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<font size=4><b>Youth and the Myth of Post-Racial Society Under Barack
Obama<br>
</b></font><font size=3>April 29, 2009 By Henry A. Giroux <br><br>
<a href="http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/21304" eudora="autourl">
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/21304</a><br><br>
Source: <a href="http://www.truthout.org/042709A">t r u t h o u t</a>
<br><br>
<br>
With the election of Barack Obama, it has been argued that not only will
the social state be renewed in the spirit and legacy of the New Deal, but
that the punishing racial state and its vast complex of disciplinary
institutions will, if not come to an end, at least be significantly
reformed.[1] From this perspective, Obama's presidency not only
represents a post-racial victory, but also signals a new space of
post-racial harmony. In assessing the Obama victory, Time Magazine
columnist Joe Klein wrote, "It is a place where the primacy of
racial identity - and this includes the old Jesse Jackson version of
black racial identity - has been replaced by the celebration of
pluralism, of cross-racial synergy."[2] Obama won the 2008 election
because he was able to mobilize 95 percent of African-Americans,
two-thirds of all Latinos and a large proportion of young people under
the age of 30. At the same time, what is generally forgotten in the
exuberance of this assessment is that the majority of white Americans
voted for the John McCain-Sarah Palin ticket. While
"post-racial" may mean less overt racism, the idea that we have
moved into a post-racial period in American history is not merely
premature - it is an act of willful denial and ignorance. Paul Ortiz puts
it well in his comments on the myth of post-racialism:
<dl>
<dd>The idea that we've moved to a post-racial period in American social
history is undermined by an avalanche of recent events. Hurricane
Katrina. The US Supreme Court's dismantling of Brown vs. Board of
Education and the resegregation of American schools. The Clash of
Civilizations thesis that promotes the idea of a War against Islam. The
backlash facing immigrant workers. A grotesque prison industrial complex.
[Moreover] ... [w]hile Americans were being robbed blind and primed for
yet another bailout of the banks and investment sectors, they were
treated to new evidence from Fox News and poverty experts that the great
moral threats facing the nation were greedy union workers, black single
mothers, Latino gang bangers and illegal immigrants.[3] <br><br>
</dl>Missing from the exuberant claims that Americans are now living in a
post-racial society is the historical legacy of a neoconservative
revolution, officially launched in 1980 with the election of Ronald
Reagan, and its ensuing racialist attacks on the welfare
"Queens"; Bill Clinton's cheerful compliance in signing bills
that expanded the punishing industries; and George W. Bush's
"willingness to make punishment his preferred response to social
problems."[4] In the last 30 years, we have witnessed the emergence
of policies that have amplified the power of the racial state and
expanded its mechanisms of punishment and mass incarceration, the
consequences of which are deeply racist - even as the state and its legal
apparatuses insist on their own race neutrality.<br><br>
The politics of racism has hardly disappeared from the landscape of
American culture and the institutions that support it. Poor minority kids
now find themselves on a fast tack extending from school to juvenile
courts to prison. And the number of poor and minority kids, now aptly
called the "recession generation" by Dr. Irwin Redlener,
president of New York City's Children's Health fund, has increased from
13 million before the economic meltdown to an expected 17 million by the
end of the year. And who are these kids? These are the kids marginalized
by race and class, who are largely seen either as a drain on the economy
or stand in the way of market freedoms, free trade, consumerism and the
whitewashed fantasies of a cleansed, Disneyfied social order. These are
kids who, not only have to fend for themselves in the face of life's
tragedies, but are also supposed to do it without being seen by the
dominant society. Excommunicated from the sphere of human concern, they
have been rendered invisible, utterly disposable, and heir to that army
of socially homeless that allegedly no longer existed in colorblind
America. Most of them, if not homeless, live in dilapidated housing,
attend schools that are underfunded and literally falling apart, receive
food stamps and eat mostly junk food when they can get it. They are the
major targets of gun violence, lack decent health care and they often
find themselves in hospital emergency rooms. These are the kids who
experience daily, whether on the street or in school, draconian
discipline policies that endlessly criminalize every aspect of their
behavior and increasingly banish them from the very institutions such as
schools that remain their last chance for getting a fair shake in life.
