Donald Trump and the Crisis of White Identity

As Donald Trump has gone from a bad joke to a potential president, we need to think more seriously about the nature of his appeal. One school of thought says that White working class voters (more on this problematic label later) are supporting Trump because they have seen their economic prospects decline. Wages have stagnated for over a decade. Jobs were lost in the great recession that are never coming back. The hardship is real. But the way the media talks about Trump's supporters has the unintended effect of making excuses for White racism. Trump's followers have "economic anxiety" the pundits intone, as if this explains why they would find racism and bigotry appealing, as if economic setbacks are naturally greeted with cultural resentment and wild cheering for a mean-spirited demagogue. The unstated assumption is that when Whites face economic hardship much less severe than what people of color have faced decade upon decade, it is understandable--perhaps even reasonable!-- for them to lash out.

Measured by standards of White economic prosperity, Black Americans have faced an economic depression for...several centuries. Why have Black Americans failed to build large political movements in support of demagogues? Imagine a Black demagogue winning primary elections while calling Whites rapists, demanding a ban on White immigration, and excusing his supporters as they beat up White protesters. I ask you to seriously imagine it, because it's a revealing counterfactual. Would the media chalk it up to "economic anxiety" and "controversial" talk? The media framing of Trump's racism as a "tell it like it is brashness" reflects our basic familiarity and comfort with White racism. Trump doesn't necessarily strike fear into the heart of the White mainstream because it is not, after all, his target. And we who are White know this. We are in the majority. If Trump becomes president, we know we will not be in the firing line. Trump's supporters love him because he validates their Whiteness. Ironically, his detractors unconsciously draw on that same Whiteness as we fail to denounce him with the moral urgency his rise demands. 

To be clear, the economic anxiety narrative makes a lot of sense on its face. After all, the economic problems are real enough. Not only that, Trump has substantive differences with GOP orthodoxy that may draw voters to him. There are lots of Republicans who favor more protectionist trade policy, less immigration, and robust welfare programs for the elderly. Trump offers them this policy mix, while other Republican politicians traditionally do not. But it is irresponsible to discuss these factors without accounting for the crucial--indeed, decisive--way White identity intersects with and animates these issues. The economic anxiety narrative actually fails to explain what is most in need of explanation: why should stagnant wages make racism, bigotry, and plain mean-spiritedness more appealing? Many people, myself included, have marveled at the stickiness of Trump's support. It seems as though he can say almost anything and retain the allegiance of nearly a third of Republican voters. This is because Trump's campaign is at bottom an appeal to identity.

Characteristically conflating nationalism and White supremacy, Klan members march in the nation's capital. 1925.

What Trump's ascendance reveals, and the economic anxiety narrative fails to grapple with, is the underlying crisis of White American identity. Forged in conquest and enslavement of others, fortified in exclusionary campaigns for political, economic, and social supremacy, White identity retains implicitly many of the assumptions of its creation. Implicit in White identity is an entitlement to success. Yet many White Americans are not successful. And the oppression that created the entitlement is no longer socially acceptable. Even the currency of the "psychological wage" of Whiteness that Du Bois famously wrote about seems to have depreciated in value. For most of American history, even the poorest Whites could act out their sense of superiority over Black Americans, from the commonplace--calling a Black man "boy"--to the extraordinary spectacle of lynchings attended by thousands. In a post-civil rights movement society where equality and freedom for all is our publicly-avowed ethic, White identity is unmoored from its founding logic. Yet no coherent mass White identity has emerged to take its place. Perhaps more than ever before, we don't know how to understand a society where two things at once are true: Whiteness is advantaged, and millions of White people live in poverty and despair.

There are nineteen million poor White Americans, the census bureau estimates. Yet our popular media and cultural narratives have no room for them. We can't even talk about them. Poor Whites are "working class" or "blue collar." They are not poor. Why? Because to be poor is to contradict the basic narrative of Whiteness. To be poor and Black is to be a stereotype. To be poor and White is to be beneath one's (entitled) station. To be poor and White is to be ridiculed, yes; but more than that it is to be ignored altogether. When the anthropologist Kirby Moss launched a project to study poor Whites in a Midwestern city, people encountered him with surprise and confusion. Not only did they assume he would be White, they assumed that an anthropologist studying urban poverty must be studying Black people. Revealing, isn't it?

