forsyth as racial cleansing.  (This is not the first time Jaspin has run into opposition to the phrase. In Buried in the Bitter Waters, he recounts a fight with his own editors at Cox Newspapers over the use of the term.) Proving the truism that justice delayed is justice denied, viewers are witness to the argument that it is too late for the Stricklands to recover their loss.  They did not seek redress in a timely manner. Yet, how could they when trying would likely have put their lives in jeopardy?    

The other case studies are equally powerful. Two descendants of James Cobb, Charles Brown, Jr. and his brother James, travel to Pierce City, Missouri to bring their great grandfather’s body back to Springfield. Whites banished the Cobb family in 1901 and James lay in an unmarked grave, unmarked because white residents had removed the stone. The story Williams tells revolves around the relationship between the white coroner and Cobb’s descendants. After relocating the body, Charles inquires about the price. The coroner takes Charles aside and many watching will likely expect, as did I, the relocation will be a gift to Charles and James, an act of racial healing. It seems that the moment has moved the coroner’s sympathies. Then he quotes a price.  Charles informs the coroner that he has written a letter to Pierce City asking the city to cover the cost. Later we discover that the city refuses to pay the coroner’s bill.  No amount of money can heal such a hurt, the coroner tells Williams. Yet the whites in Pierce City, despite the fact that the government failed to protect its lack citizens and failed to protect the chain of custody, are unwilling to produce a meager sum of money to satisfy the coroner (Charles pays the coroner himself). Just as in Forsyth County, when money becomes an issue, there is always a reason why whites should not have to pay. The implication is that blacks are unreasonable for asking.

Residents of Harrison, Arkansas divide between those who desire racial reconciliation and those who love Harrison because it is white. Williams meets with Thom Robb, a leader of the Ku Klux Klan residing in Harrison. Williams asks Robb how he would feel if he built a house on the vacant lot next to Robb’s. Robb says he would be displeased because he has a culture and a heritage to preserve.  The degree of civility shown towards Williams by Robb and the matter of fact way Robb articulates his racism is chilling. Viewers will find fascinating the brief debate, held in front of a basement shrine Robb has constructed from photographs of Klan rallies, about whether one lights a cross to celebrate European culture or burns a cross to intimidate black people. Accepting a challenge from Robb, Williams speaks with community members who tell him that they came to Harrison because they want to live in a community without black people.

Sociologists should find Banished, especially accompanied by Elliot Jaspin’s Buried in the Bitter Waters, a useful addition to their courses covering the subject of race and ethnic inequality.  Williams’ penetrating work provides students, in a readily-accessible format, information about a heretofore little-known aspect of racism in America, one that unlocks a greater understanding of the black-white inequality dynamic. The images, interviews, and commentary concern not only documenting the tyranny of the pervasive white supremacy that represents a defining characteristic of American civilization, but also illustrate C. Wright Mills’ argument concerning the connection between public issues and personal troubles. The documentary is moreover useful for demonstrating the contrasting logics of the “perpetrator” and “victim” perspectives, a foundational argument in critical race theory. In this view, the fact that the demand that a legitimate grievance must involve a living perpetrator who acted intentionally to harm a person or persons (the perpetrator’s perspective) trumps the argument that those who benefit from the crime of others have a responsibility to make whole the injured party (the victim’s perspective) reflects the prevailing structure of racialized power in the United States.

Some students may take issue with Williams’ standpoint in the documentary. Yet, their perception likely reveals more about their politics than those of the director. For the most part, Williams strives to leave the conclusions to viewers. Indeed, given the things that happen in the film, many will admire his restraint. I am not one of them, however. I expect from the documentary format persuasive efforts that either leave viewers with compelling arguments to use in political debate or clear positions about which to develop stronger critiques. At any rate, Banished will no doubt provoke spirited discussion among students about the obligations of the white community and the responsibility of local and national governments to do more than address racism in America merely by acknowledging it, but also by organizing concrete action that fundamentally changes the dynamic of cumulative disadvantage.

