Progressives and Rednecks

Some people can't be trusted

I was thinking about Jason Arday this morning, but last month I wasn’t thinking about Karmelo Anthony. These are two controversial negroes whose failures have been in the news, and since it’s American news it drags along racial implications. As usual, when I talk about race, I try to make it personal because it’s often difficult to convince Americans that what happens to one African American in one place has nothing to do with the rest of us. Except when pundits say it should. Thus I complain.

Two Problems
I’ve been dealing with a couple of problems on the high side of black culture. One of them is a moderately small problem, the other is a moderately large problem. The small one is what I have identified as a dainty social conservatism that is overly reactive to ordinary middle class conventions, like blue collar speech and military service. It’s a small problem because the success of integration in America means these particularly dainty folks are no longer the singular avenue of access to upper middle class and upper class success for black Americans. They used to be, but these days I think they may be at a loss to be as influential as they once were a generation ago.

The moderately large problem is what I’ve identified as the cadre of p-hacking sociologists who have made significant inroads into the humanities. This is a sensitive subject, so let me admit that I’m going to be rude in making some plain declarations. You see it was my father’s generation (and he’s 90) who established a beachhead in academic sociology in the 1950s. He’s a competent guy but he’s no research scholar. Yet I know that as a lecturer at Antioch University he had an outsized influence on what passes for the black intelligentsia. One might say his generation needed the kickstart after the onesie-twosies of stars like DuBois, Williams, Sowell, but we his children and grandchildren find much of his study to be quaint. The large problem is that of guilty white progressives and resentful white rednecks both of who are greatly overwhelmed by their perceived significance of moderate black academic achievements.

Commenters on this moderately large problem find a bit of asymmetry between the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’ and the ‘hard bigotry of no expectations’. It has been said that there are sloppy drunks and angry drunks. If you’re like me, it’s the difference between getting hit by a Ford or a Chevy. I have no tolerance for either kind of drunk driving. I’m not the one serving the racial cocktails. Both of these parties should have been cut off decades ago.

Still, I have a much easier time distinguishing myself from the likes of the violent criminals who have little or no social skills than I have from those with professional credentials and department store credit cards. That’s why I think a bit more about Arday than Anthony, not only for how it may reflect upon me, but what it says about the Americans I thought were much more rational and clear-headed than they’ve demonstrated. And sure I recognize that this one-off is just a single point but then again so is ‘allahu akbar’. There’s a lot of points out there and it’s going to take much more than common sense to rid us of these common corruptions.

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The Criminal Incentive
I watched a video this morning which impressed me in a counter-intuitive way. I believe this is the counter-intuition that progressives in particular have to reckon with. It was of a Central or South American leader who described the economic cascade of arresting all of those who are in the illegal drug trade in his country. Illicit drug money, he explains, is mostly spent in legit ways. On groceries, utility bills, transportation, fuel and a great number of other goods and services. It is rational from one way of thinking to only arrest the criminals bit by bit so that the economy doesn’t suffer. He estimates that the GDP of his country, were he to wave the magic crackdown wand, would take a 10% hit. I’ve certainly heard the analog of this argument from those who opposed standardized testing for protected minorities. Get rid of the SAT and minority enrollment takes a hit. At some point you have to eliminate your tolerance for corruption. At some point you have to draw a hard line for the integrity of your society.

I don’t want to be a protected minority. I’m not one of those people who was mad at The Flintstones or The Jetsons for not having characters that looked like me. Easy for me, not so easy for some. I’ll tell you why.

I didn’t grow up in a slave state. I didn’t grow up around rednecks. I didn’t grow up where Jews were afraid to walk around. I didn’t grow up afraid of police. I didn’t grow up afraid of Muslims. I grew up in a less sloppy America, an America we wanted to keep beautiful.

But I understand that many black Americans grew up in a Jim Crow redneck South and for them, these were who white people were. Here in SoCal the first whitefolks I met, aside from the few in my neighborhood, were surf kids and the kids who grew up in Pacific Palisades. Progressives for damned sure. But soon I met Irish Catholics and Vals and Episcopalians and kids from suburban San Diego. I was immersed in quite enough white diversity to know better than to stereotype. Then again I had principles and I understood what race riots were. I wasn’t raised to expect conflict. Disagreement? Sure. I knew how to resolve disagreements, even when it came to the rules of a street fight. But I didn’t grow up in a war zone blanketed by fear. Not in a black ghetto, rural or urban.

So I don’t have a great deal of sympathy for what Gad Saad calls ‘suicidal empathy’. I don’t have any confusion in my mind about the limits of tolerance. I cannot tolerate double standards for American citizens. It’s a hill worth dying on.

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My Kind of American
There’s a great episode of the Joe Rogan podcast recorded several years before he left for Texas. It was his long form interview with David Lee Roth in which Roth reveals that he studied to be an EMT at the age of 50. Around that time in my life I started looking at more things in a different way as well. One of those things was the personal relationships I started with first responders. It was a part of my readiness to step out of various bubbles. I think these days it takes more courage than it ever did, because American life has gotten more troublesome. There is a general degradation in civility and in civil society. We take hard bubbles for granted; a few of us, a whole lot of thems. We’re frightened and defensive and we’ve identified more evil cabals than national parks.

We may have lost our fresh eyes. I wonder if we are willing to go forward with the idea that gas stations have to keep locking their restrooms because of derelicts and criminals. I wonder if we are willing to accept that there is very little worth integrating and assimilating into, no matter how different we feel inside. I wonder if we want to feel safe in America and have goodwill without condescension. It’s not every work environment that presents this. I think not enough of us are engaged in that kind of productive work. So everything and everyone is means-tested.

I don’t like that kind of frightened, gated feel in America. But I know whom to trust and its easily a broad slice. That’s because I’m looking for virtue and I’m not trying to BS my way through. I’m not stuck on the optics. I’m not sniffing the air for the smell of fear. This land is your land. This land is my land. Maybe we should act like it.

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Citizenship
So my preliminary conclusion is that this nation needs to come to a reckoning, a soft one preferably over the matter of citizenship. It is, quite frankly, all we are entitled to care about. But it requires a moral obligation to the republic, a particular kind of patriotism. I can be insufferably reasonable that some lacking the genius of Jefferson, still can’t see that as he did.

The Christian King

Yet I clearly confess that I, ever reckoning with his genius, didn’t know that he wrote what he wrote. His vector of freedom was as good as any of ours, but we don’t recognize and therefore hold a stupid, sullen grudge against the Founders.

In one way, this is another plug for my Lorite Interrogator. Specifically for the profile of John Dewey with whom I share several important values.

John Dewey (1859–1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and education reformer who taught at the University of Chicago and Columbia and stayed publicly engaged in almost every American political argument of his long life. He inherited pragmatism from Peirce and James and turned it into a lived program — for schools, for public inquiry, for what democracy would have to become if it was ever to be more than a form of government.

Big idea

Democracy is not primarily a set of institutions but a way of life — ‘social intelligence,’ a collaborative process of inquiry in which people together identify their common problems and act on them. Education is the ongoing work of making that kind of citizen; a school is a laboratory of democracy or it is nothing.

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