Read Cecil Adams's response to my post here.
I appreciate the response from Cecil. It is far more measured and charitable than my post was. Still, although I would be the first to admit that my initial post was a touch on the polemical side, I stand by what I said there. For example, I still disagree, as Cecil said in the original post that "The lesson many drew [from the "Time of Troubles" when Washington was mayor] is that meaningless elections = peace and prosperity, whereas democracy = bad". Perhaps the 25-30% who supported the Two Eddies crusade against Washington would endorse this claim. But I doubt that the majority of ordinary Chicagoans would.
That said, I felt partially vindicated after reading how much clarification there was in Cecil's response. I felt vindicated in the sense that the response largely argues that Cecil agrees with what I was saying (for the most part), whereas I'd construed him as disagreeing. I'm pleased to see that we're in agreement on more than I'd previously supposed, but I'm not convinced that we agree on everything.
Although this wasn't perhaps clear in my initial critique, part of the problem with Cecil's column on non-partisan elections had to do with what it didn't say. What I mean is this. If you didn't know the facts about Washington, race and politics in Chicago, you wouldn't walk away with a very accurate view after reading the column. Absent Cecil's recent clarifications and qualifications, the original column would leave you with the impression that Washington was a "problem" best avoided in the future. Compare and contrast Ira Glass's excellent piece on Harold Washington with Cecil's original column and tell me that the latter doesn't miss the mark.
Some of Cecil's points are well taken. I wouldn't want to argue that non-partisan elections are inherently racist. However, in certain contexts, when put to certain uses, they may absolutely be an instrument of perpetuating racial subordination. And in our case in Chicago, they are such an instrument. Using them cynically in order to prevent a non-Machine-sanctioned Black reformer from taking office again seems to fit the bill here. Cecil seems to agree with this much.
But Cecil's "second point" is that despite this unsavory history, non-partisan elections have their own merits as well. But what are these merits? This is where I get a bit confused.
In the original column, Cecil argued that the merit of non-partisan elections is that they force candidates to appeal across racial lines, whereas the older procedures didn't. I don't think this is true. To be sure, the old procedures had plenty of problems. But it isn't true that the old system didn't require candidates to appeal for support across color lines. The story of Harold Washington, as Cecil himself agrees, invalidates that worry. Furthermore, it isn't even obvious to me that "non partisan elections" encourage candidates to appeal across color lines. I don't see how eliminating primaries is a step in the right direction here, but I'm open to changing my mind. I do think that the non-partisan procedures were implemented to dilute the black vote, and I don't think they were ever drawn up to increase democracy. But I concede that the one-party Machine domination of Chicago politics may have been aided by the previous set-up (though it remains to be seen whether the new rules will have any effect on the health of the Machine... my own thought is that it will take a grass-roots struggle from below to really shake things up in Chicago).
One final thought about the idea of "appealing across racial lines". There is a reasonable sense of this idea and there is one that is problematic. The reasonable version is this. People of different races should be fully equal co-legislators, and should relate to one another on terms of respect. I myself endorse this rather abstract and idealized version.
But the problematic version is sneaky. It trades on the appeal of the idealized version above, while actually apologizing for already existing oppression. The problematic version basically interprets "appealing across racial lines" as "appealing to the prejudices and existing privilege of white people". In other words, "appealing across racial lines" means "appeasing those sitting atop the existing racial status-quo".
Thus asking white and black people to appeal to one another is not an identical request. Asking whites to appeal to black people means asking the historic oppressors to listen to, and take seriously, the needs and interests of the oppressed. Asking black people to avoid talking frankly about racism in order not to alienate mainstream whites is a different requirement entirely.