War Hawks and the Ugly American: The Origins of Bush’s Central Asia and Middle East Policy. Pp. 47-66 and Beyond the Texas Oil Patch: The Rise of Anti-Environmentalism. Pp. 163-184 in Bernd Hamm (ed) Devastating Society: The Neo-conservative Assault on Democracy and Justice (London: Pluto Press, 2005). These are two chapters of mind (the latter co-written with Laurel Phoenix) that are now no longer carried by the University of Michigan press.

When controversy flared last summer, the executive board of the University of Michigan Press defended its relationship with Pluto, saying reservations about the content of a single book shouldn’t interfere with an existing business relationship, and that stopping the book’s distribution would be a blow to academic freedom and free speech. The University of Michigan Press does not review content of the books it only distributes. 

But under pressure from Jewish advocates and three regents, the executive board announced in January that it would re-evaluate all of its distribution deals based on newly created internal guidelines. Pluto was the only independent publisher that didn’t measure up. Last month, the university sent a two paragraph letter notifying Pluto executives that the distribution contract would be terminated in six months, effective Dec. 31. A six-month notice is required by the distribution contract. 

“It wasn’t just one book,” said Betsy Kellman, regional director of the Southfield-based Michigan chapter of the Anti-Defamation League, who said Jewish advocates read all of Pluto’s titles. “You can certainly criticize Israel, but when you set them up for a different standard of criticism than any other nation, that’s when we get into trouble,’’ she said. 

Losing the revenues from distributing Pluto books will have an impact on the University of Michigan Press, but it’s too early to be specific, she said. The press received $918,000 in revenues from distributing Pluto Press books in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2007. That was 16 percent of the its total revenues that year.

The upshot is that I no longer have chapters published in a university press book.

Jackson said this to CNN, “I was in a conversation with a fellow guest at Fox on Sunday. He asked about Barack’s speeches lately at the black churches. I said it can come off as speaking down to black people. The moral message must be a much broader message. What we need really is racial justice and urban policy and jobs and health care. There is a range of issues on the menu. The appeal in black America is record levels of unemployment, home foreclosure crisis, records of murders, and all kind of reprehensible actions for black America. A million blacks are in jail even as we talk today and 900,000 young black men. So we have some real serious issues, and not just moral issues—structural inequality.”

Jackson hits the nail on the head with respect to the problems facing the black community. The problems are not reprehensible actions of black American but the result of actions against black America, that is, they have an external cause, namely white supremacy. But this then Jackson falls into the Obama trap: “The basic issues he raises about an urban policy and jobs, no one else has addressed, has broad application. The crisis we’ve faced today, besides, you know, behaving better and doing the right thing, is jobs and investors leaving and drugs and guns are coming. The murder rate is up, taxes up, services down, first class jail, second class schools.”

This line about “behaving better and doing the right thing” is troubling in light of how the world works. This is right-wing conservative-behaviorism. The problem is structural inequality. The problem isn’t that some black Americans don’t follow the rules, but that most black American do. Too many black Americans accept the American Dream, and this is part of what keeps black people down. Jackson wants to combine his democratic concern for structural inequality—the soul of the civil rights movement—with Obama’s impulse to blame blacks for their problems (as well as the problems of white America). These cannot be combined for they are in opposition. Telling black men not to kill each other is more than a meaningless demand if one wants to lower the murder rate—it’s a demand that blames black people for high murder rates in their community. Nobody, white or black, should murder one another. That has nothing to do with why murder rates are higher here than there. The reason why crimes of violence (as defined by the FBI) are higher in the ghetto than in the suburbs is because of structural inequality.

Jackson then talks about Obama’s campaign as a “redemptive” moment. This is the second time I have heard him say this. Here, Jackson goes badly off the rails. Barack Obama is black only by dent of his African father, whom he never really knew. Obama doesn’t have an organic connection to black America. Obama has always been connected to the world of white people. This isn’t a redemptive moment for blacks. Obama represents a redemptive moment for whites. If Obama is elected, whites will be able to claim that the nation has been redeemed from the scourge of racism.

Jackson is doing this at a time when black Americans have never needed their leaders to stand up for them more. Black Americans have been swept up in the Obama personality cult, and the leaders who could educate them about what’s truly going on—who can remind them of what the struggle is really all about—are falling in line behind Obama. What Jackson’s off-air comments reveal is that black leaders are talking about this among themselves. Many of them think Obama is an “Uncle Tom,” but they dare not say so publicly. They are selling out black American fearful that they will become irrelevant. They don’t want to look out of touch to the younger generation of blacks. They have bought into the illusion that Obama has a deep hold on Democrats.

