By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, October 20, 2017
Ice-T never received an Academy Award, which makes sense
inasmuch as his movies have been for the most part crap. But as an actor, you
have to give the man credit: Along with other gangster rappers such as Ice
Cube, he turned in such a convincing performance — amplifying negative
stereotypes about black men and selling white people their own Reagan-era
racial panic back to them in a highly stylized form — that people still, to
this day, believe he was the guy he played on stage. One social-media critic accused
him of hypocrisy for having recorded the infamous song “Cop Killer” before
going on to a very lucrative career playing a police officer on television.
Ice-T gave the man an honest answer: “It’s both acting, homie.”
Acting, indeed.
Pretty good acting, too, across the board in the rap
world. Consider the strange evolution of Tupac Shakur, who went from the quiet,
effeminate young man seen in this interview — a
former acting and ballet student at the Baltimore School for the Arts
apparently pointed like a rocket at a career in musical theater — to the “Thug
Life” antihero persona that made him famous in a remarkably short period of
time. He played tough-guy Roland Bishop in Juice
and basically stayed in character for the rest of his public life. As with Ice-T,
many of his fans assumed the stage persona was the real man. There’s a whole
weird little racial dynamic in there waiting for some doctoral student to sort
it out. Nobody expects Anthony Hopkins to eat a census worker.
A theater critic can’t really begrudge a performer for
making a living, and Ice-T put on a great show. I do wonder how much damage
those performers did by reinforcing and glamorizing criminal stereotypes of
black men. And I do mean that I wonder
— I do not know. Maybe the act is
more obvious if you are the sort of person who is being dramatized or
caricatured. (I experience something like that when I hear modern country songs
on the radio, all that cheerful alcoholism and casual adultery and ridiculous
good-ol’-boy posturing.) It would be weird to describe black men as “acting
black,” but whatever they were up to was the opposite of “acting white.”
There’s a certain kind of conservative who loves to talk
about “acting white,” i.e., about the legendary social sanction purportedly
applied to African Americans who try too hard in school or who speak in an
English that is too standard or who have interests and aspirations other than
the ones that black people are stereotypically supposed to have. (“Acting white” isn’t a complaint exclusive to
African Americans. My friend Jay
Nordlinger relates a wonderful story about the American Indian educator Ben
Chavis, who once was accused by a sister of “acting white.” His reply: “‘Acting
white’ is not enough. I’m acting Jewish. Or maybe Chinese.”) Oh, how we love to
knowingly tut-tut about “acting white,” with the obvious implication that black
Americans corporately would be a good deal better off if they would do a little
more acting white. That sort of thing
is not entirely unique to conservatives, of course: Nine-tenths of all social
criticism involving the problems of the American underclass consists of nice
college graduates and policy professionals of many races and religions
wondering aloud why they can’t be
more like us, which is why so much
social policy is oriented toward trying to get more poor people to go to
college, irrespective of whether they want to do so or believe they would
benefit from it.
Conservatives have a weakness for that “acting white”
business because we are intellectually invested in emphasizing the self-inflicted problems of black
America, for rhetorical and political reasons that are too obvious to require
much elaboration. It’s a phenomenon that may or may not be exaggerated. John
McWhorter argues that it is a real problem, and makes a pretty good case. So
did President Barack Obama, who called on the nation to “eradicate the slander
that says a black youth with a book is acting white.” I am not sure that a
white man from Lubbock, Texas, has a great deal to add to President Obama’s
argument there.
But I do have something to say about the subject of white
people acting white.
***
We rarely used to put it in racial terms, unless we were
talking about Eminem or the Cash-Me-Ousside Girl or some other white person who
has embraced (or affected) some part of black popular culture. With the
Trump-era emergence of a more self-conscious form of white-identity politics —
especially white working-class identity politics — the racial language comes to
the surface more often than it used to. But we still rarely hear complaints
about “acting un-white.” Instead, we hear complaints about “elitism.”
The parallels to the “acting white” phenomenon in black
culture are fairly obvious: When aspiration takes the form of explicit or
implicit cultural identification, however partial, with some hated or resented
outside group that occupies a notionally superior social position, then
“authenticity” is to be found in socially regressive manners, mores, and
habits. It is purely reactionary.