Of course, the most fundamental reason to combat and fight racism rests mostly on the "reasonable version" of the idea that I laid out above. You fight it because you care about the bigger struggle of fighting for an egalitarian society in which human beings encounter each other as equals in the fullest possible sense.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Straight Dope Chicago Responds
Friday, December 17, 2010
Racist Bullshit in "Straight Dope Chicago"
From "Straight-Dope Chicago":
The idea of a nonpartisan mayoral election with a runoff if no one got a majority was first bruited in 1986, during the runup to the 1987 mayoral contest. The intent clearly was to avoid splitting the white vote again and letting Washington be re-elected. Richie Daley among quite a few others supported the plan, but an attempt to put it up for a city referendum failed...Straight dope my ass. Straight racist crap is more like it. Here's some bits from earlier in the article:
A 1988 effort to push nonpartisan elections through the state legislature died, but the idea came up again in 1995, when Republicans took control of the General Assembly and the governor's office for the first time in 25 years. They used the opportunity to push through a long list of cherished measures that had gone nowhere while the Democrats were in control, one of which was nonpartisan mayoral elections in Chicago.
...Pretty much everyone else was in favor, and how could they not be? David Axelrod, who had worked for both Washington and Daley, told the Tribune, "It forces you to appeal to a broader constituency than to one ethnic or racial group."
Hard to argue with. Governor Jim Edgar signed the measure into law, and it's what we're using now. Is it fair? Yeah, it's fair. The fact remains that had nonpartisan elections been the rule in 1983, Harold Washington wouldn't have been elected, and breaks like the one that enabled him to become mayor are precisely what the system is intended to prevent.
For many Chicagoans, [democracy] is a frightening prospect. Those who've been around for a while recall that the last seriously contested elections took place during that brief period in the 1980s when the mayor of Chicago wasn't named Daley. This is now widely thought of as the Time of Troubles. The lesson many drew is that meaningless elections = peace and prosperity, whereas democracy = bad...Before I rip this article apart, just ask yourself this: to whom is it written? Who does the author mean when he talks about "most Chicagoans"? Who is "a lot of people" in Chicago?
...However virtuous the system may look now, it wasn't put in place because of saintly considerations. Rather, it was meant to ensure that an electoral outcome a lot of people weren't too happy with never happens again.
The most famous mayoral election in Chicago history … well, I shouldn't say that; all the inter-Daley elections were pretty memorable. But certainly the one with the most dramatic consequences took place in 1983...
...white Chicagoans may not have been wild about the city's first woman mayor, but better her than the first black one.
[For a far more accurate account of the Harold Washington election in 1983 please listen ot the following excellent edition of This American Life on the subject here.]
Though the gloss given in "straight dope" suggests otherwise, the fact of the matter is that the way that most of white Chicago reacted to Harold Washington, who won the mayoral election fair-and-square (with far more grass-roots organizing and support than any Daley could ever hope to obtain), was absolutely outrageous and self-consciously racist. The way that the white-controlled City Council tried to thwart his reformist agenda was criminal and reprehensible.
But the tone of the straight-dope piece expresses none of this obviously unsavory truth. It adopts a tone of faux-objectivity that paves over the very real, disgusting attacks that Washington faced. It tacitly endorses the disgusting attacks by giving the voice of white outrage a veneer of credibility and universality. You'd hardly know from reading the article that white people make up only 1/3 of the population of Chicago- the article makes it sound as though "most", "many", "a lot of" Chicagoans are white, whereas a small fringe aren't.
Strangely, at one point the article complains that Harold Washington "split the white vote", but later on it defends the new (quite obviously racist) "non-partisan procedures" on the grounds that they force candidates to "appeal to more than one ethnic or racial group". This is flatly contradictory.
If Harold Washington indeed "split the white vote", then in what sense didn't he already have to "appeal to more than one racial group"? Moreover, if the "problem" for those wishing to maintain white political hegemony in Chicago was that Washington won by "splitting the white vote", in what sense were "non-partisan" procedures (which, if we believe Cecil Adams, are supposed to split the white vote) the "solution"? This is obfuscatory non-sense. On the one hand, the "straight dope" story is that Washington committed the sin of "splitting the white vote" and was, therefore, attacked by the Machine for having done so. On the other, we're told that the "solution" to the Harold Washington "problem" was the "non-partisan" mayoral procedure, which, we're told, has the virtue both of solving the Washington "problem" and forcing candidates to appeal to voters across racial divisions.
