Racism

In Anti-Racism, Community is Important but Cops are Problematic

November 17, 2021
by Matt Stannard

A shout out and some observations about the fight against organized hate: The shout-out is to Casper College’s Psychology faculty for hosting a movie and discussion last night. Turnout was solid and the discussion after the showing of Not in Our Town was inspiring, sincere, earnest, vulnerable. The celebration of community is important because solidarity is a motivating force. Synergy in anti-racist response, from local media to churches to elected officials matters. Of course, the efforts need to be led by grass roots groups who are not themselves overtly and arbitrarily excluding people, and who can stand independent from the institutions a campaign or movement brings on board. A hint of anti-racist populism should be present, as difficult as that currently may be for some folks to wrap their heads around.

So in 1993, white nationalists threw a cinder block through a Billings, Montana family’s window–their kid’s window, which was displaying a menorah–and inspired thousands of residents of Billings to mobilize against anti-Semitic violence and anti-Black racism. The story is iconic and familiar by now. Since the 1990s, a very long time ago ideologically, the significance of the Billings story for the fight against racism has consistently been this virtuous ability and drive to “come together” against isolated and virulent acts of intolerance. By the way, Billings still has a robust and energetic anti-racist movement.

The Billings story is also significant because it was labor organizers, represented in the documentary by Rand Siemers, who initially began to build the coalition responsible for the powerful messaging, mutual protection, and collective argument Billings made against the white nationalists who had been targeting the Black and Jewish residents of the city. We learn, in fact, that the labor movement uniquely understood the histories of these kinds of fights. In fact, labor has a mixed history on oppression, but its centering in the documentary where so many groups were doing their best is important–labor was also doing its best in and for Billings in the 1990s.

To gain fidelity, the narrative shed anomalies like indifferent or hostile churches and focused on the groups who were in. And alongside labor, anti-racist churches, a vocal lead newspaper and thousands of ordinary people, we also saw the police. The brevity of the film forces a kind of elevation of the BPD as protagonist in the story, coming to the aid of white nationalism’s victims and targets and thus taking an institutional stand against that violence.

Any lessons to be drawn from that representation will surely be limited, since police and sheriff departments around the country have long been landing spaces for racists, from garden variety unorganized bigots to highly organized identity zealots. Racists and fascists are deliberately staffing police departments. Republican politicians tolerate and even celebrate this, while liberal and centrist Democrats wring their hands but haven’t acted on the clear data and conclusions repeatedly put forward by research spanning at least as far back as the early 2000s and almost certainly before then.

Where the “exceptional” and alarming acts of direct infiltration are disturbing because they appear as a crisis of policing, treating that crisis as exceptional risks blurring the systemic and institutional violence underlying it. Billings has one of the highest rates of cops killing people–data which is harder to find going back to the 1990s but which suggests an endemic problem that must have been around in some form or another while Police Chief Wayne Inman was (we can assume sincerely) expressing his concerns about racism on the documentary.

This, and not some arbitrary ideological zealotry, is why many anti-racist action coalitions won’t work with police officers, and why even those who do often do so reluctantly. It’s arguably irresponsible to call the police to report a racist incident when there’s a risk you’ll be calling people aligned with or sympathetic to the incident. It’s true that many departments will put their best face forward when responding to systemic racism, but it’s also true that when the rubber meets the road, cops will often side with, protect, and passively (when not actively) work for the far right–something I got to see first hand during the 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Laramie, when protesters were subject to nitpicky arrests and in one instance hit by a police car, while MAGA counterprotesters were never cited and could be seen having collegial conversations with some of the cops.

At last night’s event in Casper, we had a good, short discussion about the role of the police in tolerating and perpetrating racism. I don’t think the solution is to simply and bluntly call out anti-racist groups for their choices of engagement with law enforcement, although I think we should always ask questions and publicly point out the magnitude of racist-cop collusion in the U.S. We should at least invite people to read the reports or watch videos like this, this, this, and this alongside idyllic but important narratives like Not In Our Town.

Above all, we need to build big numbers and issue clear messaging: Wyoming is again filling up on white identity, racist and fascist groups, they can do serious harm (both in normalizing hate overall and through specific acts of violence) and they’re riding on a wave of far-right energy that national data and local experience confirm includes many law enforcement personnel.

Neoliberalism Enables Fascism. It is not Fascism.

September 23, 2020

by Matt Stannard

Neoliberalism seeks to build normalcy by hiding and peripheralizing the violence of capitalism. Fascism builds on the glorification of violence in order to achieve widespread enforcement, compliance, and celebration of a mystical order that is really just capitalism.

The failure of neoliberalism to do what it promises to do calls fascism into its performative life.

