12/11/2020 Weaponized Multiculturalism: A Word to the Wise » John Halle

WEAPONIZED MULTICULTURALISM: A
WORD TO THE WISE
DECEMBER 22, 2016 JOHN HALLE

In the second week of November 2008, the anti-racist educator Tim Wise took to his blog to
issue a “Screw you!” to “those who say this election means nothing, who insist that Obama,
because he cozied up to Wall Street, or big business, is just another kind of evil no different than
any other.” According to Wise, our “cynicism had become such an encumbrance as to render
(us) all but useless to the liberation movement.” “In serious risk of political self-immolation”, Wise
concluded, our “burning” is one we “will richly deserve.”

Before discussing what Wise, and many others, were wrong about, it should be noted that he
was entirely right that those who thought the election meant nothing were mistaken.

Among those who would agree is David Dayen whose recent Atlantic piece describes how the
financial crisis constituted “an extinction event for the black middle class” disproportionately
represented among the “9.3 million American families who have lost their properties since the
housing bubble collapsed.” They were among the “more than 20 million people, forced to uproot
their lives and find shelter.” For them, the 2008 election of Obama certainly meant something: it
meant suffering “the greatest disintegration of black wealth in recent memory.”

That brings up the second point on which Wise was correct which has to do not with substance
but with rhetorical style. The “evil” of the Obama administration was indeed “different” from that
represented by previous neoliberal Democrats: Whereas atrocities such as welfare reform, the
crime bill and the war on drugs were the product of mostly white technocrats presided over by
the Clintons, within the Obama administration policies devastating black america were
advanced by black americans. These included Obama himself and the head of the Justice
Department Eric Holder whose failure to prosecute the marketing of fraudulent loans in inner
cities was a crucial element, as Denvir notes.

As the the left slowly emerged from its dysfunctional and self-destructive obsession with the first
African American President, it has become clear that these two points were connected. What
had been a signifier of the potential for change, now became a bludgeon by which those critical
of neoliberal policies would be attacked. Among surrogates wielding it were Mellssa Harris
Perry, Joy Ann Reid and Michael Eric Dyson who were quick to dismiss the mere mention of
shortcomings in Obama’s policies as motivated by white supremacist tendencies expressing
themselves in a deeply ingrained resistance to respecting black leadership.

As I noted at the time, whether or not he was aware of it, Wise was among those involved in
defending Obama’s neoliberal agenda whether through his service to Teach for America,
attacking the white privilege enjoyed by Occupy Wall Street activists, red baiting “white
Marxists”, denouncing Edward Snowden as “full of crap” and smearing Glenn Greenwald for
“never hav[ing] sa[id] shit about racial profiling, or surveillance of POC/Muslims.”

***

In the years since, Wise has, in various ways discredited himself to the extent that he is mostly
no longer worth bothering with.

His views, however, are useful in one respect in functioning as a reference point helping us to
negotiate the fraught topic of Identity politics. This recently received a spike in attention due to
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12/11/2020 Weaponized Multiculturalism: A Word to the Wise » John Halle

Bernie Sanders having referenced it in response to a question following a speech a couple of

weeks ago. Before discussing what Sanders said, it is worth noting what he did not say, which is
that he did not, as was repeatedly claimed by Clinton surrogates, “urge his supporters to ditch
identity politics.” Rather, Sanders suggested that “one of the struggles that you’re going to be
seeing in the Democratic Party is whether we go beyond identity politics.”

As several activists pointed out, going beyond means does not mean ditching, rather the
opposite: it means building on its foundation. Those claiming that Sanders’s supporters wanted
to move backward rather than forward on racial justice initiatives were reiterating by this point a
familiar Clintonite attack, most recently taking the form of Michael Dyson charging that Sanders
was “prickly about race, uncomfortable with an outspoken, demanding blackness.”

That this was always a cynical canard should by now be well understood thanks to a Reuters
pollwhich provided the relevant data. In fact, contrary to what was routinely claimed, Sanders
supporters had substantially more progressive views on racial justice in comparison to those
who had supported Clinton. This is no surprise given Clinton’s history of having referred to black
youths as superpredators and having played a leading role in pushing for the drug and crime
bills of the 1990s which led directly to the mass incarceration catastrophe still with us.
Furthermore, as Adolph Reed noted, on virtually every substantive issue of concern to African
Americans, mass incarceration, health care, free university education and prosecution of police
misconduct, Sanders’s positions were far stronger than Clinton’s.

Sanders’s program embraced the politics most responsive to the needs and aspirations of those
who identify as african americans, as latinos, native americans and as women. For that reason,
in the substantive sense of the term, Sanders was correct that he fully supported identity
politics.

That said, as Tim Wise demonstrates, the term can be construed in a very different sense,
namely, as a politics which is based on unquestioning deference to black leadership, even when
this leadership is in service of regressive neoliberal objectives, as it has been for the past eight
years. That Sanders is aware of this, he made apparent in the next sentences of his response.
Politicians need to be judged on the objective content of their performance in office, whether
they would “stand up with the working class of this country, and . . . take on big money
interests.” The litmus test for our support needs to be whether they would have “the guts to
stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel
industry.” “It’s not good enough for somebody to say ‘hey I’m a Latina vote for me’” or “I am a
woman vote for me.”

For those such as Wise, identity politics was based on the assumption that identity WAS good
enough: Obama’s election was not to be seen as another in a line of neoliberal presidencies
financed and controlled by corporate elites, but rather a cause for celebration with all those who
failed to uncritically rejoice deserving to be “burned”.

The result was the tragedy of the Obama presidency, one in which elites pursued their agenda
with impunity almost entirely unhindered by the only force which could combat it: mass protest
undertaken by an organized opposition.

Elites recognized that the reflexive tendency among the left to defer to black leadership provided
them with a weapon which they deployed with devastating effectiveness and at the cost of an
“extinction of the black middle class”, not to mention that of much of the white middle and
working class.

The Sanders movement has served notice that the days are numbered whereby neoliberalism
will be able to legitimate itself through multiculturalism and sell its goods to an overly credulous
left.
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