The Counterpublic Papers vol. 4 no. 4

Karl Rove told this (anonymously) to Ron Suskind in 2004 in distinguishing the “reality based community” from the faith-based empire George W. Bush attempted to establish.

Now when we tend to think of truth and empire, in fact when he probably thought of the two, we tend to think at the macro level. George W. Bush saying with certainty that there were weapons of mass destruction, or Cheney saying with equal certainty that Iraqis would welcome Americans with open arms after regime change. And we’re right to do so. Certainly every time Trump opens his mouth we see this at work.

I was reminded of this last week as Brett Kavanaugh attempted to redefine a range of terms in order to simultaneously cement his alcoholic past (present?) and dodge his sexual past (present?). The Devil’s Triangle becomes a drinking game. Bouf becomes a synonym for drinking. While I hadn’t heard of any of these terms—black slang is, on these issues, apparently pretty different from white prep school slang—a number of other folk had. So many in fact that a Congress driven attempt to create a “Devil’s Triangle” Wikipedia entry based on Kavanaugh’s definition ended up generating a response that is both hilarious and tragic.

….

One of the best websites with which to explain how American conceptions of race developed over time is the Colonial Williamsburg site. I use this website in my Africana intro course as well as in my American Racial Politics course. It connects the size of the growing black population (between 1625 and 1680 there was a 150-fold increase in the number of blacks in Virginia) to a series of legislative changes that changed the status of blacks from indentured servants to slaves, and that significantly regulated the bodies of black and white women alike.

I turned back to this last week in helping students understand two phenomenon—the support Kavanaugh received from conservative women, and the support Cosby received from some black women. While on the surface we’d expect women independent of party to support Kavanaugh, and black women to withhold support from Cosby, the data (hard data in Kavanaugh’s case—PDF of data here, anecdotal in Cosby’s) suggest otherwise. We can, to an extent, understand this as tribalism at work. In general we’re unlikely to believe charges against trustworthy elites (and friends), particularly when they’re brought by entities we distrust. In Kavanaugh’s case, charges brought by the Democratic Party (Dr. Ford here is likely viewed as an agent, unwitting or otherwise of the Democratic Party and liberals more generally), in Cosby’s case, charges brought by the white power structure (the various women accusers are viewed as agents, either unwitting or otherwise of forces interested in taking Cosby down). But we’re still left to deconstruct the tribalism itself. People can form all types of tribes, why these tribes at this time?

Societies are reproduced in two ways, biologically and socially. Men and women have children, and these children become adults and then themselves have children. These children become functioning adults through social conditioning/training, in the home, in school, and through other institutions.

The races that function at the base of past and present racial hierarchies are also reproduced biologically and socially. Here’s where the Virginia case comes in. We can see, through law, Virginia elites recognize that producing racially distinct populations required controlling the sexual reproduction of black and white women, making certain types of sexual activity illegal and categorizing the children of certain types of sexual activity as slave labor. Over time this dynamic ends up generating racial political interests that can end up becoming more important than interests based on either class or gender.

Many women saw themselves in Dr. Ford, just as many women saw themselves in Cosby’s many accusers. This is straightforward I think.

But.

Many women saw and see themselves in Brett Kavanaugh on the one hand and Bill Cosby on the other. Kavanaugh and Cosby both have mothers. They both have wives. They both have daughters. (They may have sisters.) In as much as the political project Kavanaugh is explicitly a part of is all about maintaining white purity and superiority, and in as much as that political project does not just benefit men but the women around those men, a number of conservative women will likely have to have a lot more than one instance in order to turn against Kavanaugh. In as much as the political project Cosby is implicitly a part of is all about defending black humanity in the face of persistent white supremacy, and in as much as that project does not just benefit men but benefits the women around those men, a number of black women (likely older—an older black women accused me of being black on the outside and white on the inside after I stated that I thought Cosby should go to jail) will likely have to have a lot more black women come forward to turn against him.

Some think this is a matter of women being brainwashed. No. It’s women placing other sorts of interest alongside of and on top of their interests as women. The trick going forward is to get them to rethink these other interests.

On that note, see you in a few days. And for those of you in the Ann Arbor area, I mean that literally.