In his book, The Color of Class: Poor Whites and the Paradox of Privilege, Moss argued that poor whites are basically invisible in the public representation of Whiteness. They exist in an anomalous position: while their material lives are shaped by poverty, their identities are tied to Whiteness, which is not associated with poverty (except in certain specific tropes tied especially to the South and Appalachia). We desperately need a Whiteness that has room for them, a Whiteness in which success is not a birthright, where solidarity is more important than hierarchy, where poverty is not stigma, and where the self-serving fables of the rich are not accepted as sober economic analysis. In short, we need nothing less than the abolition of Whiteness as we have known it. Instead, the political mobilization around Donald Trump is encouraging Whites to double-down on our legacy of exclusionary political movements. It invites us to return to that great White myth: that success is a zero-sum game, that greater opportunities for others mean less opportunity for us.

We must be honest about the history by which we became White. The peoples who became White in the United States forged their collective identity in contexts of supremacy. One of our nation's first laws, the Naturalization Act of 1790, declared that only White persons could become naturalized as citizens. Whiteness became associated with so-called civilization, with manliness, with the ability to deploy the labor of others, to own land, to prosper, with American nationalism itself. Even if one did not own land or employ others, one could hope in the boundless potential of free White labor. According to civil war-era Republican ideology, the common (White) man would rise by the fruits of his labor, untainted by Black slavery. Southern White Democrats, demanding a Whiteness that used rather than excluded Black labor, fought back against Reconstruction with paramilitary violence and terrorism. Whites on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line came to believe that Reconstruction had been a disastrous experiment in Black empowerment. Driven in part by their shared commitment to White supremacy, they reconciled after the bitterness of civil war. The decades around the turn of the century saw Whites mobilizing in nativist campaigns against the mass immigration from Eastern Europe of people of questionable Whiteness. In the first decades of the twentieth century, White middle class progressives sought to remake the country in their image, offering assimilation for some and racist eugenics for others. In the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan was reborn as a national organization with millions of members. Mixing White supremacy, American nationalism, and Protestant Christianity the 1920s Klan exemplified the powerful conflation of Whiteness with other values that has characterized much of American history. White political movements have run the gamut from exclusionary to assimilationist. They have seldom been liberatory.

In contrast, the various peoples who became Black in the United States forged their collective identity in contexts of oppression. It was and is an identity characterized by narratives of resistance, resilience, and solidarity. We're all in this together. Even if these tropes operated at the level of myth more often than not, they became powerful tools of cultural and political mobilization. Black political movements have been rooted in the specific challenges African Americans face, but they have tended to promise enduring benefits to the entirety of America. From Reconstruction to the Great Migration, the civil rights struggle, and Black Lives Matter, movements grounded in the particular problems of Black Americans have offered visions of greater justice and opportunity for all Americans.*

The meanings of race, and the boundaries it imposes, have always been unstable. Whiteness has grown to encompass more groups and what it means to be White has continually changed. We are not doomed to endlessly repeat our legacy of exclusionary political movements. We can learn from the Black political tradition. And we can remember the minority of Whites at every historical moment who resisted the dominant investment in Whiteness in their time. As the meaning of race and racism transform once again in our own time, we have the opportunity and the responsibility to build a new Whiteness. As George Lipsitz has written, if we do not actively cultivate an anti-racist White identity, we will be consumed by our investment in a White identity that is inherently destructive.
____________

*Black nationalist and radical traditions, from Henry McNeal Turner to Marcus Garvey to Black Power, might at a glance seem to defy the narrative of an inclusive Black political tradition. But we must draw a sharp line of distinction between political mobilizations designed to oppress a minority group, and those minority groups' efforts to respond to their exclusion from the dominant society. Black nationalism has played an important and necessary role in resisting oppression.