The results are quite strange. Republicans, once the
party of the upwardly mobile with a remarkable reflex for comforting the
comfortable, have written off entire sections of the country — including the
bits where most of the people live — as “un-American.” Silicon Valley and
California at large, New York City and the hated Acela corridor, and, to some
extent, large American cities categorically are sneered at and detested. There
is some ordinary partisanship in that, inasmuch as the Democrats tend to
dominate the big cities and the coastal metropolitan aggregations, but it isn’t
just that. Conservatives are cheering for the failure of California and
slightly nonplussed that New York City still refuses to regress into being an
unlivable hellhole in spite of the best efforts of its batty Sandinista mayor.
Not long ago, to be a conservative on Manhattan’s Upper East Side was the most
ordinary thing in the world. Now that address would be a source of suspicion.
God help you if you should ever attend a cocktail party in Georgetown, the
favorite dumb trope of conservative talk-radio hosts.
We’ve gone from William F. Buckley Jr. to the gentlemen
from Duck Dynasty. Why?
American authenticity, from the acting-even-whiter point
of view, is not to be found in any of the great contemporary American business
success stories, or in intellectual life, or in the great cultural
institutions, but in the suburban-to-rural environs in which the white
underclass largely makes its home — the world John Mellencamp sang about but
understandably declined to live in.
Shake your head at rap music all you like: When’s the
last time you heard a popular country song about finishing up your master’s in
engineering at MIT?
White people acting white have embraced the ethic of the
white underclass, which is distinct
from the white working class, which
has the distinguishing feature of regular gainful employment. The manners of
the white underclass are Trump’s — vulgar, aggressive, boastful, selfish,
promiscuous, consumerist. The white working
class has a very different ethic. Its members are, in the main, churchgoing,
financially prudent, and married, and their manners are formal to the point of
icy politeness. You’ll recognize the style if you’ve ever been around it: It’s
“Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am,” but it is the formality of soldiers and police
officers — correct and polite, but not in the least bit deferential. It is a formality adopted not to acknowledge the
superiority of social betters but to assert the equality of the speaker — equal
to any person or situation, perfectly republican
manners. It is the general social respect rooted in genuine self-respect.
Its opposite is the sneering, leveling,
drag-’em-all-down-into-the-mud anti-“elitism” of contemporary right-wing
populism. Self-respect says: “I’m an American citizen, and I can walk into any
room, talk to any president, prince, or potentate, because I can rise to any
occasion.” Populist anti-elitism says the opposite: “I can be rude enough and
denigrating enough to drag anybody down to my level.” Trump’s rhetoric —
ridiculous and demeaning schoolyard nicknames, boasting about money, etc. — has
always been about reducing. Trump doesn’t have the intellectual capacity to duke
it out with even the modest wits at the New
York Times, hence it’s “the failing New
York Times.” Never mind that the New
York Times isn’t actually failing and that any number of Trump-related
businesses have failed so thoroughly that they’ve gone into bankruptcy; the
truth doesn’t matter to the argument any more than it matters whether the
fifth-grade bully actually has an actionable claim on some poor kid’s lunch
money. It would never even occur to the low-minded to identify with anybody
other than the bully. That’s what all that ridiculous stuff about “winning” was
all about in the campaign. It is might-makes-right, i.e., the politics of
chimpanzee troupes, prison yards, kindergartens, and other primitive
environments. That is where the underclass ethic thrives — and how “smart
people” came to be a term of abuse.
This involves, inevitably, a good deal of fakery.
The man at the center of all this atavistic redneck
revanchism is a pampered billionaire real-estate heir from New York City, and
it has been something to watch the multi-millionaire populist pundits in
Manhattan doing their best impersonations of beer-drinkin’ regular guys from
the sticks. I assume Sean Hannity picked up his purported love for country
music in the sawdust-floored honky-tonks of . . . Long Island.
