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Jamelle Bouie tweeted Thursday morning he had been struggling to turn some thoughts into a New York Times column about anti-lockdown protesters. You know them, with their weapons and Confederate flags and complaints of federal and state “tyranny”:
This morning he has done it.
By images, the vast majority of such protesters are white, Bouie begins, “in stark contrast to the victims of Covid-19 (who are disproportionately black and brown).” Those who have lost their jobs are also disproportionately black and brown. One cannot separate the protesters’ whiteness from awareness that it is not their racial group most affected by the pandemic lockdowns.
White racial identity, legal scholar Cheryl Harris found in a 1993 Harvard Law Review article, developed in contrast to the heritage of blacks in this country as property:
“Whiteness,” Harris continued, “was the characteristic, the property of free human beings.” To be white was to have control over oneself and one’s labor. It was to be autonomous and subject to no one’s will but one’s own.
Call it rugged individualism defined as darkness is by the absence of light. But there is more:
Freedom from domination and control is one aspect of the meaning of whiteness. The other aspect, in a kind of ideological inversion, is the right to control the presence and the lives of nonwhites. To be white in antebellum America, for instance, was to be able to enslave Africans and expropriate native land. It was, as Harris notes, the right to exclude as well as the right to discipline; to punish those who violated the terms of the racial order.
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, lynchings, “sundown towns,” Japanese internment camps — even the killing of a black man allegedly shot by a white father and son as he jogged through a middle-class neighborhood of coastal Brunswick, GA — fall under the conception of white freedom as defined by the ability to control others, Bouie explains. In this sense, white dominance is the “natural order” of things.
To that, I’d add the white evangelical conception of the 1st Amendment as guaranteeing freedom of religion only so long as theirs remains the socially dominant one and their mores the ones with legal teeth. White freedom is not about race alone; it is about power, who has it, and who is unwilling to share it. Same as it ever was.
Bouie concludes:
The great irony, of course, is that this conception of freedom, situated within racial hierarchy and meant to justify deprivation and inequality, has always been impoverished when compared with an expansive, inclusive vision of what it means to be free. And in the particular context of a deadly pandemic, the demand to be free of mutual obligation is, in essence, a demand to be free to die and threaten those around you with illness and death. Most Americans, including most white Americans, have rejected this freedom of the grave. But among the ones who haven’t are the people leading our government, which means that this “freedom” remains a powerful — and dangerous — force to be reckoned with.
But Bouie’s conclusion dovetails with something Digby wrote about anti-lockdown protesters this week. The lockdown is not the issue. Not that their complaints are insincere:
They are just people who once followed the same sort of organizing for the Tea party and Gun Rights groups which have now switched to Trump Cult organizing. These have always been the same people. They aren’t “issues based.” After all, they claimed to care deeply about deficits during the Great Recession but sat by idly as Trump spent like a drunken sailor while cutting taxes.
These groups are soldiers in the culture wars, organized around fighting Democrats. Period. The “issues” aren’t the point.
Democrats is shorthand for Other the way race is. And like evangelicals and the 1st Amendment, the same people, red-faced and armed to the teeth, will defend the 2nd Amendment only so long as people who look like them are the ones with the most weapons. Guns and flags and Real Americans™ and “who is more patriotic than whom” is about power, who has it, and who in this sometime democratic republic is unwilling to share it. Same as it ever was.
E pluribus unum is for losers. The Trump faction, its improbably coiffed avatar, and his attorney general, are all about who gets to be the alpha dog and write the history. Democracy and the rule of law are disposable conveniences, mere window dressing. They don’t want to govern. They mean to rule.
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.