[News] Whiteness, NSA Spying and the Irony of Racial Privilege

Anti-Imperialist News news at freedomarchives.org
Wed Jun 26 16:13:04 EDT 2013


    /To be read in the context of the supreme court's decisions on
    affirmative action and voting rights - ed/


    Whiteness, NSA Spying and the Irony of Racial Privilege
    <http://www.timwise.org/2013/06/whiteness-nsa-spying-and-the-irony-of-racial-privilege/>

Posted on June 19, 2013
http://www.timwise.org/2013/06/whiteness-nsa-spying-and-the-irony-of-racial-privilege/

It's not that I'm not angry.

It's not that I'm not disturbed, even horrified by the fact that my 
government thinks it appropriate to spy on people, monitoring their 
phone calls --- to whom we speak and when --- among other tactics, all 
in the supposed service of the national interest.

That any government thinks it legitimate to so closely monitor its 
people is indicative of the inherent sickness of nation-states, made 
worse in the modern era, where the power to intrude into the most 
private aspects of our lives is more possible than ever, thanks to the 
data-gathering techniques made feasible by technological advance.

That said, I also must admit to a certain nonchalance in the face of the 
recent revelations about the National Security Agency's snooping into 
phone records, and the dust-up over the leaking of the NSA's program by 
Ed Snowden. And as I tried to figure out why I wasn't more animated upon 
hearing the revelations --- and, likewise, why so many others /were/ --- 
it struck me. Those who are especially chapped about the program, about 
the very concept of their government keeping tabs on them --- in effect 
profiling them as potential criminals, as terrorists --- are almost 
entirely those for whom shit like this is new: people who have never 
before been presumed criminal, up to no good, or worthy of suspicion.

In short, they are mostly white. And male. And middle-class or above. 
And most assuredly not Muslim.

And although I too am those things, perhaps because I work mostly on 
issues of racism, white privilege and racial inequity --- and because my 
mentors and teachers have principally been people of color, for whom 
things like this are distressingly familiar --- the latest confirmation 
that the U.S. is far from the nation we were sold as children is hardly 
Earth-shattering. After all, it is only those who have had the relative 
luxury of remaining in a child-like, innocent state with regard to the 
empire in which they reside who can be driven to such distraction by 
something that, compared to what lots of folks deal with every day, 
seems pretty weak tea.

As Yasuragi, a blogger over at Daily Kos reminded us last week 
<http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/14/1215645/-Alliances-Coalitions-and-the-Naivete-of-Privilege>:

    (This is) the nation that killed protesters at Jackson and Kent
    State Universities...The nation that executed Fred Hampton in his
    bed, without so much as a warrant. The nation that still, still,
    still holds Leonard Peltier in prison. The nation that supported
    Noriega, the Shah, Trujillo, and dozens of other fascist monsters
    who did nothing but fuck over their own people and their neighbors.
    The nation of Joseph McCarthy and his current-day descendants. The
    nation that allows stop-and-frisk.

    Before all that: The nation that enforced Jim Crow laws. Before
    that, the nation that built itself on slavery and the slave trade.
    And before all of that, the nation that nearly succeeded in the
    genocide of this continent's indigenous peoples.

    So why are you so surprised that our government is gathering
    yottabytes of data on our phone calls?

Let's be clear, it's not that the NSA misdeeds, carried out by the last 
two administrations, are no big deal. They're completely indefensible, 
no matter the efforts of the apologists for empire --- from the 
corporate media to President Obama to Dick Cheney --- to legitimize 
them. A free people should not stand for it.

Problem is, we are not a free people and never have been, and therein 
lies the rub.

