By Christian Parenti

Posted June 2, 2021

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(Reprinted from Nonsite, (nonsite.org) under Creative Commons License). Originally published July 9, 2020

In the United States, the police kill African Americans at a rate that is about 100 percent greater, or two times, 200 percent, their proportion of the national population. In 2016, black people were 24 percent of those killed by cops, in 2015 they were 27 percent of such victims, but in both years black people were only 13 percent of the national population. (1) These outrageous disparities have very correctly triggered a nationwide rebellion.

But where do these racial disparities actually take place?

Amidst this moment of reckoning the South, cast as the cradle of racism, seems to come in for special criticism. Antebellum Southern slave patrols are regularly name-checked as an origin of American policing. Confederate monuments are toppling, as they should. NASCAR banned the Confederate flag. A Nation writer decried “stupid” Southerners for flouting social distancing at a bacchanalian redneck vehicle jamboree on the beaches of Galveston, Texas. A Washington Post columnist asked rhetorically if Donald Trump wasn’t actually the last president of the Confederacy. And, let’s admit it, most of the country thinks of the South as profoundly backward.

Given this vibe one might be surprised by the actual regional demographics of police killings. What follows is a very preliminary, incomplete, back-of-the-napkin sketch of data on police killings. My main source on police killings is the Guardian’s Counted Project. Economic and demographic data come from the U.S. Census, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), and the Kaiser Family Foundation. I am rounding numbers with decimals up and down. For a discussion of the sources used see the first two footnotes. (2)

The South

Let’s start with Tennessee, the state that gave birth to the Ku Klux Klan. It seems reasonable to assume that the cops in Tennessee kill African Americans at a disproportionately high rate.

In 2016, police in Tennessee killed 25 people. Of these, nineteen, or 76 percent of the total, were white. Meanwhile, whites were 78 percent of the state’s total population. Tennessee police killed three black people, which was 12 percent of the total. However, African Americans were 17 percent of the state’s total population.

In other words, African Americans were, relative to their proportion of the state’s total population, actually 29 percent “underrepresented” in the stats on police killings. White people were 2 percent underrepresented in the police homicide stats.

Thus, Tennessee cops actually killed whites at a higher rate than they killed black people even as both whites and blacks were “underrepresented” in the police homicide stats. Latinos and Pacific Islanders each suffered one police homicide, and because they make up small percentages of the state’s population, were “overrepresented” in the police stats.

In Kentucky the cops killed 22 people. Of this total nineteen, or 86 percent, were white. The state’s population, as a whole, was 87 percent white. Two of the Kentuckians killed by cops that year were black, meaning they were 9 percent of the casualties. Meanwhile, African Americans were 8 percent of the state’s total population. One of the victims of Kentucky police homicide was Latino.

This means white people were slightly underrepresented among those killed by police while Latinos and African Americans were overrepresented relative to their proportion of the state’s population. But the black victims of police homicide in Kentucky were 12 percent overrepresented, not 100 percent overrepresented as they are in the national stats.

What about the Deep South where a greater percentage of the population is black? For example, take Mississippi—it doesn’t get any more “Deep South” than Mississippi.

In 2016, cops in Mississippi killed eleven people: six, or 55 percent, of these were white and five, or 45 percent, were black. The state’s population was 59 percent white and 37 percent black. This means Mississippi cops killed black people at a rate 49 percent higher than their prevalence in the state’s total population. Thus, we can say Mississippi displays a racist pattern as regards police killings. But it is only half as racist as the national numbers.

In Louisiana, cops also killed black people at disproportionately higher rates than they kill white people. African Americans were twelve of the 22 people killed by police. They were 32 percent of Louisiana’s population but were 54 percent of those killed by police in 2016. That ratio gets closer, but is not all the way, to the national aggregate numbers.

Florida is also closer to, but not at, the national average. In the Sunshine State African Americans were 16 percent of the population yet constituted 25 percent of those killed by cops in 2016. Cops in Florida thus killed African Americans at a rate that was 56 percent greater than the African-American percentage of the state population.

In Georgia cops killed thirty people in 2016. African Americans, being 17 of these victims but only 31 percent of the population, were 19 percent overrepresented. Latinos were 17 percent of police homicide victims but only 9 percent of the population and were thus almost 100 percent overrepresented. Whites on the other hand were 28 percent underrepresented in such stats, being only 43 percent of those killed by cops despite constituting 60 percent of the state population.

However, if we cross the Savannah River into South Carolina, the state that started the Civil War, the patterns change. In 2016 Palmetto State cops killed eighteen people. Of this total, four (or 22 percent) were African American even as they constituted 28 percent of the state population. This meant black people were 27 percent underrepresented in the police homicide stats. White victims of police homicide numbered fourteen (or 78 percent of the total) even as whites were only 67 percent of South Carolina’s population.

