I caught this recent article in the Washington Post via Jack and Jill Politics and Prometheus 6, and it's so wonderful. Using historical context and excellent analysis of social phenomena, Khalil Muhammad outlines the movement to transform larger social ills that affect all Americans into a cryptic pathology that targets poor black Americans for their incapabilities to Get Over Racism And Do Something Productive In Society (GORADSPIS). The main way this pathology continues for African-Americans and many other communities of color is maintaining the invisibility of whiteness and tacitly accepting "white values" as the gold standard of living well in America.

Only throughout history, poor white communities have had their own Left Behind moments, and the response overwhelmingly turned to grassroots social reform efforts to prevent poor health and crime among poor whites in areas of urbanization. Community centers and resources to help newly arrived white immigrants acclimate to the social and economic tensions of their new areas. Not blanket culture and race shaming coupled with accusations that they haven't GORADSPIS.

dnA breaks down this dynamic on Jack and Jill Politics:

The idea that our entire conversation on race is meant not to find a solution to urban poverty, but to rationalize the status quo, says a great deal about social responsibility and about the value of black life in America, a hundred and fifty years after emancipation. But maybe what's more scary is that it might say something about the person sitting next to you in class, or at work, or on the bus.

That's why Cosby's comment about "African-sounding names" resonates among social conservatives: What he's really saying is you're not being white enough.

To back up a little bit to see these dynamics in action, Nezua called out some rampant race shaming on Digg concerning the heroic actions of Alexis Goggins. (Yes, some fool had the nerve to pathologize the situations as another case of blacks not GORADSPIS.) I don't care to repost what said fool wrote on the article page and received many positive diggs for, in addition to encouragement he wasn't being a racist shit 'cause he was tellin' it like Cosby -- when oh golly, he was! These responses slow our reaction time to the failure of law enforcement to respond to an emergency call, the failure of our criminal justice and police protection system to enforce restraining orders against violent ex-partners, and the failure to make sure people with meager means have enough heat for the cold winters that many parts of this country face. Not to mention a HOST of other American ills.

But it's always damned easy to say, "You [insert color of the wind here] folks need to GORADSPIS!" Muhammad frames it thus:

Today's liberals still empathize with America's invisible white working poor, who they warn are being "nickel and dimed" to the point of near homelessness. But why the empathy? Isn't their poverty really a function of their choosing to embrace their hidden blackness?

Du Bois's scholarship and activism helped pave the way for the modern civil rights movement, which helped exorcize the ghost of America's Jim Crow past. That he was right about racism but that we still continue to accept the same flawed thinking about race and social problems suggests a powerful and enduring paradox.

If we insist on explaining racial disparities in terms of black vs. white values, then we need to explain what exactly white values are. When we do, we'll find that whiteness is an inadequate standard by which to judge good black people vs. bad ones.

With this post and ideas circling in my head a bit, I think I cornered slightly on why I was not fully infuriated with Aunt B. I caught wind of her update about white class mobility and tacit acceptance of white middle- to upper-class superiority (and all the problems and bigotries that come with it) in order to receive more of the trickles believed to come down inevitably:

[W]e live in a social pyramid and, despite the impression we’re given, white people are still the majority and white people still make up (in actual people, not percentage of population) the largest group of poor people in this country. Well, it’s not a social diamond. We can’t have a very few workers, a very few bosses, and millions and millions of middle managers.

Most lower class white people are not going to move up. Not even the ones with the college educations and the cushy jobs, because it’s not just about income but about a lot of intangible stuff, like knowing what constitute the right wardrobe for work, or not having to use personal days to go bail your brother out of jail, or, fuck, not having to worry that the kind of dog you have is so evil that legislation might be passed at any moment that would get it taken from you.

[...]I know this seems like a tangent, but I think it’s actually right on point to what’s going on for me. I assume that these popular white women bloggers are like me and I feel compelled to defend them as if any perceived threat to them is a threat to me.

And on top of that, it’s very hard for me to sit down and critically look at where I am and what my concerns are and where they are and what their concerns are and to say to myself a.) I have little proof that they share all of my concerns and b.) I have no proof that, if I help them further their agendas, they will help me further mine.

This is what’s hard for me to see, so I want to write it down where I can come back to it: I assume that WOC bloggers should get with the middle class white feminist agenda because I still believe, in my deepest heart, that when the middle class white feminists get what they’re after (or even as they’re getting what they’re after), they will not forget me and what I need.

Even though that’s demonstrably not true.

After reading Muhammad's editorial and looking at the situation in its entirety, my mind started doing all these fake-assed Matrix monologues to Aunt B. in my head. "That's what they want you to think!" When you strongly believe something will work out for you, you're more willing to ignore the signs of its failure. It happens when we render whiteness invisible; it happens when through our actions and access we tacitly accept classist frameworks of how social interactions should proceed. We make the top of the pyramid our panacea for social ills, even when their actions and the chronic problems the majority of Americans face constantly demonstrate the falsehood of that hope. That tiny pyramid rests on the blood and the sweat of our bodies.

The same goes for when I read equally backwards editorials on the burgeoning online activism movement to counter pathologizing blackness and how it's getting in the way of remedies that already were not reaching people -- whether through actual access to the programs, through knowledge of the program's availability, or through failure to pursue the courses of people being railroaded by systems constructed to accept their problems as personal failings on account of their attributes. To some extent, there is disunity in purpose in the black activist community. We do not all have the same goals and direction; we do not have the same fresh vision of success in mind. In many ways, within each community there is a debate over pathology of being and pinpointing actual problems that disproportionately affect that community. Brainstorming and solutions then proceed from some blend of those different locuses of thought. So when I look at this statement, naturally I get heated:

Literature promoting these events often compares today's protests to the Montgomery bus boycott. But Rosa Parks was a symbol of the treatment that every black person in Alabama — and many blacks around the country — received. The boycott was strategic and well-planned. We've got to stop with the knee-jerk reactions. I can't simply fall in line.

It is a shame that at a time when civil rights are eroding and blacks are willing to mobilize, this opportunity might be squandered because of protest overkill and frayed leadership.

Where is this consistency in any collection of activist settings? Seriously! All activist communities will not proceed in a unified body. And this isn't facing up to the fact that individual groups may have their own problems. But that's no reason to cast off a growing and flourishing movement.

There will be disagreements and inevitable clashes; but rather than find consensus or to look at the respective successes of each movement, it is much easier to accuse folks of co-opting someone else's shine, no? You don't think people criticized Rosa Parks? You don't think someone refused to take a stand against legal segregation before Rosa Parks? Do you know who Irene Morgan Kirkaldy is?

Would you like to know?

How about Claudette Colvin?

I'm sure if her story could be dugg back then, that dumbass from Nez's post could have and would have spewed the same shit, and the same racist apologists would emerge using some cryptic black pathology as an excuse for the injustices she faced from legal segregation.

Divergence of thought is not a symbol of poor activist growth, just as institutional failure is not a symbol of racial pathology. We cannot cultivate divergence of thought by pathologizing it as a symptom of marginalized failure. We cannot remedy institutional failures with selective ascription to traits and ways of being that those who sit at the top of the pyramid find undesirable.

We cannot challenge the system unless we're able to look critically at all of the insidious ways it works. We cannot dismantle the problematic facets of its parts while simultaneously revering the whole. Logic and life don't work that way. Our jobs as activists is to make the invisibility of oppression visible, not hold the benefits tied to oppression supreme and claw our way to the top. Our tactics may differ, our goals may change with time, but we must remain vigilant of what we prize and what we undervalue so history does not consistently and fatally repeat itself.