The performativity of fascism matters. Jedd Legum reported a few weeks ago on the Trump campaign’s acceptance of “thousands in donations from a notorious neo-Nazi leader and other racist extremists.” The neo-Nazi leader is Morris Gulett, leader of the Aryan Nations. “The Trump campaign has repeatedly accepted cash from Gulett”, who preaches that “White, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic and kindred peoples are the direct descentants of the Adamic man . . .” and has called for genocide against those of African descent, calls Jewish people children of Satan, and so on.

Gulett’s contributions were brought to the attention of the Trump campaign in July 2018 by The Forward. At the time, Gulett had donated to the Trump campaign three times for a total of $200. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment from The Forward.

The Trump campaign also did not respond to a request for comment by Popular Information about Gulett’s continued donations.

Judd’s post at his really good Popular Information site lists a handful of additional donations–in the several thousands of dollars–Trump has accepted from other open racists and white nationalists. There’s no attempt to hide any of this. Nobody in Trump’s support base, which may total as much as 40 percent of the country, will walk back that support. The reason they won’t isn’t because they are fascists (politically active and committed white supremacists, to functionally describe what I mean by this) per se, but because they’ve accepted that the open celebration of white supremacy is an effective means of protecting and promoting their own perceived interests and values.

For U.S. politics, including for a socialist approach to politics, it matters that one side is doing this and the other side isn’t.

There are two things that make the Democratic Party’s difference from, in particular, the Trumpian Republican Party, matter strategically. One is the presence of social democrats and democratic socialists in the party. Their presence is not “cover” for neoliberal and right-wing Democrats, but rather is the result of factional political struggle and popular support for the left in the United States’ two-party system.

The second implication of the difference is the philosophical positioning of the Democratic Party as embodying the promise that capitalism can be made humane.

Strategically, these implications give socialists the opportunity to emphasize both neoliberal capitalism’s broken promises and the importance of electing and protecting left Democrats while building an independent infrastructure for both direct action and electoral anticapitalism–whatever forms those take in the coming months.

Trumpian fascism, like all fascism, begins with the premise that capitalism can’t and shouldn’t be made humane, but rather that its violences are its virtues, the desirability of a violent hierarchical system, a sadistic celebration of brutality and caste order.

Fascism exists because humane capitalism rests on a lie. Neoliberalism’s stability rests, in turn, on the always-looming threat of fascism. We should be pointing this out–not as a pretext for comparing candidates or making epistemically sloppy arguments about equivalencies or third parties, but for building socialism as mass movement in opposition to capitalism, neoliberalism, and fascism.

You can support Matt Stannard’s political writing by supporting Solidarity House Cooperative on Patreon.

Notes on the Current Fascism

September 7, 2020

by Matt Stannard

Several converging events summon these notes: a massive upsurge in right-wing violence encouraged by the Trump administration, the infusion of fascist ideology into the covid-19 pandemic crisis (particularly the often hidden argument that it’s okay for vulnerable people and the elderly to die), a concern with how socialists should approach the Republican and Democratic parties politically, and a friendly disagreement with Chris Richards of Political Hack & Slash, which we dig into on this episode of the Cowboys on the Commons podcast. 

Donald Trump has been an incipient fascist figurehead, and whether he’s done so consciously or not, members of his administration are conscious white nationalists with yearnings for the administration to possess absolute executive power, the ability to silence both governmental and media criticism, and a preference for visible brutality. The administration and its boss have encouraged the growth of far-right street and militia-sustained violence against minorities and the left. The administration is fiercely nationalist. All of these traits are fascist. Although a few initial assessments of Trump a few years ago concluded against the label, such as this not-very-prescient Vox piece that relied on extremely bourgeois opinions, the fact behind those assessments have rapidly changed, and many of their conclusions failed even to consider the evidence at hand at the time. 

But there’s a thread of thinking (which has been around at least since the term “liberal fascism” emerged in the 1980s from anarchist-punk discourse and then received a new iteration from the far right), that puts both neoliberal, centrist Democratic Party governance and far-right Republican governance on the same basic canvas and calls it “fascism.” Chris Richards’ use of this term to describe the entire spectrum ranging from Biden-Harris to Trump-Pence led me to invite him to a friendly debate on the podcast. I felt like it was important to distinguish the current administration as uniquely fascist, and I still do after listening to Chris, although I think he raised some important issues that problematize making that conclusion too soon. In the end, he feels he has empirical justification for his broader use of the term, and I feel I have arguments justifying the distinction, and we’ll each go our separate ways doing what we need to do (and we largely agree that there are important differences between Biden and Trump although they’re both awful), but I wanted to explain my distinctions in more detail.