Donald Trump and the Course of American Conservatism

Donald Trump may win Iowa tonight. It remains to be seen whether he can win the nomination. But he has already emerged as a far greater political force than anyone imagined when he announced his candidacy last summer. In the process, he has unleashed passions that profoundly unsettle me and nearly everyone I know, conservative and liberal alike. We ask ourselves, do we really know our own country? Is bigotry and mean-spiritedness really so popular? Could an authoritarian demagogue really rise to the presidency? Here, in the United States? Time will tell.

I've read dozens of conservative writers make their case against Trump. They are horrified by him. So I can't help but ask, where have they been for the past two decades while the conservative movement has accepted or excused all manner of bigotry and falsehood? When did they confront the proud racism, misogyny, and homophobia of Rush Limbaugh, the apocalyptic paranoia of Glen Beck, and the lies of pseudo-historian David Barton? Where were they when a cable channel full of ignorant pundits stoking racial resentment became conservatism's premier news source? Oh, I guess many of them were too busy making sure they had a seat at the table.

The very same publications that have attacked Trump have also run articles accusing President Obama of purposely destroying America. Marco Rubio has now started saying this! It's no longer enough to say that you disagree with the President. Conspiracy theory has become common sense, and basic facts have become liberal bias. What's the message here? Trump is bad, but Trump-lite is ok?

People are wringing their hands about Trump's bigotry, constant falsehoods, and outlandish rhetoric, as if it's in any way different from what you can hear on talk radio every single day. It's not different. Is it really so surprising that a political figure has emerged to provide conservative voters a choice that echoes the views of their most popular news sources? After conservative elites have refused to say in clear terms that bigotry will not be tolerated, that figures like Rush Limbaugh are not welcome in the party, they are shocked--shocked!--that a candidate is so powerfully channeling the cultural resentment that is Limbaugh's bread and butter.

Many conservative pundits and politicians are acting as though they are not complicit in Trump's rise. But the party has been playing with fire for years. Look at the last two presidential election cycles. The jovial ignorance of Herman Cain. The routinized lying of Michele Bachmann. The cultural resentment and white identity politics of Sarah Palin. All of these unqualified figures were beloved by evangelicals in their moment, and tolerated by party elites. Trump launches a campaign of their greatest hits, and now the party suddenly realizes the downside?

Though Trump is a dangerous man, there is still time for good to come from his rise. It will start with this realization: if you don't like Trump, you actually don't like much of modern American conservatism. This doesn't mean you're not a conservative. It doesn't mean conservatism isn't valuable and absolutely needed. In many ways, I am deeply conservative. I hear the word revolution and I run the other way. Because to be a conservative is to understand that, actually, it could be worse, and change must be implemented carefully because there are always unintended consequences. In many ways--believe me, I'm not trolling, and I don't yet know who I am supporting this year--Hillary Clinton offers a more philosophically conservative vision than do many of the Republican candidates.

I believe Trump's demagoguery will pass and there will be a better and more responsible conservatism in the nation's future. But that might not begin until we face the fact that Trump is not a weed in the garden of contemporary conservatism. He is its fruit.

Comprehensive Exams Update

I'm doing my comprehensive exams this semester. That means procrastination is my familiar friend in these months. Somehow, writing a few thoughts down and clicking publish is easier than opening up my books this morning. Besides, this way I can share a few thoughts on what I'm reading to make it sink deeper into my mind, and still feel like I'm not working. Win win!

But first, what are comps?

I find that the farther along one goes in academic studies, the more confused family and friends are about what is happening. Everyone more or less understands going to college and getting an undergraduate degree. The Masters degree is a little more confusing but it's still basically just a matter of going to classes and writing an extra-long paper. By the time you get to the Phd level, however, people aren't familiar with the process. I'm done with classes, for example, but I'm not even half-way to my Phd. This confuses people. Most of my remaining time will be taken with teaching classes to undergraduates and writing a dissertation (essentially a book, but invariably unpublishable in its dissertation form). But before I can do that, I need to pass my comprehensive exams in May. Basically, this just means that between now and then I will read a bunch of books, and then sit down in a room with three professors to be raked over the coals. Fun!