In other words, white South Carolinians were 16 percent overrepresented in the police homicide stats and they were significantly more likely to be killed by cops than were black South Carolinians.

I could go on with similarly weird and counterintuitive Southern examples but I will spare readers the jumble of numbers.

So then, where do cops kill black people most disproportionately?

Yankeedom 

One of the worst offenders as regards the disproportionate killing of black people—that is to say, the state with some of the most anti-black cops in the country—is liberal Massachusetts.

The Bay State—which during the Civil War produced the ultra-heroic, all-black 54th Regiment about which the fantastic film Glory was made—has police that kill black people at five times, or 500 percent the rate at which black people appear in the state’s total population. No wonder people joke about “up South in Boston.”

In 2016, police in Massachusetts killed fourteen people: five were white, five were black, and four were Latino.

White people are 79 percent of the population but only 35 percent of those killed by cops, and were thus 56 percent underrepresented in the police homicide stats.

Massachusetts police also kill Latinos at a very high rate. Latinos were 11 percent of the state population in 2016, but they were 28 percent of those killed by police. Thus, Massachusetts Latinos showed up in the police killing stats at a rate of 254 percent their proportion of the state’s total population, or 154 percent greater than the Latino share of the population.

The key number, however, is this: Only 7 percent of Massachusetts’s residents are black, yet they constituted 35 percent of people killed by cops. African Americans therefore appear in Massachusetts police homicide stats at five times the rate, or with 400 percent greater frequency, than do they appear in the state’s total population count. Now we are beginning to see where the national average comes from.

Illinois has a similar profile. In 2016 Illinois cops killed 29 people: nine of them (or 31 percent of the total) were white, while 61 percent of the state’s total population was white. Latinos were 27 percent of those killed by cops despite being only 17 percent of the state’s population.

Illinois cops also killed seventeen black people, (or 58 percent of the total) even as black people were only 14 percent of the state’s total population. In other words, during 2016 Illinois cops killed African Americans at a rate four times (or 314 percent greater than) the black percentage of the population.

Similarly, in Minnesota, cops kill black people at three times their prevalence in the state’s total population: 6 percent of the population versus 21 percent of those killed by cops. In New York police kill black people at three times their proportion of the population: they are only 16 percent of the population but constitute 48 percent of those killed by cops. In Michigan police kill African Americans at a rate about 2.5 times their share of the state population; they are 14 percent of the population but 37 percent of those killed by cops.

Moving west, the cops show anti-black racism in their patterns of killing but not to the level of what we see in the Northeast and Midwest. California fits the northern pattern. Cops killed black people at more than three times their share of the population. But Western police racism, expressed as lethal violence, falls most heavily on Latinos and Native Americans. Measured on a per capita basis no other racial or ethnic group comes near experiencing the appalling level of police violence meted out to Native Americans.

To be fair to the police of Greater Yankeedom, in general, they kill less often than do Southern or Western cops.

The Racialization of Poverty North and South

Why is Northern policing so disproportionately racist? In 1831 Tocqueville noted the peculiar vehemence of Yankee racism: “slavery recedes, but the prejudice to which it has given birth remains stationary…. prejudice of the race appears to be stronger in the States which have abolished slavery, than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those States where servitude has never been known.” (3)

This Northern prejudice often produced state constitutions that simultaneously outlawed slavery and prohibited African Americans settlement. Ohio, for example, outlawed slavery in its original 1802 constitution. But it also aggressively barred black immigration and enforced the ban with mob violence.

Northern tier states were also the first to pass eugenic forced-sterilization laws. By 1926 most Northern states had such laws but none of the Southern states did.

I suspect that modern patterns of “racialized” poverty, which is to say the racial demographics of poverty, does much to explain Northern police racism. Keep in mind, much of what police do is harass the visibly and “disorderly” poor. Disorderly frequently comes down to doing things in public that, if you had more money, you would do in private: drinking, smoking, buying and selling, yelling, arguing, disrobing, sitting down, and sleeping. (4)

The racism of Northern police also has something to do with the more “racialized” nature of poverty in the North as compared to the South. In the North, people of color tend to be heavily overrepresented in the ranks of the poor, whereas in the South there are higher rates of poverty and more of the white population is very poor. One crude way we see this is comparing the relative gap between white and black poverty rates in the North and South.