As a purely aesthetic enterprise, none of this clears my
poor-white-trash cultural radar. I’m reminded of those so-called dive bars in
Manhattan that spend $150,000 to make a pricey spot in Midtown look like a
Brooklyn kid’s idea of a low-rent roadside bar in Texas. (There’s one that even
has Lubbock license plates on the wall. I wonder where they got them — is there
some kind of mail-order dive-bar starter kit that comes with taxidermy, Texas
license plates, and a few cases of Lone Star? Maybe via Amazon Prime?) The same
crap is there — because the same crap is everywhere
— but the arrangement isn’t quite right.
The populist Right’s abandonment of principle has been
accompanied by a repudiation of good taste, achievement, education, refinement,
and manners — all of which are abominated as signs of effete “elitism.” During
the Clinton years, Virtue Inc. was the top-performing share in the Republican
political stock exchange. Fortunes were made, books were sold by the ton, and
homilies were delivered. The same people today are celebrating Donald Trump —
not in spite of his being a dishonest, crude serial adulterer but because of
it. His dishonesty, the quondam cardinals of Virtue Inc. assure us, is simply
the mark of a savvy businessman, his vulgarity the badge of his genuineness and
lack of “political correctness,” and his pitiless abuse of his several wives
and children the mark of a genuine “alpha male.” No less a virtue entrepreneur
than Bill Bennett dismissed those who pointed out Trump’s endless lies and
habitual betrayals as suffering from “moral superiority,” from people on “high
horses,” and said that Trump simply is “a guy who says some things awkwardly,
indecorously, infelicitously.”
Thus did the author of The Book of Virtues embrace the author of “Grab ’Em By the P***y.”
We need a Moynihan Report for conservative broadcasters.
The problem, in Bennett’s telling (and that of many other
conservatives), isn’t that Trump is a morally defective reprobate but that he
is aesthetically displeasing to overly refined “elitists.” That is a pretty
common line of argument — and an intellectual cop-out — but set that aside for
the moment. Let’s pretend that Bennett et al. are correct and this is simply a
matter of manners. Are we now to celebrate vulgarity as a virtue? Are we to
embrace crassness? Are we supposed to pretend that a casino-cum-strip-joint is
a civilizational contribution up there with Notre-Dame, that the Trump Taj
Mahal trumps the Taj Mahal? Are we supposed to snigger at people who ask that
question? Are we supposed to abandon our traditional defense of standards to
mimic Trump’s bucket-of-KFC-and-gold-plated-toilet routine?
Ludwig von Mises was as clear-eyed a social critic as he
was an economist, and he noted something peculiar about the anti-Semitism of
the Nazi era: In the past, minority groups were despised for their purported
vices — white American racists considered African Americans lazy and mentally
deficient, the English thought the Irish drank too much to be trusted to rule
their own country, everybody thought the Gypsies were put on this Earth to
spread disease and thievery. But the Jews were hated by the Nazis for their virtues: They were too intelligent, too
clever, too good at business, too cosmopolitan, too committed to their own
distinctness, too rich, too influential, too thrifty.
Our billionaire-ensorcelled anti-elitists take much the
same tack: Anybody with a prestigious job, a good income, an education at a
selective university, and no oxy overdoses in the immediate family — and
anybody who prefers hearing the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center to
watching football on television — just doesn’t know what life is like in “the
real America” or for the “real men” who live there. No, the “real America,” in
this telling, is little more than a series of dead factory towns, dying farms,
pill mills — and, above all, victims.
There, too, white people acting white echo elements of hip-hop culture, which
presents powerful and violent icons of masculinity as hapless victims of
American society.
The “alpha male” posturing, the valorizing of underclass
dysfunction, the rejection of “elite” tastes and manners — right-wing populism
in the age of Trump is a lot like Bruce Springsteen’s act, once acidly (and
perfectly) described as a “white minstrel show.”
I wonder if Bill Bennett can tap-dance.
***
Race is part of this, as it is part of many things in
America, but it is easy to make too much of it, too. The white underclass may
suffer from “acting white,” but what poor people in general suffer from is
acting poor, i.e., repeating the mistakes and habits that left them (or their
parents and grandparents, in many cases) in poverty or near-poverty to begin
with.