The Historical and Marxist Definition of Fascism

Fascism plays a distinct role in brutal institutional countermovement against the democratization of economic and political life. Fascism is when capitalism has a temper tantrum, stripping back liberal reforms and the rule of law, punishing the humanitarian tendencies of liberalism, and doing direct violence against socialist and anti-capitalist movements, liberatory identity movements, and progressive public dissent. 

I don’t consider myself an orthodox Marxist, but the general definition of fascism at marxists.org contains what I think are the vital components of a definition of fascism: “Fascism is right-wing, fiercely nationalist, subjectivist in philosophy, and totalitarian in practice. It is an extreme reactionary form of capitalist government.” The definitional essay lists several “fundamental characteristics” including that fascism is right wing, nationalistic, hierarchical, anti-equality, religious, capitalist, warlike, voluntarist (in that it advances a particularly metaphysical view of “the will”) and anti-modern. 

Fascism is Performative

Moreover, although this is not explicit in the Marxist definition, these characteristics are performative as well as substantive. By this I mean that fascism celebrates nationalism, the fervor of its hierarchy, and its insistence on violence. Fascism isn’t just authoritarian nationalism in substance–it’s a violent and forceful public argument for authoritarian nationalism.

Although during our conversation on the Cowboys on the Commons podcast, Chris argued that fascism inherited its violent practices from, say, Italian politics or an American tradition of party-based violence that implicated the communists as much as the fascists, the communists did not celebrate their violence or make it party ideology, and by all accounts, fascist violence in Italy, Spain, and Germany far exceeded prior manifestations of political violence. Violence was often the sole argumentative tactic of fascists. The Italian fascists systematized and stepped up political violence. The Spanish fascists were unrelentingly abusive towards peasants and communists and used violence to demoralize republicans in the Civil War. And Kenneth Burke writes of Hitler’s early street-level political team deliberately antagonizing people at rallies in order to start fights that would become performative arguments for National Socialism: 

“Hitler also tells of his technique in speaking, once the Nazi party had been effectively organized, and had its army of guards, or bouncers, to maltreat hecklers and throw them from the hall. He would, he recounts, fill his speech with provocative remarks, whereat his bouncers would promptly swoop down in flying formation, with swinging fists, upon anyone whom these provocative remarks provoked to answer.”

. . . a tactic duplicated by the Trump campaign. 

So the difference between authoritarianism (which tolerates the liberal state) and Fascism (which doesn’t tolerate the liberal state) is obvious in the way the two forms of governance and political movement function. And there are other distinctions. Fascism flirts with a few revolutionary demands. It typically does this by promising a strong executive, a “strongman” who will bypass the democratic process to create special “exceptional” policies favoring some group or another and overriding procedural barriers to meeting their needs or demands. The Trump administration has done this, though the degree to which the administration has any legitimacy on this is determined by the outcome of internal cabinet struggle and placating big capital. 

Above all, fascist ideology glorifies violence, celebrates mythic strength, divides strong and weak. The Trump administration does this by encouraging interpersonal violence, police violence, right wing nationalist violence, the death of “weak” people vulnerable to disease, and the explicit celebration of immigrant detention (rather than Obama’s and presumably Biden’s, more humane-appearing and sugar-coated anti-immigrant violence, which also contains zones of exception and the space for change that explains why most immigration attorneys would undoubtedly prefer a Biden administration to a Trump one). 

Fascism is inseparable from white American nationalist and white Euronationalist ideology. Where nonwhite groups have exhibited fascist tendencies they have done so in the context of right-wing nationalism (e.g. Hindutva) or anti-Semitism and mysticism (Nation of Islam under Farrakhan). 

Fascism relies on the conscious, publicized creation of street-level gangs and, in the American context, right-wing militia. Fascism is not as contemptuous towards the managerial or liberal state, the military and the intelligence sector as it is to the far left–that is, fascists believe the far left must be eliminated first–but fascists do want to dismantle the liberal state and remake it as a totalitarian state based on mysticism and force. That this goal is ultimately unattainable* is not an immediate concern. 

The difference between the fascist state and the liberal state is that the liberal state tolerates judicial review, popular demands, local control and other checks on totalitarianism up to a point. Fascism can’t do that. Liberals form relationships with those protections, demands, and procedural checks that are very different from the bare, aggressive antagonisms of fascism. 

Errors from Misunderstanding fascism or Conflating it with General Authoritarianism: 

1. Misunderstanding the push-and-pull game of liberalism and fascism. Liberalism is based on the argument that the progressive liberal state can co-exist with capitalism. Fascism rejects that argument, sees liberal progressivism as a threat to capitalism (and to the white supremacist order behind it), and thus periodically destroys it. 

