D-Squared has a provocative post about the politics of race in the U.S. (Matthew Yglesias has some thoughts on it, and a post by Kevin Drum is also relevant.) It’s worth reading carefully. It makes three points. The first is the most arresting but also the least substantial. The second is basically right. The third is very interesting. Here they are in order.

First, he says

In the opinion of D-Squared Digest, the epithet “nigger” is a much less offensive term when used to refer to an American of African descent, than the more popular word “minority”.

Why?

Because, in the opinion of D2D, a bluntly stated truth is less offensive than an Orwellian lie. The word “minority” is the clearest and most pernicious example of Newspeak that I can come up with today. “Minority” is a word which means “Black, Southeast Asian, American Indian, Indian and all other non-white”, but which is often used in contexts (particularly, university admissions) in which it can only be reasonably interpreted as meaning “Black”.

This is incorrect. Or rather, there’s much less to it than meets the eye, for two reasons. First, D-Squared is equivocating between two senses of the word “offensive”: its straightforward sense, which means “a word or deed likely to be interpreted as abusive”, and a more rhetorical sense that means, roughly, “a phrase used to cover up the true meaning of things”—- a piece of Newspeak, in other words. Focusing on the second meaning (as D-Squared does) is all very well, but it doesn’t change the fact that, empirically, calling someone “the N-word” is vastly more likely to cause offence than calling someone “a minority.”

The second reason that there’s much less to this than appears is that D-Squared’s “N-word/Minority” dichotomy is false. Those aren’t the only choices. In everyday speech, in the language of politics, and in academic writing, it’s possible to be perfectly precise about the group you want to talk about, without resorting to outright abuse or blurry Newspeak. Use “African-Americans” or “blacks”. Take your pick. A cursory scan of the literature will reveal thousands of books and papers with titles like “Trends in Black/White Income Inequality” or “African-American Cultural Innovation” or any number of others. I’m pretty sure D-Squared knows this vocabulary is there. He doesn’t normally grandstand, so I’m at a loss to say why he ignores this simple point.

His second point is much more acute, though not terribly new:

When one thinks about the matter in this way, a number of social issues become clear. America does not have a problem with “race”; it is, in all likelihood, the most non-racist society in existence. America is today, as it was in de Tocqueville’s day, an open, colourblind, melting-pot society with a Negro problem.

Native Americans are only other group in the U.S. whose historical position is comparable to that of blacks. The main difference is that genocide, rather than slavery, was their fate so there are far fewer of them left to cause serious political problems. So essentially he’s right. There’s no other immigrant group with a similar history, because the rest all actually emigrated rather than arriving as slaves. D-Squared then summarizes the structural reasons why, as W.E.B. DuBois pointed out in 1903, the U.S.’s most serious problem is “the problem of the color line”.

His third point is that there are potential lessons to be learned from the Irish experience in America.

There has been only one case in which a scattered diaspora reached the USA and built itself up to become integrated with the rest of the American class structure, and they did it like this:

  • First, recognise that your vote is worth something.
  • Second, recognise that blocks of votes, if they can be delivered, are worth much more than general sympathies
  • Third, organise your blocks of votes under ward captains. (Tammany Hall often got 99% straight ticket voting and 99% turnout, better than Saddam Hussein)
  • Fourth, the ward capitans must look after their people with government jobs.
  • Repeat election after election, until no longer needed.

After fifty years of machine politics, there was no reason for an Irish youth to want to go into crime, booze or any other of the recreations of the poor and desperate. They were no longer stigmatised. Like it or not, it worked.

This analysis would suggest that the model for the black community in the USA has to be the Reverend Al Sharpton.

It’s true that, in the racial map of 19th-century America, Irish people were right down there with black people. I’m not an expert on this topic (I am an expert on being 100% Irish, but this isn’t much use) and my sense is that the process by which Irish people were assimilated into the Anglo mainstream wasn’t driven simply by their mastery of machine politics. Changes in social stratification interact with shifts in racial classification in complex ways. I know of (but have not read) a few books on this topic—- Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White, Karen Brodkin’s How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America and Matthew Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different Color—- but I don’t know whether these are the best of what must be a very large body of research. Ann Morning, a friend of mine from Princeton, is currently writing a dissertation in this area, and has also done some work with Josh Goldstein on multiple-race data in the Census. My former teacher Paul Starr has a terrific essay, “Social Categories and Claims in the Liberal State”, on the growth of the “one drop” rule and concomitant disappearance of the “Mulatto” category after the U.S. Civil War.

All of which is to say this is a complex issue. D-Squared’s idea is interesting to me in part because of how it contrasts with proposals of the kind that Kevin Drum has been discussing. While CalPundit focuses on education and affirmative action, D-Squared’s argument is that the right kind of change has to be driven by political mobilization to secure resources and opportunities for collective social mobility.

If the political arena has changed enough since Tammany Hall, then D-Squared’s analysis might run into further trouble. This is Matt’s point about Al Sharpton not really being a Tammany Hall type of politician. Beyond that, if politics takes place more on the national stage now than it did 150 years ago, the prospects for machine building may be less. Further, if machines are already built (as in Boston and Chicago, say) and the cities they service are no longer growing rapidly, then this might also mean that the strategy D-Squared advocates is harder to pursue than it once was.

At any rate, it’s an interesting post, at least once you get past the distractions at the beginning.

Incidentally, D-Squared comments in a footnote:

This line of thinking comes from Malcom X, who memorably reminded us “We never landed on Plymouth Rock! Plymouth Rock landed on us!”

It’s one of the small ironies of great rhetoric that Malcolm X got this line from Cole Porter:

Times have changed And we’ve often rewound the clock Since the Puritans got a shock When they landed on Plymouth Rock. If today Any shock they should try to stem ‘Stead of landing on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock would land on them.

In olden days, a glimpse of stocking Was looked on as something shocking. But now, God knows, Anything goes.