One common criticism of vocal progressive anti-racists, whether they’re tenured professors or Hollywood celebrities or TV anchors, is that they don’t practice what they preach. They tout the benefits of diversity. They preach the necessity of “solidarity” with the poor urban blacks trapped in inner-city ghettos. And then they go home to their well-policed, relatively affluent, mostly white communities (where even the few swarthier folk that they live near have been carefully vetted by schools and businesses for middle-to-upper class attitudes). The most famous example is, of course, Tim Wise, a Jewish anti-racist lecturer from (it pains me to say it) Nashville, TN. He travels the country hectoring white undergraduates about their ineradicable “privilege,” and then returns to an overwhelmingly white neighborhood on the ritzy side of the state capital.
It’s a common criticism and, I think, a fair one. Most any Southerner who has attended college knows the exquisite pleasure of listening to some starry-eyed classmate from Oregon or somewhere, who has never and probably will never live around any appreciable quantity of black folks, solemnly argue that racism comes from a lack of familiarity with “the Other.”
This disconnect doesn’t always boil down to rank hypocrisy. Sometimes it does (Exhibit A: Tim Wise). But a lot of it is simple insularity, the knowledge, subconscious or not, that a safe distance exists between you and the problems you’re arbitrating. It’s easy to be cavalier on issues that can’t come back to bite you, personally, in the backside. Call it the “skin in the game” effect. Call it the “drive it like you rented it” effect. Whatever you call it, it’s how the mind works.
The sad thing is the insularity of top tier anti-racists from the various consequences of the aggressive multicultural integration schemes they advocate isn’t even among the most pernicious varieties of insularity that have metastasized in the body politic of contemporary America. When you get to checking all those varieties off, the prognosis looks grimmer and grimmer.
Take, for instance, the latest round of interventions that we’re considering in the Middle East. The gray-headed senators and the chickenhawk neocon chatterati kicking around the “boots on the ground” options for Iraq aren’t considering putting their boots on the ground over there. They’ll stick with their AC and their penny loafers thank you very much, as will most of their sons. That’s a problem of insularity. It’s easy to talk about ultimate sacrifices and the high costs of freedom when you have to make no sacrifices and pay no costs to do so.
There’s pathological insularity, too, in our financial world here in the States, of which the “too big to fail” banks of the 2008 crash are the example par excellence. When the housing bubble burst, there were groups of Americans who lost their homes and their livelihoods, their life’s savings, a spot for their children in a decent school district. And then there were people who lost decimal points on a spreadsheet. But the latter group was the financiers whose various schemes precipitated the crisis in the first place, whereas the former were frequently guilty of little more than taking the bait of easy home loans. The banks were insulated from the fallout of the bomb they set off.
These sorts of issues are everywhere. Big business CEOS who will never have to compete with an H1-B Indian for an entry-level coding job are zealously in the camp of expanded legal immigration. New England Democrats who will never see their communities swamped by hordes of newly-arrived Guatemalans offer lofty rhetoric about starving refugee children to the public conversation about illegal immigration. Or how about the perceived insularity that led so many young and middle-aged progressives to march behind the banner of “comprehensive medical reform!” and the shock afterwards as their premiums skyrocketed or they lost coverage. You mean we are footing this bill?
Then there’s Washington, DC. Good Lord! DC looks more and more like an island unto itself. In the first decade of the new millennium, as the median household income of the rest of the country stagnated or dropped, the DC metro area saw an almost 25% increase. And while American politics have never been the exclusive province of noble Cincinnati—leaving their plows behind to do the needful thing before retiring gracefully back to private life—now it looks more and more like a self-sustaining system, one in which a minor functionary with nothing but a good sense for political winds and no skills but a bureaucrat’s can make a life of the place. Lobbyists, NGOs, “think-tanks,” consultants, the controlled press corps: there are all sorts of ways to get in and stay in. There’s a culture there, attached to only a few other centers of power in the US, mutating and diverging from the rest of America that its edicts bind.
That’s really the crux of it. A lot of what goes on in our country right now looks for all the world like insanity. Some of it is (Exhibit A: John McCain). But some of it is just a natural consequence of the way our society is organized and the scale at which it operates. There has been a long-term trend towards centralization in this country, an appetitive federal government that has gobbled up state prerogatives and powers to the point that it seems strange for most folks (outside of maybe Texas) to even think in terms of state prerogatives and powers. Washington has her subsidiaries by the purse strings and she’s not beholden to them. Similar patterns of concentration of power occurred in the financial sector as well, and media companies both broadcast and internet. Now much of what happens on the national stage where these massive entities comport themselves only looks like insanity to the individual members of the three-hundred million citizen audience. It’s actually just the movements of entities whose motivations are alien and who are insulated by level upon level of wealth and influence from the petty fears that haunt our own imaginings.
I suppose I’ve waxed philosophical. Sometimes my dislike for Washington just brings it out in me. And I don’t have a twelve-step plan by which we can undo these various instances of pathological insularity, either. What I do know is that a lot of our governance is bad simply because the ones doing the governing are protected from the outcomes that their governance brings about. What I do know is this problem looks irresolvable unless decision making meaningfully returns to the regions those decisions impact.