I have concluded that I can't study for an exam for four months, especially since this isn't anything like what one normally thinks of as an exam. No, my secret sauce for succeeding at comps is to do it for me. I don't mean that in a selfish sense. I just think that if I am to stay sane, it will be because I am reading these books for the love and excitement of learning rather than in hopes of answering a difficult questions months from now. Doing it for the joy of it means letting myself linger over books that I want to linger on, and thinking about connections that have nothing to do with comps: teaching ideas, dissertation possibilities, intersections with articles I'm trying to publish. That's my theory. It'll keep you sane.

Now, my method. I have three book lists (racial identities and ideologies in the twentieth-century U.S., religion in the twentieth-century U.S., and settler colonialism and decolonization). I'm alternating back and forth, doing one book list each week. I'm hoping that will give a sense of coherence to each week, and then the intervening two weeks before I come back to a given list allow ideas to germinate (or lie dormant, as the case may be). I'm using evernote, writing a less than one-page summary of each book, which I find to be extremely helpful. I can print those and read over them in relatively short order, so I have (perhaps naive) hopes of actually remembering the gist of all the books. I figure if I read 10 books a week ("read" in the graduate school sense) I will not fall too far behind and will be in a position to ramp up for a more intense sprint in April. So far, when I think about what I'm learning I really enjoy it. When I think about it being comps, I don't enjoy it. So again, do it for yourself.

So, this week is my first settler colonialism week. I can now say I've read some Frantz Fanon. I haven't finished The Wretched of the Earth, and I may well be misinterpreting him, but I can't accept his ideas about violence and religion. Colonialism, he writes, "is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence." Part of what violence accomplishes, of course, is the liberation of the mind of the colonized. But I don't think such liberation requires violence. I'm struck by the similar terms in which Dr. King described the psychological liberation he believed African Americans achieved through non-violent action. And I am interested to see if Fanon addresses the case of India. I don't know anything about decolonization there, but I'm not sure how it would be interpreted as a case of the colonized meeting violence with greater violence. Still, I understand the appeal of violence and I've written before about the real costs of non-violence.

As for religion, I don't know enough about Fanon to know if he was attacking the liberatory potential of religion as such, or if he was attacking its actual practice in colonial Algeria. I would dispute the more general attack but not the specific one. For example, this seems perceptive and necessary:

The Church in the colonies is a white man's Church, a foreigners' Church. It does not call the colonized to the ways of God, but to the ways of the white man, to the ways of the master, the ways of the oppressor. And as we know, in this story many are called but few are chosen.

Brilliant. But elsewhere, he seems to imply that religion as a rule aides colonial oppression without exception. He talks about the colonized subject taking his (It's always a male subject for Fanon) tensions and frustrations out on his fellows rather than on the oppressor and contends that religion supports this misdirected aggression:

The colonized subject also manages to lose sight of the colonist through religion. Fatalism relieved the oppressor of all responsibility sine the cause of wrong-doing, poverty, and the inevitable can be attributed to God. The individual thus accepts the devastation decreed by God, grovels in front of the colonist, bows to the hand of fate, and mentally readjusts to acquire the serenity of stone.

It's not that this is universally wrong, but it's naive to suggest that this is the way religion functions in the world. Again, from India to the United States, religion during Fanon's life also mobilized "the wretched of the earth" to resist their oppression. Like most everything, humans have found ways to use religion for both good and ill. In other respects, the book is remarkably relevant. It's remarkable how much Fanon's discussion of the colonist and colonized calls to mind the American context of White supremacy, especially if we think of the creation of American ghettos as analogous to colonial rule.