It gets worse. For instance, a full 60 percent of black high school
dropouts, by the time they reach their mid-thirties, will be prisoners or
ex-cons and the drop out rate is as high as 65 percent in some cities.[5]
This apartheid-based system of incarceration bodes especially ill for
young black males. According to Paul Street:
<dl>
<dd>It is worth noting that half of the nation's black male high-school
dropouts will be incarcerated - moving, often enough, from quasi-carceral
lock-down high schools to the real "lock down" thing - at some
point in their lives. These dropouts are over represented among the one
in three African American males aged sixteen- to twenty-years old who are
under one form of supervision by the US criminal justice system: parole,
probation, jail, or prison.[6]<br><br>
</dl>As the toll in human suffering increases daily, Obama and his Wall
Street advisers bail out the banks and the rich just as crucial social
services for children are being cut back, unemployment is soaring into
record numbers and more and more youth of color are disappearing into an
abysmal pit of poverty, despair and hopelessness. Raised in a
blood-drenched culture of violence mediated by an economic Darwinism that
harbors a rabid disdain for the common good, poor minority kids appear to
be completely off the radar of public concern and government compassion.
And Obama, for all of his soaring poetic imagery of unity and justice,
falls flat on his face by allowing his Secretary of Education Arnie
Duncan to offer up reform policies that amount to nothing more than
another version of Bush's No Child Left Behind with its anti-union
ideology and obsessive investment in measurement and accountability
schemes that strips any talk of educational reform of any viability while
turning schools into nothing more than testing factories - policies that
disproportionately punish brown and black youth. These racially
exclusionary set of policies and institutions have become especially
cruel since the beginning of the neoconservative revolution in the 1980s,
and are not poised to disappear soon under the presidency of Barack Obama
- in fact, given the current economic crisis, they may even get
worse.<br><br>
In short, the discourse of the post-racial state ignores how political
and economic institutions, with their circuits of repression and
disposability and their technologies of punishment, connect and condemn
the fate of many impoverished youth of color in the inner cities to
persisting structures of racism that "serve to keep [them] in a
state of inferiority and oppression."[7] Not surprisingly, under
such circumstances, individual suffering no longer registers a social
concern as all notions of injustice are assumed to be the outcome of
personal failings or deficits. Signs of the pathologizing of both
marginalized youth and the crucial safety nets that have provided them
some hope of justice in the past can be found everywhere from the racist
screeds coming out of right-wing talk radio to the mainstream media that
seems to believe that the culture of black and brown youth is synonymous
with the culture of crime. Poverty is now imagined to be a problem of
individual character. Racism is now understood as merely an act of
individual discrimination (if not discretion), and homelessness is
reduced to a choice made by lazy people.<br>
Unfortunately, missing from the discourse of those who are arguing for
the kind of progressive change the Obama administration should deliver is
any mention of the race-based crises facing youth and the terrible toll
it has taken on generations of poor black and brown kids. Bringing this
crisis to the forefront of the political and social agenda is crucial,
particularly since Obama, in a number of speeches prior to assuming the
presidency, refused to adopt the demonizing rhetoric often used by
politicians when talking about youth. Instead, he pointedly called upon
the American people to reclaim young people as an important symbol of the
future and democracy itself:
<dl>
<dd>[C]ome together and say, "Not this time." This time we want
to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black
children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and
Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that
tells us that these kids can't learn; that those kids who don't look like
us are somebody else's problem. The children of America are not those
kids, they are our kids.[8]<br><br>
</dl>But if Barack Obama's call to address the crucial problems facing
young people in this country is to be taken seriously, the political,
economic and institutional conditions that both legitimate and sustain a
shameful attack on poor minority youth have to be made visible, open to
challenge and transformed. This can only happen by refusing the
race-based somnambulism and social amnesia that coincide with the
pretense of post-racial politics and society, especially when the matter
concerns young people of color. To reclaim poor minority youth as part of
a democratic vision and a crucial symbol of the future requires more than
hope and a civics lesson: It necessitates transforming the workings of
racist power arrangements both in and out of the government along with
the market-driven institutions and values that have enabled the rise of a
predatory corporate state and a punishing state that have produced a
polity that governs through the logic of finance capital, consumerism,
crime, disposability and a growing imprisonment binge.<br><br>
The marriage of economic Darwinism and the racialized punishing state is
on full display not merely in the rising rate of incarceration for black
and brown people in the United States, but also in places like East
Carroll Parish in Louisiana where inmates provide cheap or free labor at
barbecues, funerals, service stations, and a host of other sites.