The fact is that the "power brokers" that the article seems to side with did not want there to be a Black mayor and they used every available means to try to thwart his plans and have him removed.
The article also suggests that most white Democrat Chicagoans voted for Washington, whereas some voted for the white Republican. In fact, 90% of white Democrats defected from their party to vote against Washington for the (white) Republican, whose campaign slogan was "Epton for Mayor: Before it's too late".
The bottom line is this. As I've noted elsewhere, the typical white racist line in Chicago is a Hobbesian one. Their paranoid, irrational view is that Chicago can either have (a) a chaotic, disastrous "rule of barbarians" if it allows full democracy, or (b) it can have an autocratic white ruler who "maintains order". Though some white apologists for the Machine may reproach Daley in certain respects, most consent to its top-down domination of politics insofar as it ensures the political subordination of the "barbarians", i.e. the people of color in Chicago who make up 2/3 of the population (1/3 Black, 1/3 Latin@). This is the politics of white paranoia playing itself out (listen to the This American Life episode for more details here.)
Despite the actual divisions, inequalities, and the demographics and history of Chicago, most of the mainstream white population in Chicago thinks it deserves permanent domination over the municipal and county government. Thus when a white candidate runs for Mayor, that's just "normal". But when a person of color runs it's "divisive" and "racially exclusive". As the "Straight Dope" article suggests, it's a "problem", it's "an outcome a lot of people weren't too happy with", which they want to make sure "never happens again".
This "analysis" of recent Chicago electoral politics seems rather nakedly racist. And it appears in affiliation with Chicago's so-called progressive publication no less. While The Reader is easily the best leftish news and analysis one can find in Chicago (certainly it's many, many light-years ahead of worthless tripe like the Trib or Sun-Times), I'm always bothered by how goddamn white (in the pejorative sense) the publication is. What I mean is that it is consciously written by and for a slice of the white population in Chicago but nonetheless understands itself to be a publication representative of the city writ large.
In reality, The Reader does not really express the needs or interests of people of color in Chicago. Indeed, even when it adopts a sympathetic attitude towards the other 2/3 of Chicago, it typically does so from an outsider, observer perspective, rather than from the perspective of fellow city-dwellers and comrades. It's not that I'm arguing that the Reader should focus exclusively on the topic of race and nothing else --but I think it's problematic how little it reflects the social or political interests of black Chicagoans. That can and should change.
Most of the time, there is not a lot of discussion of race in the Reader. So far as I'm aware, there is no regular input from a person of color in the paper about issues facing people of color. In a city so segregated that sociologists had to invent a new word to describe it ("hyper-segregation"), you'd think that the allegedly progressive publication in the city would be a bit more sensitive to the historic and ongoing subordination of black people in the city of Chicago. But apparently not. Hence you find ridiculous "maps" of Chicago among some of these folk which don't even bother to include much of the west-side or south-sides on the map of the city.
Saturday, August 8, 2009
Racism, Class Power and Democracy
Within the framework of neoliberal 'development' prescriptions, it is 'bad policy' to enact laws in a 'developing nation' which imposed higher taxes or regulations on foreign corporations operating in that nation. Imagine the following semi-true scenario: we're in South Africa in 1995. After decades of oppression and Apartheid, finally universal suffrage is extended and a Left-wing government promising to fight for universal health care is elected by a margin of 80%-20%.
In this case the democratically-elected government of a sovereign nation has an overwhelming majority and has the strong popular backing of more than 80% of the electorate. The Constitution of the country states that the legislative branch of government, backed by a democratic mandate, has the sole power to make laws as it sees fit within the limits set by the Constitution.
Unfortunately this isn't how it works under capitalism. Say the hugely popular government wants to impose a new corporate tax to fund a social program aiming to provide health services. Say they have more than the enough votes to easily pass the law.