In the South the black poverty rate is typically about twice as high as the white poverty rate. But in most of the northern-tier states the black poverty rate is three times as high as the white poverty rate. (5) This is not because black people are necessarily wealthier in the South, though the highest black poverty rates do cluster in the north, but rather because there are more poor white people in the South. (6)

The U.S. Census defines four major regions: Northeast, Midwest, South, and West. Of these, the South has the lowest median household income; it also has “the largest share of counties with high income inequality.” The South remains the region with the lowest median wages, (7) has “maintained the highest rates of poverty over the past 40 years,” and has “the largest share of Americans living in poverty of all regions.” Food insecurity is highest in the South. It has the highest adult and infant mortality rates and the greatest prevalence of illnesses like cardiovascular disease, obesity, and HIV/AIDS. Southerners suffer higher occurrences of occupational fatalities, and the South has many of the highest rates of incarceration. (8)

The Political Economy of North and South

The South, from the settling of Jamestown onward, has always been home to a large population of poor whites. The South was intentionally designed to be a land of gentlemen and servants. This plan, if you will, shaped southern land distribution. Huge lots were given to rich men, while very little was made available to the common classes. The Yankee north, despite its many faults, pursued an intentionally more equal distribution of land. These divergent sectional settlement patterns had profound and long-term consequences for later economic development.

This sectional difference in land disposal patterns meant that the South never developed a large class of independent small farmers, whereas that class predominated in the North. As Charles Post has shown in his book The American Road to Capitalism, it was from this stratum of family farmers that American industrial capitalism emerged. During the nineteenth century, these small farmers, increasingly subject to market competition and price signals, began specializing and mechanizing. As subsistence production declined, production for sale increased. As it did, consumption increasingly depended on purchasing commodities with money in markets. Through it all the capitalist division of labor deepened, commodification and what Marx called “real subsumption” spread. With class struggle, in the form of growing unionization and then with the New Deal, the wealth produced by Northern industrialization, even as it made robber barons rich, also helped reinforce older Northern patterns of a more widespread, if modest, prosperity.

In the Slave South, several factors blunted this process. The extremely uneven land holding of the South limited the rise of a class of innovating, increasingly market-oriented small farmers. Uneven land distribution also translated into a lower population density and fewer cities, which meant smaller, less competitive markets. And as John Majewski explains in Modernizing a Slave Economy, weak and acidic soils, which are easily depleted by mono-cropping, encouraged the use of “shifting cultivation,” which in turn further reenforced the pattern of large land holdings, low population density, and class inequality.

Slavery also hindered economic development and industrialization because slaves were a fixed cost that had to be utilized even when not working on the cash crops. Because slaves could not be fired like free workers, slave owners needed to maximize their use of slave labor. This disincentivized and undermined the use of labor-saving equipment, resupply through markets, and the outsourcing of tasks to commercial specialists (like blacksmiths or carpenters). Put simply, instead of buying cheap, well produced bacon on emerging commercial markets supplied by small innovating farmers, slaveowners were incentivized to make their slaves raise hogs when they were not raising cotton. Thus even as slaves produced cash crops for export and plantations ran with capitalistic tools of efficiency, like modern account books, the fixed costs of slavery also encouraged nonmonetized production for use. This meant that in the South a smaller portion of production was governed by the law of value, and what Joseph Schumpeter called capitalism’s “gales of creative destruction.”

With large parts of the population (slaves) consuming little and producing much of what they consumed in a non-monetized, production-for-use fashion, even small yeoman farmers who might have innovated and mechanized along capitalist lines, were for lack of markets effectively held back and stuck in a twilight economy that was capitalist but still heavily governed by the slow logic of production for use. Thus southern industrialization and capitalist “expanded reproduction” were thwarted.

In Slavery and Freedom, James Oakes summarized how slavery underdeveloped the South as follows: “Slavery hindered technological innovation even where its profitability depended on the latest techniques for processing and transportation. It slowed the growth of cities and industry, hampered the growth of a consumer market, reduced the flow of savings, and promoted soil exhaustion and demographic instability by dampening interest in long-term improvements on the land.” (9)

In the South the pattern of economic development was about cash-crop exports and later also resource extraction. This pattern of economic development reenforced the region’s tremendous class inequality. In the words of the Southern chronicler J.W. Cash, this made the South a society of “Big Men and Little Men, with strict reference to property, power, and the claim to gentility.” (10)

As a result of the South’s tremendous class inequality, the region’s demographics of poverty have long been less racially skewed than in the North.

In her fine book Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, Keri Leigh Merritt shows that poor, landless whites constituted a full third (some have said one half) of the population of the U.S. South! (11) To be clear these were not the hardscrabble small farmers. Rather these were a semi-itinerate, rural Lumpenproletariat, who owned no land and instead lived by occasional day labor, grazing hogs, gathering herbs, cutting wood for sale, stealing, poaching, making and selling liquor, fencing stolen goods, and prostitution. Prone to binge drinking, violence and cavorting with both free and enslaved African Americans (even as they were known for their loudly professed hostility to black people), these poor whites were by most accounts often genuinely dangerous. The planter class hated them. So too, it seems, did much of the smallholding yeomanry.