To some extent, the working class can demand and take advantage of the reformism of the liberal capitalist order. The socialist movement can use the tension between liberalism’s promises and failures to deliver them to open up wider political space. Fascism closes that potential and that space. Fascism doesn’t just function to reassert capitalism but also to reassert white supremacy and patriarchy and really the whole Kyriarchy, to borrow from the feminist term. Ultimately, just as the looming threat of communism has forced parliamentary democracies to enact social democratic reforms (like universal health care), the threat of fascism serves to close that reformist space. Thus, fascism and liberalism can never “be the same” functionally because to do so would undermine their ability to play off of each other in the service of capitalist white supremacy. 

2. Misunderstanding America First-ers’ & MAGA’s argument that Trump won’t start wars. This is a particularly frustrating public argument–that Trump will keep us out of war where liberal internationalists and neocons are more likely to start wars. It’s frustrating because there is a kernel of truth in fascism’s arguments against the interventionist and internationalist state, but we also know that nationalism, particularly non-liberatory nationalism, is an antecedent to the kind of unilateralism that, had things gone a little differently in Iraq and Iran earlier this year, undoubtedly would have taken us into an extremely destructive war. I can write more about this later, or talk about it on a podcast (mine or someone else’s) because I have limited time here and it is a complex discussion. Short version: Trump, like Hitler and Mussulini, would risk millions of lives if he believed it would advance his interests, including very immediate and very personal ones. We already know that he has no qualms about spending American lives in the service of illusory leadership. 

3. Misunderstanding other far right regimes like Putin’s Russia. 

4. Ceding political space to fascists by not forming critical/contingent electoral alliances with left liberals/left Democrats. There’s a great discussion about this on the vast majority podcast, and I would add that those who believe electoral politics are irredeemable need to answer a few questions: what’s your theory of the state? Are we cool ceding state power, the administrative and material power of various elected and appointed positions, to the far right? How far down the ballot is this true? Do you feel comfortable with the kind of oddsmaking that says we’ll be “worse off” or “just as bad off” regardless of who occupies those positions? 

5. In all of these errors, confusing bourgeois identity politics with demands for civil rights, equality under the law, and more radical anti-oppression work. Do we want to be the Socialist Workers Party or the Socialist Equality Party, the former praising the Bundy family and the white supremacist takeover of federal facilities, the latter mocking campaigns against sexual assault? I say that instead of this, we need to acknowledge that even though class and materiality contextualize struggles for equality under the law and equality in the anti-capitalist struggle, we still should support strong steps towards securing political and civil rights within the capitalist system. 

6. Sliding into accellerationism. This is where the rubber meets the road, as far as I’m concerned, about socialist praxis. Accellerationists, including people who don’t really know or admit that they’re advocating accellerationism, do this by rejecting reforms that socialists have traditionally led the way in demanding of the capitalist state, and by committing what I’ve come to call the “bare face” fallacy, assuming it’s preferable to have an open fascist in control of the state than a liberal. 

Conclusion

This kind of analysis will always feel futile and fleeting if we’re being honest with ourselves. Method and analysis can’t capture the dynamic, ever-changing clusters of material power and meaning-making around us. Nevertheless, in my own attempt to make sense of it, I find that the difference between liberal/neoliberal capitalism and fascistic neoliberal capitalism is that in the former, there is space to fight for, carve out, and demand non-systemic, but useful reforms; in the latter, there is a mad, overwhelming dash to end reforms, relief, and any checks possible against the self-directed excesses of capital. 

The liberal/neoliberal capitalist state is still brutal, often exporting or hiding or otherwise deferring the violence away from the political centers of its regime. But it is more likely to pay legal and rhetorical heed to political equality across identities, and more open to demands for relief and service as a function of democratic processes and public bureaucracy or coordination than the fascist state. In those instances where the fascistic capitalist state grants relief, it does so under the public warrant of strong executive power, so that all relief and reform depends on the will and the grace of the strong (and aspirationally unitary) executive. And the fascistic capitalist state is likely to continuously engage in the stripping of legal protections for minorities, as well as sanctioning rhetorical dehumanization of minorities.  

These distinctions are problematic; as my discussion with Chris revealed to me, the liberal/neoliberal capitalist state has broken down the distinction between legal and extralegal violence that used to enhance fascism’s reliance on street gangs and militias. But I think the distinctions still explain how liberalism creates the conditions for fascism, and in a sense relies on the looming threat of fascism to prevent the material delivery of socioeconomic rights, or sometimes weaken the enforcement of civil rights. 