While we're talking about Algeria, another fascinating book this week is Todd Shepard's The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France. Shepard argues that at the moment of Algerian independence French leaders quite suddenly rewrote history so as to make decolonization appear natural and progressive, a vindication of French universalist ideals. In doing so, they obscured the rupture that had actually occurred in the French nation (Algeria was France) and repudiated a colorblind political ideal of French citizenship. To put this more simply, "The Algerian Revolution," Shepard writes, "was at the same time a French revolution," or, even better, a "counterrevolution" in which French identity narrowed and protection of civil liberties declined. Instead of acknowledging this wrenching revolution, the French "invented decolonization." 

This is fascinating. It's probably old-hat to people in the field, but it's new to me. I need to think more about the implications of framing decolonization in this way. Decolonization as revolution or nation-rupturing in the metropole means discarding the idea of decolonization as something that takes place only on the periphery, only among so-called developing peoples. I need to think about how this is all entangled.

Speaking of so-called developing peoples, I also waded through the introduction to Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe.  My understanding is that Chakrabarty believes the language and categories we have for thinking about modernity are embedded in the European past and are in fact inadequate for thinking about modernity in South Asia (and the whole global south for that matter). In short, Europe's present is not the globe's future; there are multiple ways of being modern, and we must cast off the historicist conceit that history is moving from stage to stage toward a certain destination, one that Europe happily arrives at first. Part of what this means, I think, is that our entire popular language about "development" is really messed up. Developed nations, developing nations, or modernizing nations. This kind of talk imports European categories to innacurately describe global realities. I think. Who knows? This book is confuing!

Nonetheless, Chakrabarty said something really fascinating about religion that I think is important. In keeping with the theme of his book, it calls into question European ideas about what is modern, but it also rebukes a lot of historian's conception of what religion is. Here's Chakrabarty:

The second assumption running through modern European political thought and the social science is that the human is ontologically singular, that gods and spirits are in the end "social facts," that the social somehow exists prior to them. I try, on the other hand, to think without the assumption of even a logical priority of the social. One empirically knows of no society in which humans have existed without gods and spirits accompanying them...

I take gods and spirits to be existentially coeval with the human, and think from the assumption that the question of being human involves the question of being with gods and spirits.

I need to read the rest of his book to more clearly see what this means for him in practice, but this seems like a radical rebuke to any kind of Marxist-influenced view of religion.  Now, I completely agree with this, but I agree with it because of my theological beliefs rather than historical training. I'm not sure what it means for historical work. Doesn't it take religion outside the sphere of historical scholarship altogether? I think I'm missing something and need to read the rest of the book to see how he applies this idea.

Let's see...what else? I also read Margaret D. Jacobs' Bancroft Prize-winning book, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940. Utterly fascinating and devastating. Jacobs argues the removal of indigenous children as part of "protection" and "assimilation" policies in late nineteenth and early twentieth century were not more benign practices representing a break from earlier brutal forms of colonization. Instead, they were nation-building policies with the same fundamental goals of earlier policies: the taking of land and the erasure of indigenous identities. 

She pushes hard on the idea that the very presence of indigenous groups represented a threat to the construction the American and Australian nations, and thus historians who have seen a sharp break between earlier overt violence and these ostensibly more humane policies are missing the forest for the trees. And she cleverly shows how women took center-stage in the process of child-removal. Instead of military invasions of land, now white women invaded the intimate indigenous spaces of the home, policing and pathologizing the indigenous body, sexual practices, and child-rearing norms. She makes a convincing case that you can't understand the settler colonial project without understanding how Europeans undermined the gender conventions of indigenous peoples and asserted their own in the name of civilizing, advancing, uplifting. Beneath the rhetoric of saving and civilizing and "making useful" through child removal lay "a bedrock of concerns about defining and building the nation--as white, Christian, and modern."

