Inside race-ball

Captivity: the ultimate curve

Image source: blvck.com

If you’ve never heard of Coleman Hughes, I empathize. I hadn’t heard of him, either, until very recently. Hughes emerged as one of author Ta-Nehisi Coates’s nemeses, presenting himself (metaphorically) as one of the enlightened, “colorblind” Black folks.

Accordingly, Hughes (a writer for Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, among other places), has pitted himself against Coates’s scrupulous vivisection of race, accusing Coates of bamboozling the average American into viewing an illusion.

What Hughes and others like him are playing is what can be thought of as inside raceball. They are, externally, “outsiders” in a white supremacist society, standing for the idealized values of that society as racialized-yet-deracinated insiders.

These exquisitely positioned folks are there to spread the gospel of the wider society to other externally racial Others so that they are persuaded to adopt the insider’s perspective, which in this case is that (1) society is not supremacist, (2) race doesn’t exist (and therefore racism doesn’t exist — this is the reductionist flaw in their logic), and (3) those trying to examine race as a current social problem are hucksters, hustlers, and charlatans trying to cash in.

Interestingly, this frame of examiners of race as hustlers immediately casts them as cheaters, just as it simultaneously reinforces the notion that society is based on meritocracy. These tricksters, so the story goes, subvert the system to try to make a fast buck. This view substitutes the ideal (meritocracy) for the real (a slanted, biased society).

This move is a clever but clandestine way to present the idea that the lived society and its ideal are one.¹

So these frontmen are race influencers, there to convince those in the generations coming up — rather distant from the vitality of the civil rights movement to where that era now seems rather abstract — that racism is a phantom, a put-on, a ruse. The frontmen are subsumed into the structure of white supremacy to serve as outreach. They are weapons of pacification.

I imagine it is the ultimate sign of success for a white supremacist when he can fundamentally convince a racialized person that racism is a myth. His work is done. He’s co-opted the perfect messenger, one who might well work to bring like-minded Others into the white supremacist fold. Such converts are the best mouthpieces for white supremacy because the message itself is camouflaged.

As a person of color (particularly as an African-American), in order to accept white supremacy in America, one must accept that capitalism is supreme. That is to say, slavery was all right in the end because now Black people have a higher standard of living than they would otherwise. The convert is convinced that he’s lucky (or even blessed!) to be here.

This shift requires compartmentalization. One must shelve the fact that Black bodies were capital — Black bodies were fungible, which is how they came to be on these shores here and now — and it requires amnesia of commodity, of the arbitrariness of the color line, for the imagined luxury of being able to participate in the system of capital, as though that weren’t a living contradiction.

There will always be a place for these frontmen (which, to be sure, include males and females). Accepted into the white supremacist fold, they will rewarded for their willingness to hawk these claims. This reward will feel like just compensation, like earnings, like meritocracy. Thus the system produces the illusion that the convert then proselytizes.

The late psychologist Edgar Schein, in “Empowerment, coercive persuasion and organizational learning,” said:

“[I]f a prisoner was physically restrained from leaving a situation in which learning was the only alternative, they would eventually learn through a process of ‘cognitive redefinition.’ They would eventually come to understand the point of view of the captor and reframe their own thinking so that the judgment of having been guilty became logical and acceptable. In effect they had undergone what might be called a ‘conversion’ experience except it did not happen in the sudden way that religious conversions are often described.”²

I posit that the further we get from the civil rights era, with each successive generation, the susceptibility of persons of color to “understand the point of view of the captor” increases. Such sympathy might form by internalizing the degrading stereotypes of their designated group.³ (It’s worth noting that, though the US has dramatically reduced the sheer amount of racist material in its ambient culture, there is still a profound amount pervading the cultural system.)

Schein continues, listing nine methods designed to win compliance.

“The essence of this process, from the point of view of the captor, was to create a situation in which several conditions obtained simultaneous:

“(1) The prisoner was put in jail with an indeterminate sentence, articulated by the captor as ‘you will never get out of here until you make a sincere confession and accept your guilt as a spy and criminal....”⁴

→ In the US, African-Americans are born into the system, trapped on these shores. This is especially true for those who are impoverished; and it’s universally true for babies and small children, who have no say or agency to pick up and move.

“(2) The prisoner was put into a group with others who were more advanced in their learning process.”⁵

→ For frontmen, this means being placed in an environment that drills into them that meritocracy and fundamental fairness are the reality, not just the ideal, of American culture. Based on this belief, they are given role models to admire and replicate.⁶

“(3) The group was rewarded on the basis of its total progress; only if all the members learned the new point of view would they get more privileges and fewer punishments.”⁷

→ Black people, so far as I can see, will be America’s scapegoat into the indeterminate future. That being the case, the frontmen must repudiate “typical” (really, the stereotypical) African-Americans and conspicuously identify with libertarian / “talented tenth” bootstrappers, so as to effect self-segregation: absorbing “white culture,” disavowing “Black culture.”

