by DAVID WALSH
Supporters took photos with their phones as Mr. Trump arrived for a rally last month in Sanford, Florida PHOTO/Eric Thayer/The New York Times
“The Interpreter” is a New York Times column by Max Fisher and Amanda Taub that pledges to explore “the ideas and context behind major world events.” An interpretation no doubt, but on what basis and from what social vantage point?
Taub’s November 1 article, “Behind 2016’s Turmoil, a Crisis of White Identity,” is one of many pieces in the American media that pin the blame for the unprecedented character of the 2016 presidential election on “white” defensiveness and resistance to change.
According to this line of reasoning, support for Republican Donald Trump has emerged from formerly “privileged” layers of the white working and lower-middle class, who feel threatened by the growing power of women, African Americans and other previously “marginalized” social groupings.
Several things are striking about Taub’s article––first of all, its unseriousness and lack of substance. The comment does not reveal a trace of scholarship or depth. It is little more than a series of impressions and assertions, driven by reactionary, although unstated, political assumptions.
Who are the “experts,” backing up her claims? They include Eric Kaufmann of Birkbeck College, University of London, whose sensationalized research about the influx of fanatically religious Muslims into the West (in Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? and other works) has fueled anti-immigrant sentiment; Michael Ignatieff, former leader of Canada’s Liberal Party, who defended the Bush administration’s policies, including torture, in his The Lesser Evil; and Robin DiAngelo, whose “area of research,” according to her website, “is in Whiteness Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis, explicating how Whiteness is reproduced in everyday narratives.”
Another conspicuous feature of the November 1 column is the degree to which Taub and others like her are consumed with racialist ideology. Her article cavalierly and recklessly makes assertions about “whiteness” and “white people’s” beliefs and fears in a manner that bears a far greater resemblance to the outpourings of an Alfred Rosenberg, Nazi ideologist, than to any democratic tradition in the US. Such language and jargon have always been the preserve of the extreme right.
“Whiteness,” Taub asserts, is more than simply skin color. It is the privilege of “not being defined as ‘other.’ [i.e., black, female, etc.]” This identity now “seems under threat.” She continues: “For generations, working-class whites were doubly blessed: They enjoyed privileged status based on race, as well as the fruits of broad economic growth.” Their “feeling of success may have provided a sort of identity in itself. But as Western manufacturing and industry have declined, taking many working-class towns with them, parents and grandparents have found that the opportunities they once had are unavailable to the next generation. That creates an identity vacuum to be filled.”
“Doubly blessed”! What imaginary universe is Taub describing? The American working class, white and black, made progress in the postwar period on the basis of enormous struggles and sacrifices. The US capitalists have never given anything for free. Taub makes much of the fact that for a historically brief moment, as it turns out, many workers were able to lift their heads up and not lead lives dominated each day by privation and poverty. She clearly begrudges them that. In any case, as Taub herself admits, those “doubly blessed” conditions have been destroyed or significantly undermined.
Taub simply makes things up as she goes along.
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