The U.S. electoral system, particularly where presidential elections are concerned, is pretty much broken, and so I don’t think it’s constructive to get involved in the numerous debates about whether socialists should vote for the Biden-Harris ticket, abstain from voting for a presidential ticket, or vote for a third party. The system is soaked so full of voter suppression and electoral college distortion that one can’t confidently draw an arrow from one’s individual vote to a predictable outcome. What I can say is that a Biden-Harris presidency will raise extremely different needs and tasks for socialists, the anti-capitalist movement, and those concerned with cooperation and justice, than a Trump-Pence re-election–and that there are many people fighting on the front lines of labor, immigration, LGBTQAA+ and civil rights who note an exhausting, perpetually demoralizing, ship-always-sinking, fires-always-burning feeling from the Trump administration. Such an effect is intentional when an administration is full of open white nationalists, radical supply-siders, and advocates of unitary executive governance. There will not be fewer challenges presented by a Democratic administration, but the challenges are likely to manifest in a different, less exhausting and demoralizing way for many categories of progressive resistance. Although we should never pretend that’s good enough, I don’t think we should discourage people from preferring that outcome. It remains for us to educate people why it is, at best, necessary but not sufficient.

* Unattainable because the function of fascism is to beat back resistance to capitalism; when it fulfills that purpose it often (but not always) goes into retreat. Its remnants are assimilated into the liberal state, but that doesn’t make the liberal state a fascist state. The explicitly fascist traits are watered down, rehabilitated, and change rather drastically in form.  

Cleveland Baseball Team Won’t Enforce “Offensive Images” Rule on Racists

Some baseball teams, like the Chicago Cubs, have taken proactive approaches to dealing with racist fans. The Cleveland Indians* have not.

My friend Lauren alerted Cleveland Indians management concerning this tattoo in front of her in the security line:

D3kMqZyXsAESsCP

. . . as well as this pic of a different racist tattoo, taken by Lauren’s partner . . .

D-_9ED3XUAAceIn

And Lauren got this response.

“Hi Lauren. Thank you for reaching out to the Cleveland Indians. We are very thankful that you and your family are fans of the Tribe. We want you to enjoy your experience here at the ballpark. If you let the usher or anyone in lower fan services aware of this, [sic] someone can be sent to ask the fan to cover their tattoo if necessary. As well, even if you would not want to be re-located, it is possible though to get re-located for that game if you and your family are at the ballpark.”

Not sure where to begin, but this response places the burden of objecting to racism on the fan, not the club or stadium management. It promises nothing even if the fan does speak up, and then offers to relocate the family — even if they don’t want to?

But we shouldn’t even have to ask these questions. As baseball and politics blogger Sarah Sanchez pointed out in our discussion, the club’s fan behavior section provides that “offensive words or images must be covered or removed from the ballpark”.

Stadiums generally kick people out for yelling at umpires, stop serving alcohol late in the games, and even remind people not to swear because kids are present.

Lauren wrote:

I do have a bee in my bonnet, as they say, about hate speech tattoos at baseball games. I think the reason it bothers me so MUCH is that they wore this into the ballpark! It’s no different than a Nazi t-shirt, right? And the onus is on their seatmates to bring this to the park’s attention? Why? They didn’t just draw this on. They wore it in through security, in front of God and everyone. If people can be refused entry for having restricted items in their bags, for being too drunk, for any number of reasons, why don’t we say the same here? It’s not reasonable to expect their seatmates to take a personal risk to document something everyone can SEE and then – what? Raise it with the same management who let them in and seated them? And have any confidence they’ll take an action? And it’s bad! BAD bad. I shouldn’t have to sit near someone who felt SO STRONGLY about being a Nazi that they literally permanently altered their body so everyone would know HOW NAZI THEY ARE. Is this something I should have to address MYSELF?

So, if you’d like to sound off on this to the Cleveland Indians and Progressive Field, all the information to do that is here.

I write about why we should do everything we can to make racists socially uncomfortable here.

Thanks to Lauren & Yusuf for the pictures and the bravery.

 

* I’m gonna bracket (for now) the question of whether the Cleveland Indians mascot is itself racist (it is).  The fans of clubs with racist mascots deal with that reality in complex and varied ways. This episode is probably connected to such institutional racism in big-picture ways, but is totally worth pointing out by itself. 

by Matt Stannard on July 13, 2019

Podcast & Watch Guide on Protecting Your Kids from Fascism

Today at Solidarity House Cooperative we posted this special podcast featuring Lindsey Hanlon, Brad Kramer and me talking about how to talk to kids, especially teenage kids, and particularly white and mostly male teenage kids, about the alt-right. In the wake of the latest and worst fascist massacre in New Zealand, we felt like it was important to address the toxicity and danger of youth hate radicalization.

Lindsey, who blogs at Into the Void, also compiled the following list of video resources for parents, kids, and anti-fascist activists.