In his cowardice, Jackson becomes a tragic character: a man who can’t stand up for those he claims to represent, a man who willingly dwells in the shadow of a man who represents the destruction of everything Jackson has stood for. It means Jackson’s work in the name of civil rights comes to shit. He has become a tool of the establishment. King’s dream dies in the cowardice of those who pledged to continue his work.

Obama said yesterday that his life “has been a journey that began decades ago on the South Side of Chicago, when, working as a community organizer, helping to build struggling neighborhoods, I let Jesus Christ into my life. I learned that my sins could be redeemed and that if I placed my trust in Christ, that he could set me on the path to eternal life when I submitted myself to his will and I dedicated myself to discovering his truth and carrying out his works.”

He then said, “The challenges we face today—war and poverty, joblessness and homelessness, violent streets and crumbling schools—are not simply technical problems in search of a ten-point plan. They are moral problems, rooted in both societal indifference and individual callousness, in the imperfections of man. And so the values we believe in—empathy and justice and responsibility to ourselves and our neighbors—these cannot only be expressed in our churches and our synagogues [not mosques], but in our policies and in our laws.

Whatever feelings of satisfaction religion has given Barack Obama, it has no official role to play in public policy making—not if the First Amendment means anything. As Obama said in his 2006 speech on religion, “To base one’s life on [the] uncompromising commitments [of religion] may be sublime, but to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing.” Yet Obama’s advocacy of faith-based government interventions in social problems contradicts his formerly-held principled stance in defense of church-state separation. Obama’s mixing of church and state is no mere pragmatic move to the center (whatever that might mean). Obama’s advocacy of faith-based government-funded programs are tantamount to pushing down the central pillar supporting enlightened civilization.

Obama’s argument about technical and moral problems is deeply misguided. Joblessness and homelessness are indeed moral problems, but their solutions lie not in religion, but in reform and revolution. Joblessness is a consequence of capitalism’s inability to put everybody to work, the result of the pursuit of profit rather than human need. Worse, capitalism is predicated on the exploitation of many families by a few families. A truly moral society would be one in which no person is compelled to rent her body to the minority of families living in unearned opulence. Restricted access to the means of production and sharp constraints on the ability to generate adequate incomes that result from he imperative to generate wealth for those who run the economy make it impossible for everybody to provide for themselves and their families.

It’s not secularism that fails us, but capitalism. Joblessness and homelessness are the inevitable material consequences of the economic system in which we (do not choose to) live. The only capitalist countries that have approached the moral goals of eliminating joblessness and homelessness are those societies that have used government to ameliorate the social harm of capitalism. These societies are the more secular of all societies. These societies have low rates of poverty and do not often make war. Most of their citizens are atheist or agnostic.

The immorality of the present situation of humankind—poverty, war, and insecurity—issues from violations of universal human rights, rights embedded in the objective needs of human beings, not in any religious conception of morality. Joblessness and homelessness have nothing to do with the “imperfections of man,” an oppressive concept embedded in particular mythological conceptions of the world, the chief one being Christianity, in which an invisible being represents all that is good in the universe and human beings, polluted and sinful, are held to fall far short of that godly standard. 

In this mythology, humans are believed to be perfected only after death and then only after submitting their lives to the tyranny of religious doctrine. Failure to submit oneself to the love of the invisible being exposes the person to eternal torture, contradicting the premise of a loving god. Christianity is an essentially authoritarian ideology if conceived of in the manner in which Obama has articulated his faith. Eternal life and redemption require him, Obama says, to place his “trust in Christ.”

Obama concludes that “the values we believe in—empathy and justice and responsibility to ourselves and our neighbors—these cannot only be expressed in our churches and our synagogues, but in our policies and in our laws.” Here Obama has switched premise and conclusion to mitigate the fear progressives and secularists may experience upon examining his words. 