The more you know about that world, the less sympathetic
you’ll be to it. What the Trump-style would-be tribunes of the plebs most have
in common with self-appointed progressive advocates for the poor is ignorance of the actual subject matter.
It weren’t the scheming Chinaman what stole ol’ Bubba’s job down Bovina, ’cause
ol’ Bubba didn’t really have him a job to steal. And it isn’t capitalism that
made rural Appalachia or small-town Texas what it is. Well-heeled children of
privilege such as Elizabeth Bruenig condescend to speak on behalf of people and
communities about whom they know practically nothing — people who have not,
let’s remember, asked the
well-scrubbed sons and daughters of the ruling class to speak on their behalf.
When they were asked, they chose
Donald Trump by a very large margin, but then the poor make poor choices all
the time — that’s part of why they’re poor. The Left is convinced of Thomas
Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?
thesis, that the poor and struggling in the conservative and rural parts of the
country are just too besotted with Jesus talk and homosexual panic to
understand what actually is at stake, and who therefore — the famous phrase —
“vote against their own economic interests.” Progressives preach about — and to — people with whom they have no real
connection, and do so in ways that would embarrass them to death if it were a racial line rather than a class line they were crossing in such a
state of pristine ignorance. They are the mirror image of white conservatives
who wonder why poor black people in the Bronx can’t just “act white” and get
with the program.
If I might be permitted to address the would-be benefactors
of the white underclass from the southerly side of the class line: Ain’t nobody
asked you to speak for us.
Of course there are external forces, economic and
otherwise, that act on poor people and poor communities, and one of the
intellectual failings of conservative social critics is our tendency to take
those into considerably greater account in the case of struggling rural and
small-town whites than in the case of struggling urban blacks. “Get off welfare
and get a job!” has been replaced by solicitous talk about “globalization.”
Likewise, the reaction to the crack-cocaine plague of the 1980s and 1990s was
very different from the reaction to the opioid epidemic of the moment, in part
because of who is involved — or perceived to be involved. And this isn’t the
first time we’ve seen a rash of deaths from opioid overdoses. As Dr. Peter
DeBlieux of University Medical Center in New Orleans put it, heroin addiction
was, for a long time, treated in the same way AIDS was in its early days: as a
problem for deviants. Nobody cared about AIDS when it was a problem for
prostitutes, drug addicts, and those with excessively adventurous sex lives.
The previous big epidemic of heroin overdoses involved largely non-white drug
users. The current fentanyl-driven heroin episode and the growth of
prescription-killer abuse involve more white users and more middle-class users.
But there are internal forces as well. People really do
make decisions, and, whether they intend it or not, they contribute to the
sometimes difficult conditions in which those decisions have to be made.
Consider the case of how I became homeless.
I wasn’t homeless in the sense of sleeping in the park —
most of the people we’re talking about when we’re talking about homelessness
aren’t. The people who are sleeping on the streets are mainly addicts and
people with other severe mental-health issues. I was homeless in the way the
Department of Health and Human Services means: in “an unstable or non-permanent
situation . . . forced to stay with a series of friends and/or extended family
members.” (As a matter of policy, these two kinds of homelessness should not be
conflated, which they intentionally are by those who wish for political reasons
to pretend that our mental-health crisis is an economic problem.) Like many
underclass families, mine lived very much paycheck-to-paycheck, and was always
one setback away from economic catastrophe. That came when my mother, who for
various reasons had a weakened immune system, got scratched by her poodle,
Pepe, and nearly lost her right arm to the subsequent infection. A long
hospitalization combined with fairly radical surgery and a series of skin
grafts left her right arm and hand partially paralyzed, a serious problem for a
woman who typed for a living. (She’d later learn to type well over 100 words
per minute with only partial use of her right hand; she was a Rachmaninoff of
the IBM Selectric.) I am sure that there were severe financial stresses
associated with her illness, but I ended up being shuffled around between
various neighbors — strangers to me — for mainly non-economic reasons. My
parents had two houses between them, but at that time had just gone through a
very ugly divorce. My mother was living with a mentally disturbed alcoholic
who’d had a hard time in Vietnam (and well before that, I am certain; his
grandfather had once shot him in the ass with a load of rock-salt for making
unauthorized use of a watermelon from the family farm) and it was decided that
it would be unsafe to leave children alone in his care, which it certainly
would have been. He was very precise, in funny ways, and would stack his Coors
Lite cans in perfect silver pyramids until he ran out of beer, at which point
he would start drinking shots of Mexican vanilla, which is about 70 proof.