Contrapoints:

The Darkness (a great take on edgy humor and how it is done well versus how it is done poorly)

 

Decrypting the Alt-Right: How to Recognize a F@scist (what it says on the tin)

 

Incels (a deep dive into the Incel community that manages to be sympathetic but also call out what is really messed up about it)

 

Innuendo Studios:

The Alt-Right Playbook: Mainstreaming (the whole Alt-Right Playbook series is great, but this one is most relevant to what we talked about)

 

Lindsay Ellis:

Mel Brooks, The Producers and the Ethics of Satire about N@zis (an excellent look at the irony/boundary pushing discussion, specifically centered around the representation of Nazis)

hbomberguy:

PewDiePie is a Nazi (A lot of hbomberguy’s stuff is great, but again this is the most relevant to the discussion that we had. It’s both an old video and sadly relevant again)

 

Peter Coffin:

Somewhere to Belong: Jordan Peterson and + Alienation (again, many great videos, but this one is super relevant to what we talked about)

 

Angie Speaks:

Jordan Peterson, Jungian Archetypes, and Masculinity (again, awesome in many ways, but this one is most relevant for today)

 

Kat Blaque:

Freedom of Speech + Social Media (again, many great videos, but this one is most relevant for today)

 

Philosophy Tube:

Steve Bannon (a really good look at someone who is helping to normalize radicalism)

Can Racists Be Good Citizens? Should They Be Citizens At All?
by Matt Stannard
October 31, 2018

The title question is derived from “Can Atheists Be Good Citizens?” a dreadful essay published way back in 1991 by Richard John Neuhaus, a leading voice on the religious right, who was as responsible as anyone for conservative Christianity’s turn to militant, and often ruthless, political activism. That activism, and the political structures it built, punched down rather than up and was never about liberating the oppressed. The essay appeared long before “atheism” came to designate the bigotry of Richard Dawkins, et al. It simply denoted proactive nonbelief, which Neuhaus found incompatible with good citizenship, because one could not truly be a good citizen unless one acknowledged the Common Source of Good. That was pretty much it, a “gotcha” argument right up there with “you oppose capitalism but you’re using a computer.”

How incredibly, disturbingly ironic to reread Neuhaus’s article now, at a time when far-right groups are back in the public square calling for the extermination and subordination of nonwhites and non-Christians people, and performing that call with bullets. The idea that atheists are a danger to public order because they don’t share a very particular foundational metaphysics is just fucking quaint.

Tolerance and co-existence get a lot of crap from both the right and left. I get the left critique of liberalism, but I’d like to revisit the necessity of tolerance at least long enough to assert that, at a time when the current presidential administration is enabling and encouraging fascism, along with threats to strip citizenship rights away from some, and deny asylum and freedom of movement to others, while all the while white supremacists are harassing, beating, and killing people and not fearing for their own status or citizenship in the least, it’s time for us to contemplate the legal subordination of racists.

In the abstract, it may be that a willingness to welcome and engage others who are different from us is supererogatory at most–morally desirable but not morally required. If we stop there, we can easily conclude that a racist can never be a good citizen in a society nominally premised upon welcoming difference. This seems noncontroversial to anyone to the left of Donald Trump or Stephen Miller. So the answer to the first question is easy for us, and I suppose we could debate it out with those in the “center” who believe that we need to tolerate intolerance, although those debates tend to go in circles.

But because we are not in the abstract, and because white supremacists in America are doing more than just thinking shitty thoughts, and because there is no abstract, and wherever there is white supremacy there is violence and murder and the closure of public space and incursion of secure private space, I want to move beyond the question of whether a racist can be a good citizen and ask whether racists ought to be stripped of
their citizenship altogether. There is a solid case to be made.

By the way, it’s equally obvious to me that to propose an ethno-state as some counter-antecedent to the “good citizenship” question is to beg that question. To advocate the ethnostate is to advocate racism per se, and that is the battle-cry of contemporary American fascists, although, as I’ll explain a bit below, they often propose such things half-ironically as a rhetorical trick.

It is reasonable and, in the current context of racist violence, desirable, to demand as a condition of citizenship the acceptance of the citizenship, dignity, and autonomy of others in one’s community; and where dignity and autonomy are concerned, such an obligation extend to respect respect for non-citizens as well.

The idea of revoking citizenship is provocative, of course, but it’s far from absurd. Rainer Baubock and Vesco Paskalev’s 2016 article in the Georgetown Immigration Law Journal discusses various grounds for revocation of citizenship, mostly in the context of the European Union, but with much to consider when contemplating a more cooperative and egalitarian iteration of the United States. There are a number of weak reasons why states revoke citizenship, such as service to a foreign state; but there are stronger reasons too, such as the discovery that an applicant had deceived authorities in order to acquire citizenship (although we can ask whether that is an adequate reason). Then, of course, there are those who threaten public security in such an extreme way as to expose as false one’s commitment to the society in which they live. “No right is absolute,” Baubock and Paskalev write, “and in the Hamdi case the U.S. Supreme Court found that grave threats to public security can justify significant limitations of the right to due process. It would not be inconsistent for the Court to sustain abridgment of their right to citizenship on the same grounds too.”