Putting premise and conclusion in the right order yields, and I paraphrase: “Secular policies and laws cannot alone realize the values we believe in—empathy and justice and responsibility to ourselves and our neighbors. Our government must rely on our churches and our synagogues to bring to our citizens the religious understanding necessary to solve our moral problems, and therefore I propose to expand Bush’s faith-based initiative, which will transfer tax payer dollars from the public trust to the bank accounts of religious institutions.”  

This is the real conclusion of Obama’s argument, and this conclusion represents a profoundly un-American stance—if patriotism is to be judged in terms of how committed a person is to the bedrock principles of American civilization as articulated in the US Bill of Right: “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion.” If patriotism is anything, it is this.

So-called “pro-lifers” are so singularly focused on the fetus, they’ve made such a fetish of the thing, that they can’t grasp any argument that does not depend on the status of the fetus. They insist on pushing the line that the status of the fetus, including the zygote and the embryo, is a person and that this alone determines the moral and legal status of abortion. If the fetus is a person, the argument goes, then abortion is murder.

Given this assumption, all of the effort is put into pushing the assertion that “life,” which for pro-lifers means person, “begins at the moment of conception,” which is the joining of egg and sperm to produce a zygote (that’s a fertilized egg, for those of you not studied up on viviparous biology). Once there is a zygote, a person has been conceived, and it is murder to kill persons, ergo abortion is wrong and therefore must be criminalized.

When I stipulate for the sake of argument that the fetus is a person, pro-lifers pretend they didn’t hear the stipulation and keep on with this tedious why-a-fetus-is-a-person argument, as if it were still the crux of the matter. Why don’t they acknowledge the stipulation? Because they don’t know what to do next. They have been trained to believe that the debate over the status of the fetus is all there is to the argument. What remains is merely a matter of writing a criminal statute to protect the lives of the “unborn.”

But the argument isn’t over. I grant that the fetus is a person. I even grant that the zygote and the embryo are persons, too. Don’t waste on me arguments about heartbeats, requisite number of chromosomes, or what doctors tell us about when fetuses feel pain or what they think about. I’m going to argue that all that’s irrelevant: defending a woman’s right to control her reproductive capacity doesn’t depend on the status of the fetus one jot or tittle. The question doesn’t turn on the fetus, but on the right of the woman to have sovereignty over her body. Reproductive freedom is a human right.

First, let’s dispense with this erroneous assumption that killing persons is always murder. While killing a person is a necessary condition for murder, and while murder is a sufficient condition for a person having been killed, killing a person is not a sufficient condition for murder.  Murder is the intentional and unlawful killing of a person by another person. There are lawful reasons to kill persons: self defense, defense of innocents, state execution, and by-the-rules military combat. Furthermore, not all murder is immoral even if illegal. While it was illegal for a slave in the US south to use lethal force against the slave-master in order to free himself from captivity, it was not immoral for the slave to do so; the slave-master had no legitimate reason to keep people as slaves. Persons have the natural right to use up to lethal force to free themselves from unjust captivity. It is important to note that, because of his second-class status, the slave was not at liberty to exercise the rights first-class citizens enjoy. But this doesn’t change his right to act in this way. Rights don’t depend on status.

Most exceptions to murder stem from the fundamental human right of personal sovereignty, which involves, among other things, the person’s right to decide what happens to her or his physical body. To be a sovereign entity means to be free of the coercion or control of others. It means to be able to determine the direction and character of one’s own life. Sovereignty over your physical person is the essence of liberty. 

Here are some examples of the exercise of personal sovereignty: 

• I can refuse surgery, because I have the final say-so over what happens to my body. You can try to talk me into having the surgery, but you cannot make me undergo a surgical procedure. If I wish to die from my cancer, even if there are effective treatments for it, that is my choice.
• You are not allowed to take one of my kidneys, even though I only need one to survive, in order to provide a person with two dysfunctional kidney’s with a working one, even though that person will die without it. I have not committed murder by refusing to give up one of my kidneys to save a dying man even though it was my refusal that killed him.
• Medical experimentation on me without my express and voluntary consent is unethical because such action violates my personal autonomy. That’s what Nuremberg was all about.
• If you try to take my life or physically harm me in a significant manner without just cause, I can lawfully resist you with lethal force. This is the right of self-defense.
• I am morally and legally justified in taking the life of my captor when being unlawfully confined because such confinement is not chosen and thus interferes with the principle of personal sovereignty. It is wrong for a person or persons to physically control me in this way without just cause.