A possibly more problematic book is Hermann Giliomee's The Afrikaners: Biography of a People.  This is a sprawling book, but for my purposes Giliomee's apartheid arguments are most important. He contends that the decisive turning point in twentieth century South African history was not the National Party's 1948 victory on an apartheid platform, but S. Africa's divisive entry into World War Two as it divided whites along lines of language. He discards the claim that apartheid was driven by Afrikaner populism in the north. Instead, he claims, it was a product of the western Cape. Further, he contends that the ideological roots of apartheid were found not in Nazism but in already established segregation (especially in schools), the white supremacy of the Dutch Reformed Church, American Jim Crow (fascinating! When American hyper-nationalists talk about our grand influence on the world they usually don't acknowledge these kinds of influences), and emerging ideas about indirect rule and social conflict in plural societies. That Afrikaners pursued apartheid even beyond their economic self-interest was due, he contends, not to simple racism but a concern for ethnic and national survival. This sounds reasonable but it also treads some uncomfortable lines. I worry that there is a romanticism to this that is unwarranted, but I don't have the expertise to know. For instance, he frames the Afrikaners as fighters of "the twentieth century's first anti-colonial war" which, in the first place, seems a quirk of timing, and in the second place, not even true. Was the Philippine Republic not fighting an anti-colonial war against the United States at the same time? On the other hand, it is simply true that Afrikaners were both colonized and colonizers, as he puts it, and that tension can be uncomfortable to explore.

But wait! What is settler colonialism? I should have mentioned this book first: Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices, Legacies is a collection of essays edited by Caroline Elkins and Susan Pederson. In the introduction they introduce a typology for twentieth century settler colonialism, setting it apart from earlier forms and from settler projects and settler states. Their argument: twentieth century settler colonialism was defined by a four-way negotiation for power, and the institutionalization of settler privilege. The four groups contesting the governance of the settler colony were the metropole, local administration, indigenous population, and the settler community. The typology distinguishes between settler colonies with high and low institutionalization of settler privilege, and high and low levels of settler incorporation into governance, thus creating four quadrants. Rhodesia, for example, was high in both variables, while Korea was low in both dimensions. This typology allows for easily understanding comparison of similarities and differences across settler colonies around the world.

They're also careful to distinguish twentieth-century settler colonialism from earlier forms. Elkins and Pederson urge us to consider pre-twentieth century settler colonialism in countries like Australia and the United States not as a stage of historical development but as an organizing principle of the states founded by it. Drawing here on Patrick Wolfe, they write, "Settler colonialism, then, is not the past--a violent but thankfully brief period of conquest and domination--but rather the foundational governing ethic of this 'new world' state." Yet the twentieth century cases discussed in the book are quite different from those earlier and extremely successful forms of settler colonialism. In every twentieth century case, the indigenous population was larger, and the influence of the metropole stronger. Twentieth century settler colonial societies were more fragile, and only in the case of Israel did they produce a successful nation-building project.

Ok, I think I'm ready to get to work now. 

A Few Things for Christians to Keep in Mind When We Vote

Little-known fact: Jesus would make a horrible president.

Presidential primary season is upon us. Around this time every four years, Christians on both the left and the right engage in a lot of motivated reasoning to explain why their political ideology is the most appropriate expression of Christian values in our American democracy. Perhaps this post isn't so different from all the others, but I'd like to think it is at least a little bit. I have three simple thoughts that it seems to me ought to help inform our vote. You might come up with a different list, but I'm increasingly struck by the extent to which our political system runs on the values of self-interest, nationalism, and incumbent wealth. I emphasize these three factors not for their comprehensiveness, but for the dearth of attention paid to them. Because these issues cut across partisan boundaries and structure the very terms of political debate, they are often overlooked. Too often, we rush into partisan debate without realizing that the mainstream positions of both parties are troubling.

Each party in its own way appeals to the following values that are, at best, irrelevant to the life Jesus invites Christians to discover. 

1) Self-interest. This is the most basic form of political appeal. Candidate A says her policies will benefit you more than those of candidate B. This kind of appeal should not move Christians in the least. It is not enough to start from self-interest and then produce rationalizations explaining that the interests of others mysteriously align with yours.

2) Nationalism. Both parties, the Democrats in their diplomatic way and the Republicans in their more militaristic tone, assure voters that they will do whatever it takes to protect the national interest. But Christianity has nothing to do with nationalism. Imagined solidarities based on the modern nation-state have no bearing on the valuation of human beings in the kingdom of God. Any hint that, say, an Iranian life is less valuable than an American one is heretical to Christians. It is not enough to start from nationalism and then produce rationalizations that what is best for the U.S. happens to be best for the world.