According to Adam Nossiter, "the men of orange are everywhere"
and people living in this Louisiana county "say they could not get
by without their inmates, who make up more than 10 percent of its
population and most of its labor force. They are dirt-cheap, sometimes
free, always compliant, ever-ready and disposable....You just call up the
sheriff, and presto, inmates are headed your way. 'They bring me warm
bodies, 10 warm bodies in the morning,' said Grady Brown, owner of the
Panola Pepper Corporation. 'They do anything you ask them to do....' 'You
call them up, they drop them off, and they pick them up in the
afternoon,' said Paul Chapple, owner of a service station."[9]
Nossiter claims that the system is jokingly referred to by many people
who use it as "rent a convict" and is, to say the least, an
"odd vestige of the abusive-convict-lease system that began in the
South around Reconstruction."[10] This is not merely an eccentric
snapshot of small town racism, it is also an image of what kind of future
poor minority youth might inhabit.<br><br>
Treating prisoners as commodities to be bought and sold like expendable
goods suggests the degree to which the punishing state has divested
itself of any moral responsibility with regard to those human beings who,
in the logic of free-market fundamentalism, are considered either as
commodities or as waste products, and this is true especially of young
people. At the same time, as racism has been relegated to an
anachronistic vestige of the past, especially in light of Barack Obama's
election to the presidency, the workings of the punishing state are
whitewashed and removed from the racialized violence that deeply
influences and constrains the lives of so many young people.
Consequently, the American public becomes increasingly indifferent to the
ways in which the practices of a market-driven society - market
deregulation, privatization, the hollowing out of the social state and
the disparaging of the public good - wage a devastating assault on
African-American and Latino communities, young people and, increasingly,
immigrants and other people of color, who are relegated to the borders of
American normalcy. Alarmingly, the punishing state, when coupled with the
growing disappearance of newspapers and other crucial public spheres, not
only produces vast amounts of inequality, suffering and racism, but also
propagates collective amnesia, cynicism and moral indifference.<br><br>
Under this insufferable climate of increased repression and unabated
exploitation, young people and communities of color become the new
casualties in an ongoing war against justice, freedom, social citizenship
and democracy. While Obama speaks eloquently about the need to develop
public polices that stress social investment rather than enriching the
coffers of the rich, he has not produced adequate policies, especially in
education, for whom poor and minority youth will no longer be viewed as
either criminals or simply disposable. Instead of testing schemes, young
people need structurally sound schools, smaller class sizes, high quality
teachers, social programs that address the conditions that disable
students from learning and a Marshall Plan committed to providing free
education, health care, full employment through public works and a
promise that the government is willing to invest as much time, money and
resources in their future as it has invested so willingly in the past in
the military-industrial complex and its expanding discourse of
militarism. How much longer can a nation ignore those youth who lack the
resources and opportunities that were available, in a partial and
incomplete way, to previous generations? And what does it mean when a
nation becomes frozen ethically and imaginatively in providing its youth
with a future of hope and opportunity?<br>
<br>
[1] For a brilliant analysis of the racist state, see David Theo
Goldberg, "The Racial State" (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell,
2001).<br>
[2] Joe Klein, "Obama's Victory Ushers in a New America,"
Time.com (November 5, 2008). Online:
<a href="http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1856649,00.html">
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1856649,00.html</a>.<br>
[3] Paul Ortiz, "On the Shoulders of Giants: Senator Obama and the
Future of American Politics," Truthout.org (November 25, 2008).
Online:
<a href="http://www.truthout.org/112508R?print">
http://www.truthout.org/112508R?print</a>.<br>
[4] Jonathan Simon, "Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime
Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear" (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 59.<br>
[5] Jason DeParle, "The American Prison Nightmare," New York
Review of Books, Vol. LIV, No. 6 (April 12, 2007), p. 33.<br>
[6] Paul Street, "Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in
Post-Civil Rights America" (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 82.<br>
[7] Angela Y. Davis, "Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons,
and Torture" (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), p. 98.<br>
[8] From a transcript entitled "Barack Obama's Speech on Race,"
New York Times (March 18, 2008). Online:
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/us/politics/18text-obama.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=%22Barack%20Obama%27s%20Speech%20on%20Race%22&st=cse">
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/us/politics/18text-obama.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=%22Barack%20Obama's%20Speech%20on%20Race%22&st=cse</a>
.<br>
[9] Adam Nossiter, "With Jobs to Do, Louisiana Parish Turns to
Inmates," New York Times (July 5, 2006). Online:
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/05/us/05prisoners.html">
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/05/us/05prisoners.html</a>.<br>
[10] Nossiter, "With Jobs to Do, Louisiana Parish Turns to
Inmates."<br>
<br>
Henry A. Giroux holds the Global TV Network chair in English and Cultural
Studies at McMaster University in Canada. Related work: Henry A. Giroux,
"The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence"
(Lanham: Rowman and Lilttlefield, 2001). His most recent books include
"Take Back Higher Education" (co-authored with Susan Searls
Giroux, 2006), "The University in Chains: Confronting the
Military-Industrial-Academic Complex" (2007) and "Against the
Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed" (2008).
His newest book, "Youth in a Suspect Society: Beyond the Politics of
Disposability," will be published by Palgrave Mcmillan in 2009.<br>
<br><br>
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