New Jim Crow, Capital, and the Fool’s Game of “Public Consensus”
Posted on May 27, 2012 by zisel
Michelle Alexander’s recent sensation New Jim Crow reveals a pattern of racial oppression repeatedly reconstituting itself. Just as Jim Crow replaced slavery, the criminal justice system quickly evolved to replace Jim Crow as the dominant mechanism of racial oppression. The question Alexander poses is how we are to overcome this New Jim Crow once and for all, along with all its second lives and zombies. Alexander’s story is complex, but her diagnosis boils down to something as vague as it is simple: “a flawed public consensus” (222).
The system has a tendency to reconstitute itself, and our criminal justice system is just a reincarnation of last century’s Jim Crow. Each gain against racial oppression has been followed by a countervailing movement, redrawing the lines of political alliance to protect those in power. Those lines have tended to reproduce racial caste, relying on narratives explicitly or implicitly constructed around blackness to divide the oppressed, bribe some among them, and keep the others down and exploited. Thus, approximately, go the first few chapters of Alexander’s book. Chapter 6, the book’s concluding chapter, brings us to the hard questions. We’ve looked at the history, deconstructed some myths, revealed some shocking statistics and deeply disturbing patterns. Now what? Alexander brings her argument to a point: “to the extent that major changes are archived without a complete shift, the system will rebound. The caste system will reemerge in a new form, just as convict leasing replaced slavery, or it will be reborn, just as mass incarceration replaced Jim Crow” (222). We need a deeper change that does not just consist of legal reforms and “disconnected advocacy strategies” (221). It is clear we a paradigm shift.
So far, so good.
This is when Alexander hits us with it: the pinnacle of her argument, the last lingering high note in a composition full of moments that ring clear. But it comes out muffled. And a little flat. We are not sure about that sound. They key thing, says Alexander, is “public consensus.”
“The central question for racial justice advocates is this: are we serious about ending this system of control of not?” (221). All those reforms, all those piecemeal cases, will get us nowhere, unless we build a movement through and around them: “reform work is the work of movement-building, provided that it is done consciously as movement-building work. If all the reforms mentioned above were actually adopted, a radical transformation in our society would have taken place” (223). So the question is how serious are we? We collectively. Are we building a movement? Are we changing the public view? Do we, as a society, have the right attitude to see these reforms through? “A flawed public consensus lies at the core of the prevailing caste system,” Alexander tells us (222). So what do we need? A “truly egalitarian racial consensus.” Try chanting that one.
The problem with Alexander’s book is not that she does not provide us with a wealth of stunning details. It is not that she does not deliver an intriguing and intricate history. It is rather that she produces this history, this wealth of historical information, and then misses a critical pattern that her data itself suggests.
A continuing theme of Alexander’s book is the pattern of those in power finding ways to reconstitute their power. She herself mentions many a time the role of elite interests and class in maintaining racial caste systems. For example, the early deployment of racial stratification to break the bond of black and white laborers who joined Bacon for their own liberation (sadly, and reminding us of the need for complexity, liberation with Bacon meant taking Native American land). Or in the formation of Jim Crow, how “segregation laws were proposed as part of a deliberate effort to drive a wedge between poor whites and African Americans,” who had been campaigning together against their shared exploitation (34); “As long as the poor whites directed their hatred and frustration against the black competitor, the planters were relieved of class hostility directed against them” (qtd 34). And further, that in the formative stages of today’s mass incarceration system, the law and order campaigns and Drug War were driven by a Republican elite working to gain power by once again channeling the economic frustrations of lower-class whites, “forced to compete on equal terms with blacks for jobs and status” while elite whites exploited them both. All these threads point to the role of economic power, of economic interests and exploitation, in the persistent reconstitution of the racial caste system. Alexander’s data provides the dots, but she fails to draw in the line of capitalism’s role in the New Jim Crow narrative.
This underlying narrative is one in which racialized castes consistently serve as the basis of cheap labor for capital. And one in which periods of discontent lead to political intrigue as new bribe structures and political alliances are set up. Attitudes are certainly a factor, but these grow up on the trellises of capital’s wheeling-and-dealing. Beginning with the slave system, which we all understand to be a system of providing cheap vulnerable labor for capitalist exploitation, we see capital’s role in setting up our “flawed public consensus.” Not only black and white castes, but the very notions of racial identity, were first solidified around a racial bribe. Solidarity arose spontaneously in a system of unsegregated workers laboring side-by-side, under the same exploitative conditions; racial stereotypes, though surely present, were permeable and not fixed to the categories we know today because they were not set up by larger forces in relationships of antagonism. As Theodore Allen in The Invention of the White Race explores in detail, these laborers did not identify as black or white. It was only with the quelling of Bacon’s rebellion, which mobilized both the black and white poor with the promise of land and freedom from bond-labor, that the governing classes, seeking to keep their workforce docile, drew a line of whiteness around some of their workers and singled them out for favorable treatment on the condition that they disassociate from their former fellows. The driving role of economic logic is apparent. Under Jim Crow, the division of the working class along racial lines kept economic frustrations and animosity directed inward. Blacks and whites competed for jobs and blacks functioned as a reserve labor force, to be cast off during periods of economic recession and tapped into when needed.
Brown vs. Board of Education, recounted by Alexander as narrative of “public consensus” not having adequately changed, is in fact a good example of the importance of recognizing the economic logics of oppression. As Alexander tells it, “’for ten years, 1954-1964, virtually nothing happened.’ … Brown did not end Jim Crow; a mass movement had to emerge first—one that aimed to create a new public consensus opposed to the evils of Jim Crow.“ But it is grossly obfuscating to say that the failure of Brown vs. Board to effect change was about public consensus; this makes it sound as though change just required convincing the broad public of the need to have integrated schools, the need to “ really care across color lines” (222). To do so would be to ignore the structure that underlies the status quo. As Alexander herself recognizes, when we do not make active change, legal change make no difference. And “public consensus” alone is little more substantive, as in her own tale of those who bore no hostility to integration continuing to play into the system. What then is the barrier we must actively fight against? Is it just the inertia of public opinion? What Alexander mentions but fails to draw out is the theme of economic exploitation. It takes active bussing campaigns to overcome the geographic segregation encouraged by the political logics of a capitalist order. Why is it (or is it twisted to appear) in the interests of many whites to keep a predominantly black population segregated or under lock and key? Because the system is set up such that a powerful class—including prison operators, their political supporters, and the corporations that purchase the cheap products of prison labor—benefits from prisoner exploitation and saves a little of the scraps for other segments of the proletariat that they also exploit.
http://blackorchidcollective.wordpress. ... consensus/