3) Incumbent wealth. Both parties go out of their way to emphasize their determination to protect and promote the interests of those who are already successful. Whether it is the Democrats talking incessantly about the middle class or the Republicans praising job creators, both parties try to avoid talking too much about the social and economic groups about which Christianity is most concerned: the poor and marginalized. It is not enough to start from middle-classness and only then come up with rationalizations for why what's best for the wealthy will somehow be best for the poor.

Some will read this as vulgar emotionalism. Don't I know that democracy, though it thrives on self-interest, is the best form of government we've managed to find in this broken world? Don't I know that the nation-state is a bulwark of protection in dangerous times? Don't I know that middle-class success really is crucial for the alleviation of poverty?

These are complicated issues. But I emphasize what we Christians don't seem to know well enough: that the entire ethic of the Kingdom of God challenges the most taken-for-granted allegiances and structures of the modern world. So when--or, indeed, if--we walk into the voting both, my hope is that we will do so with a substantially more subversive frame of mind than we have thus far imagined.

People Are Right to Boycott the Oscars

Some Black artists have chosen to boycott the Oscars after the major award categories featured all-White nomination slates. It is not as though there was a deficit of great Black performances this year, and their exclusion from the awards stage is part of a broader decades-long pattern of discrimination. So the decision to boycott the event is entirely appropriate. But talk of a boycott is producing predictable hand-wringing and questions about the supposed threat to the integrity of the Oscars and of film artistry in general.

"What are the Oscars to do?
 Lower standards?
 Set an artificial quota for films featuring people of color?
 Are we to have affirmative action in movie awards now!!??
 Political correctness!!!!"

Implicit in these questions and complaints is the confident but completely unfounded belief that the Oscars reflect meritocratic achievement. The controversy brings into sharp focus the extent to which White success is coded in our society as earned and natural, even if there is little evidence to support these claims. It is hard to imagine that the people loudly insisting race has nothing to do with this would be so sanguine in a world where Oscar Voters were 94% Black. But here in our real world where they are 94% White, it is obviously inconsequential. By the way, there's nothing sinister or mysterious about this kind of discrimination. The notion that your identity will affect how you experience a film and identify with its characters is too obvious to be seriously denied. But this is, in effect, exactly what defenders of the Oscars do deny.

It is telling that so many people see a challenge to White dominance and Black exclusion as an attack on a meritocracy. Instead of appealing for inclusion of people of color using the language of individual achievement and hard-earned merit, we must expose how the fiction of meritocracy hides the reality of unearned White advantage.

Let's zoom out from movies and think about what we know of the broader structures of opportunity in American society: we know that Whites have race-based unearned advantages in getting jobs and promotions and benefit from network effects. We know that people of color, particularly African Americans, are widely discriminated against in the job market. We also know that discrimination and inequality in education, health, policing, and housing leave many young people of color less prepared for the job market in the first place. We know that these dynamics of unearned advantage and discrimination overwhelm the effects of affirmative action policies. Thus we know that, in the aggregate, successful White individuals are more likely to owe their success to their racial identities than are successful Black individuals. We know this. There's nothing mysterious about it. If we allow ourselves to linger on this point, we will see how dramatically the meritocratic screen distorts our perceptions.

Think about it: though successful Whites are the most likely to experience unearned advantaged based on race, their achievements are most associated with merit, hard work, and earned success. In contrast, achievements of people of color are associated with affirmative action and political correctness. The point is not that people of color never benefit from affirmative action; it is that whites continue to gain far more from our racialized society even as their success is coded as raceless. The idea of meritocracy is deployed in defense of the very group that least exemplifies it.

To be clear, I think it is uncharitable to view any person's success in cynical terms of earned or unearned. On an individual level, few people find great success without putting in a lot of hard work. But the suspicion that attaches itself to Black success ("he's only there because of affirmative action"), would, if applied with any consistency, render White success even more suspicious.