“(4) The new point of view was presented in many ways — personally by the interrogator, by lectures, by printed materials and by more advanced group members in informal discussion.

“(5) The main vehicle for learning and assessing the degree of learning was a written confession and self-criticism which was required as a regular activity and served to stimulate the prisoner to rethink his or her past actions and begin to assess them from a new point of view.”⁸

→ In the US, a written confession is unnecessary (though, as just mentioned, a convert might vocally repudiate “Black culture” so as to obtain bona fides from his new compadres.)

For a mark not yet convinced of the (fallaciously constructed) idea that race is false, therefore racism is false, a more “advanced” group member might deliver a bit of rhetoric to essentially gaslight the novice, leading him to evaluate the idea as though it were offered in good faith.

“(6) Any evidence that the prisoner was beginning to grasp the new point of view or new concepts was instantly rewarded and, on the other hand, any evidence of insincerity or superficiality of understanding was severely punished.”⁹

→ Social reward and punishment — operant conditioning — is sufficient here. (Social punishment might include criticism, ostracism, and derogation, among other treatment.)

“(7) Communications that in any way reinforced the old point of view or that reminded the prisoner of his or her links to old membership or reference groups were withheld, e.g. mail from home was delivered only if it contained bad news such as the message that a spouse was seeking a divorce or that a valued friend had died.”¹⁰

→ This withholding of materials can be seen in the book bans of such classics as The Bluest Eye and Black Like Me, which connect living generations to the ones that existed during (or call back to) the time before the civil rights era. There can be no empathizing with those stories’ points of view if conversion is to succeed.

“(8) Physical pressures of all sorts were constantly applied to weaken the prisoner’s physical strength, with sleep deprivation being the most potent of these pressures; ‘torture’ was only used as a punishment for insincerity or lack of motivation to learn.”¹¹

→ As a broader analogy, being forced to participate in an all-pervading capitalist system — especially if one is of the working or lower middle classes — convinces a person of the worth of that system.¹²

“(9) Psychological safety was produced for the prisoner by fellow prisoners who were further along in their re-education and could be supportive of the target prisoner’s effort.”¹³

→ This is the buddy system. This was Ben Shapiro tutoring and shielding Candace Owens as a promulgator of certain ideals, at least until she broke a cardinal yet unspoken rule and began criticizing a key holding of today’s white supremacist topography.

Also the law school companions of Clarence Thomas qualify as part of this system, at least as far as they stoked his resentment of being viewed as a recipient of affirmative action. To the racist, affirmative action is a handicap that connotes “lesser than”; Thomas apparently learned to put stock in that worldview instead of seeing the program as redressing the legacy of prior, longstanding discrimination against those in his position.

So we see that conversion is a subsystem in the white supremacist superstructure.

There will always be a place for this flipping of Othello pieces. Some might call these folks ‘tokens’ (and, in a way, I suppose I just did) but, really, they’re evangelists. They’re here to spread the good word of prosperity through hard work, shilling the idea that meritocracy has already been achieved. It’s a type of prosperity gospel whose entry point is a wholesale denial that racism, in any form, affects one’s chance of success in the American system.

1. In individual psychology, putting the ideal/superego in place of the actual ego is the sine qua non of narcissism. So perhaps this insistence of the ideal as the real is an indicator of cultural narcissism.

2. Edgar Schein, “Empowerment, coercive persuasion and organizational learning: do they connect?” The Learning Organization (1999), Vol. 6, No. 4, p. 165.

3. This internalization tends to be called “self-hate” following Kurt Lewin’s hypothesis of why people adopt views that lead to damaged self-esteem; but one then needs to ask: is it the self — i.e., an interior identity — if a person is designated as being of an arbitrary group? That’s not the self — that’s the acceptance of society’s definition of who and what one “truly” is. That’s a fiction from the start. But those inclined to believe that skin color = race will tend to accept this self-concept-damaging hypothesis (as they are immersed in the culture just like everyone else, and cultural systems — especially for those born into them — are adopted reflexively). In American culture, we tend to see race (i.e., skin color) as inherent, not assigned.

4. Schein, op. cit., p. 165.

5. Ibid.

6. Thomas Sowell is an example of such a model for Black conservatives, as is Glenn Loury. Others can be found in various industries (e.g., entertainment, politics, religion, etc.) as examples of bootstrap success.

7. Schein, op. cit., p. 165.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid., p. 165-166.

11. Ibid., p. 166.

12. Recall Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance, where a person given a menial or tedious task convinces themselves that the task was enjoyable (i.e., worth their time). See Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith, “Cognitive consequences of forced compliance,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology (1959), Vol. 58, No. 2.

13. Schein, op. cit., p. 166.