As a general category, “noncompliance with citizenship duties” can go beyond just obeying laws, though. Baubock and Paskalev cite Shai Levi’s speculative argument that citizenship could be revoked for serious violations of the “duty of civic allegiance.” Although Lavi’s argument is in the context of terrorism, which violates a citizen’s “commitment to self-government,” it isn’t a stretch, and may even be more reasonable, to extend that duty to respect for the rights of others to exist (period), and to participate in public life. This doesn’t strike me as a free speech concern, either, since the act of renouncing one’s state is also a speech act–one which denotes an explicit rejection of the foundation of one’s citizenship. I do understand the danger giving the state the power to throw around “duty of civic allegiance” and think such a concept could be replaced with some kind of minimal duty of acceptance of others, a literal duty of non-racism or nondiscrimination applied to those identity categories we currently define as protected classes (plus a couple more that we should so define).

So a simple statement of my hypothetical proposal would be something like “Those advocating discrimination or subordination of other humans on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity and expression, religion, ethnicity, nationality, age, or socioeconomic class are subject to revocation of citizenship.” Not unproblematic, but a good starting point for discussion, I think.

The liberal argument against this kind of hard line is most often the marketplace of ideas metaphor, that the solution to racist speech is anti-racist speech. We have to ask: solution for whom? Although we don’t realize this when we’re making the argument, it’s made from the privileged position of those least likely to be killed as a result of bigoted incitement. History demonstrates that allowing racist discourse in public dialogue does not result in the sorting of good and bad ideas through the filter of public choice. Instead, because racists explicitly reject such argumentative ethics to begin with (embracing them only in cruel irony to justify making inroads into such incitement), racism becomes a perennially unsettled, re-presented issue that we re-litigate again and again and again, each time accompanied by spiraling levels of extra-discursive and fatal violence.

And in any event, I’m not arguing for censorship of racist speech or criminal punishment of the racist. My argument is that, in being racist, one fails to meet one’s citizenship obligation threshold. I should be entitled only to such status which I am willing to categorically and sincerely extend to others, with only non-arbitrary exceptions. I should affirm, or at least not actively oppose, the inherent worth and dignity of all people and their right to co-exist in the state and civil society so long as they also affirm the same. If I refuse to do that, then I am refusing to join with others in upholding a basic ethical obligation to those with whom I exist, the violation of which directly threatens others’ security and participation in the state and civil society.

But what about those of us with radically critical views of the state and civil society? Well, I may be “against the state” or large parts of it (e.g. I may be an anarchist or a revolutionary communist), but this doesn’t have to undermine the social obligation to affirm, or at least not actively oppose, the inherent worth and dignity of all people and their right to co-exist in the state and civil society. In fact, this is an important difference between anarchism or communism on one side, and fascism on the other. The former are critiques of the state that do not arbitrarily exclude people from participation and moral status (and actually attempt to propose social orders where all people are truly free to so participate), while the latter is premised upon those exclusions and mandates them in praxis.

Drawing such a line in order to retain one’s status as a citizen is also desirable because the classical liberal line of protecting racist speech while outlawing violent action is a line that fascists have learned to blur through an elaborate system of ironic practices such as the use of outrageous statements that the speakers deny being serious about when called on them. This quite often appears as “We should kill all of you. Stop, stop, I’m joking. Maybe.” “We need a white ethno-state. Perhaps I am only being ironic.” Fascists can and will make endless versions of these statements, mixing them with conspiracy theories and non-actionable discourse advocating racial hierarchies and appeals to the desirability of ethnic cleansing and eradication. As long as they aren’t calling for specific acts of violence against specific people, there are no real consequences for such speech acts even when they inspire actual violence. My hypothetical proposal recognizes this limitation and suggests that the requirements for citizenship in a just democratic society ought to be heavier than simply being able to claim one was only joking about the desirability of slavery and genocide.

Similarly, racist conspiracy theories about marginalized people serve as a subsidy to those with a political agenda served by marginalizing potential opposition. Fox News can assert, with no legal consequences, that powerful Jews are responsible for people of color being mad at police. The ability to do such things is similar to the ability of corporations to create (and avoid paying for) negative externalities like pollution. A social cost is extracted and paid by others for the profits of the polluters. My hypothetical proposal says that the polluters should pay the costs of those externalities. Rejecting my proposal wouldn’t make those externalities go away; it just ensures that innocent people, and the state, will continue to pay for them. Those rejecting the proposal ought to provide a counterproposal for how those costs will be paid, one that solves for the fact that they are externalized on innocent victims now.