The idea that with this NSA program there has been some unique blow 
struck against democracy, and that /now/ our liberties are in jeopardy 
is the kind of thing one can only believe if one has had the luxury of 
thinking they were living in such a place, and were in possession of 
such shiny baubles to begin with. And this is, to be sure, a luxury 
enjoyed by painfully few folks of color, Muslims in a post-9/11 America, 
or poor people of /any/ color. For the first, they have long known that 
their freedom was directly constrained by racial discrimination, in 
housing, the justice system and the job market; for the second, 
profiling and suspicion have circumscribed the boundaries of their 
liberties unceasingly for the past twelve years; and for the latter, 
freedom and democracy have been mostly an illusion, limited by economic 
privation in a class system 
<http://www.pewstates.org/uploadedFiles/PCS_Assets/2012/Pursuing_American_Dream.pdf> 
that affords less opportunity for mobility 
<http://www.edtrust.org/sites/edtrust.org/files/publications/files/nv.schoolboards.2011.pdf> 
than fifty years ago, and less than most other nations with which we 
like to compare ourselves.

In short, when people proclaim a desire to "take back our democracy" 
from the national security apparatus, or for that matter the plutocrats 
who have ostensibly hijacked it, they begin from a premise that is 
entirely untenable; namely, that there was ever a democracy to take 
back, and that the hijacking of said utopia has been a recent 
phenomenon. But there wasn't and it hasn't been.

Reaction to the most recent confirmation of this truth ranks right along 
with the way so many were stunned by the September 11 attacks. The shock 
in that instance also came from a place of naiveté, wrought by the 
luxury of believing that the rest of the world viewed us as we did: as a 
paragon of virtue, which had brought only light and happiness to the 
world, rather than military occupations, hellfire missiles, brutal and 
crippling economic sanctions, and support for dictators so long as they 
were serving our presumed interests. But some people --- and again, they 
were mostly black and brown --- were not stunned at all. Having long had 
no choice but to see the nation's warts for what they were, and having 
never possessed the benefit of viewing America as most whites had, 
peoples of color, while horrified by that day's events, were hardly 
likely to be knocked off stride by them. They had always known what it 
was like to be hated. And hunted. And solely because of who they were.

For myself, I long ago stopped being shocked by anything the empire did 
in the service of its continuity. Ever since I was in college, and it 
was revealed that the Central American solidarity group of which I was a 
member was being actively spied on by the FBI, I've taken it as a matter 
of faith that such things were probably happening, and that it would 
have been silly to the point of idiotic for me to assume such 
surveillance were a one-off thing, confined to the inner-workings of the 
Reagan Administration.

By 1988, at which point I was still a Democrat --- hoping against hope 
to turn that party in a truly left direction --- the realization that 
the government was actively spying on its citizens was fully concretized 
for me. It was then that I was disallowed from riding in a campaign 
motorcade for Michael Dukakis (despite being the head of the largest 
College Democrats chapter in the New Orleans area), because my activism 
against U.S. policy in Nicaragua and El Salvador had earned me an FBI 
file and caused me to fail a Secret Service background check.

So yeah, the government is spying on you precious. And /now/ you're pissed?

This is the irony of privilege: the fact that some have for so long 
enjoyed it, in its largely unfettered state, is precisely why some of 
those those same persons are now so exorcised at the thought of 
potentially being treated like everyone else has been, forever; and it 
is also why the state was able to get away with it for such an extended 
period. So long as the only possible targets were racial and religious 
and class others, shock and outrage could be kept at a minimum. And so 
the apparatus of profiling and monitoring and snooping and data 
collection and even targeted assassination grew like mushrooms in the 
dark. And deep down, most of the same white folks who are now so 
unhinged by the mere possibility --- and a remote one at that --- that 
they will be treated like those others, /knew/ what was going on.

And they said little or nothing. White liberals --- with some notable 
exceptions --- mostly clucked their tongues and expressed how 
unfortunate it was that certain people were being profiled, but they 
rarely spoke out publicly, or challenged those not-so-random searches at 
the airport, or dared to challenge cops when they saw them harassing, or 
even brutalizing the black and brown. Plenty of other issues were more 
pressing. The white conservatives, of course, largely applauded either 
or both of those.