Lubbock was a dry city then, and buying more booze would have meant a trip past
the city limits, hence the resort to baking ingredients and, occasionally, to
mouthwash. I am afraid the old realtors’ trick of filling the house with the
aroma of baked cookies has the opposite of the desired effect on me.
Our mortgage then was $285 a month, which was a little
less than my father paid in child support, so housing was, in effect, paid for.
And thus I found myself in the strange position of being temporarily without a
home while rotating between neighbors within sight, about 60 feet away, of the
paid-up house to which I could not safely return. I was in kindergarten at the
time.
Capitalism didn’t do that, and neither did illegal
immigrants or Chinese competition to the Texas Instruments factory on the other
side of town. Culture didn’t do it, either, and neither did poverty: We had
enough money to secure comfortable housing in a nice neighborhood with good
schools. In the last years of her life, my mother asked me to help her sort out
some financial issues, and I was shocked to learn how much money she and her
fourth and final husband were earning: They’d both ended their careers as
government employees, and had pretty decent pensions and excellent health benefits.
They were, in fact, making about as much in retirement in Lubbock as I was
making editing newspapers in Philadelphia. Of course they were almost dead
broke — their bingo and cigarette outlays alone were crushing, and they’d
bought a Cadillac and paid for it with a credit card.
They didn’t suffer from bad luck or lack of opportunity.
Bad decisions and basic human failure put them where they were. But that is
from the political point of view an unsatisfactory answer, because it does not
provide us with an external party (preferably a non-voting party) to blame. It
was not the case that everything that was wrong with the lives of the people I
grew up with was the result of their own choices, but neither was it the case
that they were only leaves on the wind.
Of course, they were anti-elitists before it was
fashionable, FDR Democrats who grew into Buchananism and Perotism before those
became Trumpism. It might never have occurred to them to imitate the habits of
people who had gone farther and done better in life than they had, even though
they had the experience of seeing people who came from the exact same
conditions as they did — or, in some cases, from far worse circumstances —
build happy, prosperous, stable, productive lives. My mother despised the college
professors for whom she worked in her last job, who were unfailingly kind and
generous to her, because they were unfailingly kind and generous to her, which
she understood (as she understood many things) as condescension. Hers was a
world of strict tribal hierarchy: She would, for example, enact petty cruelties
on waitresses and grocery-store clerks and other people in service positions,
taking advantage of the fact that she had momentary social inferiors, and she
must have been confused that the professors and deans did not behave that way
toward her. In fact, they did the opposite, entrusting her with work far beyond
her modest formal credentials or the official duties of her position. Class is
funny in a small-ish town: The father of a school friend of mine became the
dean of her college and her boss, and she spoke of the family as though they
inhabited some faraway realm when in reality they lived three blocks north and
two blocks east. That she herself could have had a life more like theirs, or that
her children might yet, never occurred to her — it was sour grapes raised to a
state of psychosis.
Feeding such people the lie that their problems are
mainly external in origin — that they are the victims of scheming elites,
immigrants, black welfare malingerers, superabundantly fecund Mexicans,
capitalism with Chinese characteristics, Walmart, Wall Street, their neighbors
— is the political equivalent of selling them heroin. (And I have no doubt that
it is mostly done for the same reason.) It is an analgesic that is unhealthy
even in small doses and disabling or lethal in large ones. The opposite message
— that life is hard and unfair, that what is not necessarily your fault may yet be your problem, that you must act and bear
responsibility for your actions — is what conservatism used to offer, before it
became a white-minstrel show. It is a sad spectacle, but I do have some hope
that the current degraded state of the conservative movement will not last
forever.
The thing about eternals truths is, they’re eternal.
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