The last two years of public life in the United States, filled with spiking numbers of racist violence, open fascist activity, and the occupation of the White House by white nationalists devoted to turning the United States into an ethno-state (or perhaps more accurately, preserving it as such) makes Richard John Neuhaus’s 1991 piece on atheism and citizenship even more disgusting in retrospect than it was originally, as if nonbelief in God threatened the safety of vulnerable people and the body politic in any way comparable to white supremacy, an ideology very compatible with conservative theism and which, in totality, carries no possible consequences other than to subordinate, hurt, or kill other people.

Racism, particularly manifest in fascism, serves another nefarious role: It’s invoked to preserve the existing socioeconomic order through violence and intimidation. I believe the existing socioeconomic order threatens to destroy all life on earth, but even if it didn’t, racism prevents public deliberation rather than facilitating it. White supremacists, racists, and fascists produce metaphysical justifications for murder, arbitrary hierarchies, and structural violence, and in doing so, not only pose direct threats to people’s safety, but also long-term threats to democratic participation in public life. That they are allowed to do so is a political anomaly caused not by America’s unwavering commitment to free speech, but America’s antecedents in material hierarchy and ideological bigotry. Because we want to put such antecedents behind us, racists ought not feel safe, let alone affirmed, in the United States. They ought to fear for their citizenship and social status. One could even reasonably argue for the social utility of them fearing for their personal security and safety, since they knowingly create climates where others fear for theirs. But at the very least, they should not feel at ease about their relationship with the state and civil society. Racists should be afraid to be racists.

Matt Stannard is operations director at Solidarity House Cooperative. His latest article at Occupy.com is “After Rahm, Can Chicago Create a Cooperative Economy?” The opinions expressed in this essay are solely Matt’s. 

Resisting Prison Labor

by Matt

Black Agenda Report: “Prisoner rights advocates will converge for what aims to be the largest abolitionist demonstration in U.S. history, [Saturday, August 19], in Washington D.C. The Millions for Prisoners’ Human Rights March is centered around the demand that the exceptions clause, which allows for slavery to continue in United States prisons, be removed from the Constitution’s 13th Amendment.”

Since we’re in a period of heightened consciousness about slavery and its legacies, this is an especially important time to talk about compulsory prison labor, or, more bluntly, prison slavery; enslavement of incarcerated people.

I have no desire to break down the components of the moral case against slavery, but must at least partially do so to point out how enslavement of the incarcerated is an especially nefarious kind of human exploitation.

Labor produces value. Prisoners’ compulsory–or even very-low-paid–labor facilitates the production of value for privileged entities (the state, private corporations who get in on the action) and extracts that value, working the body and mind of people at their most vulnerable. Not even the weak justification for the wage system (people are free to walk away and find other work, live in other labor communities) is present in the context of incarceration. I believe this all amounts to something foundationally evil and unjust, which bypasses whatever moral judgment may fall on the prisoner. I’m betting most people reading this believe the same.

Nazism, the Confederacy, China’s authoritarian capitalism, all have slave labor as their material foundations (so does Classical Greece, but that’s another post). That’s the backdrop of Nazis in Charlottesville, and prison labor is another head of the Hydra.

The Black Agenda Report piece by Kyle Fraser summarizes the corporate and governmental profiteering that steers the prison labor ship, and is a good starting read. Last year’s Think Progress piece by Carimah Townes is a longer and more detailed read, definitely worth the time.

Confederate statues should be removed because they are non-living remnants of slavery. Prison labor, on the other hand, should be abolished because it’s a *living* remnant of slavery.

Photo By Royalbroil – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, at Wikimedia Commons

How Racism and Capitalism Work Together in Policing

by Matt Stannard

Municipal and state police forces’ use of intimidating and lethal superweapons is a result of the private, for-profit production of such weapons and accompanying lobbying to create policing policies that favor those weapons. But that production and distribution couldn’t work except over a backdrop of anti-Blackness, and the ability of police ideologists to interpret disadvantaged neighborhoods and the trauma of historical oppression as Black criminality.

Racism and capitalism work together in tandem again in the training of police officers by private training firms with the same material interests as the weapons makers. The fastest way to turn police forces into consumers of those weapons is to teach cops that they need to be very, very afraid of people of color. The obvious solutions are to take control of the situation and eliminate any threat to the safety of the officer as quickly as possible. This imperative, propped up in the consciousness of police officers even if they aren’t overtly racist, must be constantly replenished.

Matt Stannard is policy director for Commonomics USA. 

Photo: By Daviskorn at English Wikipedia – Fed Up Queers, Public Domain