And now, because they mostly ignored (or even in some cases cheered) the 
violations of Constitutional rights, so long as the violations fell upon 
someone other than themselves, they are being freshly confronted with 
the surly adolescent version of the infant to which they gave birth, at 
least indirectly. And they aren't too happy with his insolence.

Yeah, well, tell it to pretty much every Arab American, every Persian 
American, every Afghan American, everyone with a so-called Middle 
Eastern name walking through an airport in this country for the past 
decade or more. Tell them how /now/ you're outraged by the idea that the 
government might consider you a potential terrorist.

Tell it to the hundreds of thousands of black men in New York, stopped 
and frisked by the NYPD over the past fifteen years, whose names and 
information were entered into police databases, even though they had 
committed no crime, but just as a /precautionary/ measure, in case they 
ever decided to commit one. Tell them how tight it makes /you/ to be 
thought of as a potential criminal, evidence be damned.

Tell it to brown folks in Arizona, who worry that the mere color of 
their skin might provoke a local official, operating on the basis of 
state law (or a bigoted little toad of a sheriff), to stop them and 
force them to prove they belong in the country. Explain to them how 
patently offensive and even hurtful it is to you to be presumed unlawful 
in such a way as to provoke official government suspicion.

Tell it to the veterans of the civil rights struggle whose activities 
--- in the Black Panthers, SNCC, the Young Lords, the Brown Berets, and 
the American Indian Movement, among others --- were routinely monitored 
(and more to the point actively disrupted and ripped apart) by 
government intelligence agencies and their operatives. Tell them how 
incredibly steamed you are that your government might find out /what 
websites you surf/, or that you placed a phone call last Wednesday to 
someone, somewhere. Make sure to explain how such activities are just a 
step away from outright tyranny and surely rank up there alongside the 
murder and imprisonment to which their members were subjected. Indeed.

And then maybe, just /maybe/, consider how privilege --- being on the 
upside, most of the time, of systems of inequality --- can (and has) let 
you down, even set you up for a fall. How maybe, just /maybe/, all the 
apoplexy mustered up over the NSAs latest outrage, might have been 
conjured a long time ago, and over far greater outrages, the burdens of 
which were borne by only certain persons, and not others.

And yes, I know full well that some /were/ speaking out, loudly and 
clearly from the start and have never stopped. I am not speaking to them 
(to you?), so relax (after all, if what I'm saying doesn't apply to you, 
why so defensive, buttercup?) But so too, there are those who know 
(perhaps you?) if they are among those who, like Rand Paul or Glenn Beck 
or --- for that matter --- /Edward Snowden/ had never before raised too 
much fuss about those other things, until it began to potentially affect 
them and people like them.

Or provide them an opportunity for some publicity. Hero worship. Perhaps 
(at least in their own minds) martyrdom?

Maybe it is time to remind ourselves that the only things worse than 
what this government and its various law enforcement agencies do in 
secret, are the things they've been doing /blatantly/, openly, but only 
to /some/ for a long time now.

This nation's government has killed hundreds of thousands in Iraq and 
Afghanistan, openly, in front of the world.

This nation's sanctions on Iraq in the '90s contributed to the deaths of 
hundreds of thousands more, by the admission of Secretary of State 
Albright. All of it, out in the open. No secrets.

This nation stood by and even helped propagate massacre after massacre 
--- an attempted genocide even --- in Guatemala throughout the 1980s; 
and not only did we not hide that we were doing it, President Reagan 
openly praised the architects 
<http://www.alternet.org/noam-chomsky-nuclear> of the slaughter while 
proclaiming they were committed to social justice.

We incarcerate 2.5 million people --- and have roughly 7 million people 
under the control of the justice system in all --- openly, and 
increasingly for non-violent offenses: more than any nation on Earth.

We have the highest child poverty rate in the developed world, and there 
is nothing secret about it. Our leaders don't even care about covering 
it up. In fact, an awful lot of them just don't care. At all.

These are the crimes of empire. These and a lot more. And it didn't take 
Edward Snowden to tell you about them. They've been hiding in plain 
sight for a long time.

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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