These examples are widely agreed upon. The personal sovereignty principle lies at the core of our law and concepts of morality. Very few of those who believe that a woman should not have the option of obtaining an abortion would accept the state telling them what they could do with their bodies.

This is what is at issue with respect to abortion rights, which constitute a subset of the larger right to personal sovereignty I have just sketched. Like everybody else, a woman owns her body. Just like a man, a woman is free to do with it what she will even if it involves the killing of another person under certain circumstances. She can justifiably kill a man who is trying to rape her. She can justifiably kill her captors to escape unjustified captivity. She can justifiably kill a person who is trying to kill her. She can do these things because she has a right to life and liberty. She has a right to her body and can use lethal force to protect that right. No law can properly deprive her of that right. Granting this is to assert women’s equality with men.

If the state criminalizes abortion, it makes doctors who perform abortions, and the women who seek them, criminals. The consequences of the criminal law are designed to instill fear in the would-be perpetrator and thus force the individual to follow the dictates of the law. Laws criminalizing abortion intend, and would have the effect, of forcing women to have children against their will. They frame a system of forced childbearing. It is hard to imagine a more terrible world to live in than a world in which women are forced to have babies. A woman does not control her womb under a criminal abortion regime, but is subject to state control of her body. The criminalization of abortion represents a violation of the woman’s most basic civil and human rights, constituting an immoral regime striking at the very core of the principle of human freedom. Such a society is not a free society, but a tyrannical one.

Judith Jarvis Thomson made an argument in her paper “A Defense of Abortion” that shares points of logic with the argument I am making. She argues from analogy:

You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. … To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.

Most of us would agree that it is wrong for a person to remain forcibly attached to another person for the purpose of keeping that other person alive. If one day one should find himself attached to another person, Thomson reasons, he should have the right to disconnect that person from his body, and if that person dies, he has not committed murder. On the contrary, any situation that forces a person to remain attached to that person is immoral for it compromises his sovereignty. He did not choose the situation, therefore he does not have accede to it. To be sure, one can imagine a state that forces him to remain attached to another person in order to preserve that life, but this would be a totalitarian society in which personal liberty and basic rights would go unrecognized. Most of you, I hope, agree with this assessment. A few people I have encountered will accept the burden. But the vast majority honestly answer that they would not and do agree that it is terrible burden and injustice.

Criticisms of Thomson’s position were many. It is not the purpose of this essay to review that literature. It will suffice to say that the objections are not compelling. But one objection worth looking at is the argument that this logic could only apply in cases of rape and incest, where the pregnant woman had not consented to the sex act that resulted in conception; where the woman consented to sex, she has consented to pregnancy. This objection doesn’t work. Historically, sex has been a necessary condition for pregnancy (technology has changed this, but that’s beside the point); however, sex has never been a sufficient condition for being pregnant. Sex is a precondition for pregnancy; sex does not signal an intent to be pregnant. Moreover, even if a woman intends to be pregnant, that does not require her to stay pregnant, since part of personal sovereignty is the right to change one’s mind. One does not have to stay in an experiment he volunteered for if he decides he wishes to quite the experiment. To force him to continue is to violate his right to voluntarily consent to the conditions. A free person can quit anytime. 

If I choose to be hooked up to another person in such a fashion, then that is my decision, and the state should allow me to make that choice. If one of my children needs a kidney, and I am a match, then I should be allowed to give my child one of my kidneys. If a woman chooses to have a baby, then that is her decision, as well. Any state that tells a woman that she cannot have a child is tyrannical (consider China’s one-child policy). The state should not force the woman to have a baby any more than the state should force me to remain attached to another person against my will.

While it seems the right thing to do to give my child one of my kidneys, the state does not have the right to take my kidney to save my child’s life. I am not a murderer if I refuse to give up my kidney and my child dies. Likewise, the state does not have the right to require a woman to remain attached to the person inside her womb. The same principle is in operation in all of these examples. Remember, I am not treating the fetus any differently than I am treating legally-recognized persons. I have assumed throughout all this, for the sake of argument, that the fetus is a person. 