We can imagine the companies who would be taxed saying in response: if you tax us heavily we will leave the country. Capital flight, massive job losses and economic turmoil will be the result. Still want to try and tax us?
Make no mistake: this is a threat. And it is one that no government could possibly ignore. As soon as the government heeds the threat, it becomes clear that the legislative branch is neither as sovereign or powerful as it would seem on paper. Despite overwhelming popular support, a small clique of capitalists, themselves accountable to no democratic vote, have an inordinate amount of leverage over what becomes law (and this is already assuming that they haven't done anything to game the process via lobbying). In this case political power is subject to democratic principles but economic/class power is not. The result is that undemocratic concentrations of economic power have bargaining clout and leverage over democratic political institutions. This is especially lopsided in 'developing' nations whose economies may depend very heavily on foreign investment.
But neoliberals see no problem here. They would merely comment that it would be 'bad policy' to raise the taxes on corporations. Instead the job of governmental institutions is to create a 'good business climate' and create conditions favourable to large accumulation of profits by business. This will bring jobs, investment, etc. Democracy may actually get in the way of this process, according to the neoliberal line, so it is not particularly useful in 'development' to have wide democratic participation. Let the capitalists and 'experts' organize and coordinate participation.
Now fast forward to Chicago in the early 1980s. The demographics break down roughly as follows: 35% black, 35% latino, 30% white. But you would never know this from glancing at Chicago's political institutions.
In 1976 Lord/His Majesty/Mayor Richard J. Daley keeled over dead while in office. By law, the man designated to succeed him was President Pro Tempore of the City Council, William Frost. But because Frost was black, he was literally locked out of meetings and deliberations set in place by the white-majority City Council to determine who would be acting-Mayor after Daley died. A couple of days later Michael Bilandic, a white man, was declared acting-Mayor.
A power-struggle was set off within the Chicago Machine over who would be the next Big Guy. Ruptures in the Machine opened up space for a challenge from below from Chicago's black and latino majority. Over 100,000 black and Latino voters were registered for the first time to vote by community organizers. Harold Washington, a U.S. Congressman at the time, surprised everyone when he eked out a close victory in the Democratic primary (which, in Chicago, is usually tantamount to winning the election; The Republican Party is meaningless here).
Harold Washington, Mayor 1983-87
The most frequently-aired argument against Washington was something like the following: if you elect a black man, Chicago will "become another Detroit". Jobs will go, High-rise public housing projects will be crop up everywhere, crime will sky-rocket, and another wave of severe White-flight will devastate the city's tax base.
You might say that allowing the government of Chicago to actually reflect the make-up of the people who live there would be 'bad policy'.
Now I see a lot of similarities between the imagined South Africa case and the Chicago case. In both cases, we see that when political democracy is actually extended enough to pose a threat to existing relations of power, counter-threats from elites follow. And they are in a position to make threats because of disproportionate concentrations of power outside the political realm. What I mean is that if whites didn't have the economic power, wealth, ability to move to the suburbs, etc. that they currently have, they wouldn't be in a position to make these kinds of "this city will become Detroit" threats. Can you imagine the black population threatening 'black flight' and telling white elites that they'd better listen up and change their ways? Of course not, because the black population in Chicago is not in the position of power that white elites are.
This is an unbelievably unjust state of affairs. In effect, the black population is told the following: either you stay in your place and accept that the majority-white Machine is in charge, or you can feel the wrath of disinvestment, job loss, white flight, and economic turmoil. Either we run the show, or you can have another Detroit.
What's interesting is that the "Detroit card" isn't really a cynical threat for many whites in Chicago. They believe it. They are scared, paranoid and worried that the "urban crisis" of the late 1960s/early 70s could happen again. And this is why so many whites who have qualms about Daley and the Machine vote for it again and again. But whether or not whites vote, a 30% sector of the population should not be able to even cast a veto on potential mayoral candidates. Yet the reality is that this 30% constituency largely calls the shots. Democracy? I don't think so.
