analysis
Sean Jacobs and Jessica Blatt
The terrorist attacks in New York and Washington and the United States retaliation in Afghanistan have resulted in an outpouring of patriotism in the US, among African-Americans as much as anyone else. But the crisis has also put African-Americans in some odd and uncomfortable positions.
Recent weeks have been marred by hate crimes (harassment as well as violence) directed against Arab-Americans and South-Asian immigrants an experience all too familiar to members of the African- American community. But this time African-Americans, too, have been implicated in such violence against people of colour. A similar dynamic is occurring with racial profiling (the singling out of particular race groups by law enforcement for random drug searches, traffic stops, and so on). It has been widely noted that resistance to this practice has plummetted in the wake of the attacks. The influential New York Times has run a story on the new-found approval racial profiling enjoys among US minorities and whites alike. A black American quoted in the piece echoed sentiments that can be heard on call-in shows and street corners around the city: “It sickens me that I feel that way, but it’s the real world.”
In fact, Gallup polls have shown that, while a majority of Americans support increased security efforts aimed at Arab-Americans, blacks support such measures even more heavily.
Some commentators suggest that this is traceable to America’s evolving racial calculus. “The perception is, if the ‘Arabs’ are the new ‘them’ and ‘we’ are part of the newly constructed ‘we’, then perhaps things will get better for a little while,” suggests Andre Pinard, an African-American sociologist who studies black youth culture.
Black Americans have not always defended other minorities’ rights in crisis situations. Cultural difference, resentment over the economic success of new immigrants, and racism by Arabs towards African-Americans also contribute to this response. In the main African-American views on immigrants including views of black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean are by no means out of the mainstream.
Despite having experienced hardship here, historically African-Americans have responded to calls of patriotism with the fiercest of determination.
This response was fuelled by the notion that by expressing their allegiance they will be rewarded with the respect, privileges, and social capital accorded “real Americans”.
On a more profound level, though, African-Americans’ patriotism is not false. They respond like most of their countrymen in a crisis. What some perceive as a jingoistic new vogue for displaying American flags on cars, houses and inside shops, and even in some cases, tattooed on bodies, is no less pronounced among blacks and Latinos than among whites.
“Most of the critical debate is being waged outside of the US ,” says Erk Ponder, a Chicago-based political scientist, “partly because the US public do not want to hear it or their media do not want to tell them. It is important to note that most Americans are ignorant about the outside world and could care less. And that is why isolationist policies work well with most Americans. That also counts for most in the African-American community.”
Leading African-American intellectuals (those with regular access to the dominant public sphere) have been uncharacteristically quiet during this period, with a few exceptions (writers Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou as well as outspoken New York political scientist Adolph Reed among them). This surprises activists like Laurent Alfred, a Yale law student and a delegate to the recent World Conference on Racism in South Africa. “There is an utter lack of any critical voices about the US government response among mainstream African-Americans regular people, intellectuals, entertainers, anyone.”
When political leaders and intellectuals in the black community have raised their voices, they have focused on racial profiling and the erosion of civil liberties, but offered few, if any, concrete propositions. This is partly understandable in the current climate in the US, where statements against Bush or his “war effort” risk being denounced just short of treason.
Already, Barbara Lee, a black congresswoman from California and the only dissenter in a vote in the House of Representatives for increased military and surveillance powers for the Bush administration, has been rewarded with death threats for her troubles.
But the picture is not all bleak. The New York weekly newspaper, The Village Voice, reported that Americans’ warlike spirit may be overstated. Polls have shown 92% of Americans favour military action but when the polls offered the alternative of extraditing and trying the terrorists, that figure dropped to 54%. And the crisis has brought the white left together with civil rights groups concerned about civil liberties and the beginnings of a debate that links these events with US foreign policy.
Walton Johnson, a professor of black studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey, suggested to us that the mass of black Americans are likely eventually to react to the racist tinge in American nationalism. He recounts that this was a problem in Vietnam among African-American soldiers.
They were happy to fight for the US, but they sensed a particular viciousness toward this enemy because of his colour. If he is right, perhaps the African-American experience means they have a unique contribution to make to a more positive response to the threat of terrorism, and to rethinking the US’s relation to the rest of the world.
Sean Jacobs, a South African, is a visiting fellow at the New School University in New York City. Jessica Blatt is an American graduate student living in New York