If the state can force a woman to remain attached to a person in her womb, then why can’t the state force the woman to remain attached to a person outside her womb? In fact, if the principle is that the state can force the mother to remain attached to a person inside her womb so as to prevent a murder, then the state can and should force any person to remain attached to another person so as to prevent a murder. Your failure to give one of your good kidneys to a person without a kidney causes that person’s death. Are you a murderer? Your failure to give blood led to a blood shortage in which people died. Are you a murderer? A dozen people die everyday from kidney disease. These deaths could be virtually eliminated if people were to donate their kidneys. Have those who have died waiting for a kidney been murdered? 

However, pro-lifers won’t like this argument merely because it exposes their hypocrisy. They don’t want everybody to have to physically sustain the life of those whose lives are not self-sustaining. They would decry as tyranny such a situation. They would condemn it as yet another example of the intrusive liberal state. They only want women to physically sustain the life of those persons living inside their bodies. You don’t see them overly concerned with what happens to children after they are born. You don’t see them calling on extensive government provisions of social welfare in order to lift children out of poverty. If you suggest expanding the welfare state, they will whine about how the government is enslaving them, forcing them to support other people with their hard-earned tax dollars.  

The overall cognitive and moral frame of the most aggressive pro-lifers—conservative and authoritarian—betrays their motives. They want the state to force women to remain attached to the fetus. That’s what all this business is about when it comes to making a distinction between abortion for rape and incest over against “merely” not wanting to be pregnant. The idea is this: the state isn’t forcing women to have babies because women made the choice to have sex in the first place. At the same time the arguer is denying that he is motivated in opposing abortion on the grounds that the woman had sexual intercourse. I have seen this pattern repeated dozens of times in arguments I have had with pro-lifers and in reading comment sections to various blogs over the years. The fetus-is-a-person is a smokescreen for patriarchal oppression.

What pro-lifers want is not a consistent policy requiring each of us to physically sustain the life of other individuals with our physiological systems. What pro-lifers want is the recognition in law that women are second-class citizens, citizens who do not enjoy the same rights as men (men would never allow their bodies to be co-opted in such a fashion).  Just as slaves were not entitled to the natural right of self defense, they want to exempt women from the right to determine what to do with her body. 

Like the prohibition against slaves and those who fought alongside them from using lethal force to liberate themselves from slavery, criminalizing abortion is the exception to the rule of personal sovereignty, one that can exist, from the perspective of the patriarchal chauvinists who advocate it, because women are lessers in a society rightly dominated by men. Having an unwanted pregnancy means that the woman had sex for some other reason than procreation and this behavior must be punished by shackling the woman to the person living in her womb. Their interests lie in making sure the woman has a baby, that she suffers the consequences of sex for pleasure. 

Does this characterization exhaust the thinking and motives of all pro-lifers? No, of course not. People will give you lots of reasons why they believe it is proper for the state to force women to have babies (the same is true for those who support limiting the number of children a woman can have). A lot of people don’t understand the real motive that underpins their rationalization in favor of this or that public policy or moral stance. But I have captured the spirit of those who most vehemently oppose a woman’s right to control her reproductive capacity. The assumptions in their arguments, the tone of their attacks, and their overall belief system give the game away. 

However, in any case, whatever the political persuasion of those advocating state control over the body of women, such advocacy is a call for tyranny. The demand for the state to control the reproduction of women is an authoritarian one, one that is entirely incompatible with the principles of liberty underlying the legal and moral order necessary for a free society. The pro-life position has no reasonable justification for its advocacy for tyranny. They only have slogans.

Socrates was a philosopher of a slave society. His remark, “He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have,” looks designed to convince the oppressed and the impoverished to be content with what they have so that they do not try to change the social order. 

All slogans that have at their core the claim that people should be content and free in their minds despite being workers and slaves in objective reality are ideological pronouncements the intention of which is to reproduce the system of capitalism and slavery.  But the oppressed and impoverished are discontent not because they suffer from some personality flaw that makes them restless, but because the conditions of existence they experience are such that they properly lead them to discontentment. 

What the responsible and moral person does—that is, the person concerned with social justice—is instruct the oppressed to never been satisfied with the exploitation and oppression of their persons and the persons of their family and comrades and to rebel against those conditions and transform society in order to overcome them.