Prior to emancipation, slavery being the system that controlled most African Americans in the South, both extrajudicial mob violence and formal criminal justice were largely targeted at controlling this class of poor white Southerners.

Even today, in most Southern states the demographic distribution of poverty more closely tracks the overall demographic profile of the state than do poverty rates in the North. (12) Of the states with the top ten highest white poverty rates all except for Idaho and New Mexico had been part of the Confederacy.

Making of the Yankee Ghetto

Concentrations of black poverty in the Northern states that once banned black settlement is the result of the racist articulation of deindustrialization and urban renewal. The Great Migration, that is the large-scale relocation of African Americans from the rural South to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West, began with the industrial boom of World War I. Pulled north by the lure of jobs, higher wages, and greater freedom, the migrants were also pushed north by the hard times brought on by the increasing mechanization of Southern agriculture, and by the despotism of Jim Crow segregation and lynch-law terror. Roughly six million black people moved north before the migration subsided around 1970.

The greatest part of this wave happened from World War II until 1970. But African Americans arrived in the land of industrial democracy and upward mobility just as that political economy began a process of radical restructuring driven by automation and then industrial relocation. Almost as soon as African Americans established themselves in Northern industrial occupations and cities, deindustrialization and racist slum clearance began.

As Thomas Sugrue shows in The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, industrial employment in Motor City actually peaked in 1950, a full three decades before “deindustrialization” became a sociological watchword. As unionized industrial employment shrank, so too did the service sectors. According to Sugrue, black workers actually continued to move up the wage and skill ladder even as deindustrialization took hold. But this hardly made up for a shrinking regional economy and rising class inequality at a national scale.

Just as industrial employment was peaking, federally subsidized “slum clearance” and highway construction programs began reshaping Northern and Western cities. Coupled with suburbanization along racist lines, these developments increasingly forced black people into de facto segregated and underinvested communities. As businesses and middle-class whites left the urban core, municipal tax bases shrank, services and employment suffered, and concentrations of black poverty became defining features of the Northern-tier rustbelt.

The rustbelt geography became that of the doughnut city, with the African Americans’ deindustrialized core surrounded by autonomous, and for a long time de facto white, segregated suburbs.

The Modern Low-Wage South

Meanwhile, poverty in the U.S. South remained and remains widespread. This is revealed in the disproportionally high percentage of its population working for low wages. In 2016 the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the “states with the highest percentages of hourly paid workers earning at or below the federal minimum wage” were: Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and (one western outlier) Idaho. (13)

That year saw 2.2 million Americans working for wages at or below the federal minimum. Fully 49 percent of these workers worked in the South. These low-wage workers were predominately women. White women and people of color of all genders were (and still are) disproportionately represented in low-wage work. However, in absolute numbers, low-paid workers as a whole, were and are predominately white. The BLS reports that 74 percent of workers making wages “at or below the federal minimum” are white. (About 10 percent of that number are likely white Latinos but the BLS does not disaggregate in that fashion.) Thus white people work low-wage jobs in proportion to their share of the population. African Americans, at 18 percent of this workforce, are overrepresented. Latinos and Asians are each slightly underrepresented among low-wage workers. Thus for every African American working for the federal minimum wage or less there are four white workers in the same position, and, although the BLS does not offer numbers for race and region together, we can assume that most of both groups are in the South. (14) In other words there are lots of poor white people in the South, and this probably helps explain why white people are killed at a higher rate in the south than in the north, and that, in turn, helps explain why black people so disproportionally show up in the northern police killing stats.

Conclusion

One clear takeaway from all these numbers is that Northern liberals—after all, they run most Northern city governments—should not feel too terribly smug when surveying the South, or applauding symbolic victories over racism, because very material forms of racism unfold up North on their watch and these are rooted not only in police prejudice but regional political economy and industrial policy. Transforming those “root causes” would be a massive though not impossible task. It would require challenging the prerogatives of capital; that is, confronting actual capitalists, i.e., campaign donors. That is a daunting prospect. And so, the liberal political class prefers progressive cultural change, renaming and redecorating, to the harder job of progressive economic change. Because, in the grand scheme of things, symbols are cheap.

Notes

1,  According to the Guardian’s much-lauded Counted Project—which is perhaps the most thorough and easily used database ever created on the not well tracked issue of police homicides—in 2016 police killed 1093 people of whom 266 (or 24 percent) were black. In 2015, cops killed 1146 people of whom 307 (or 27 percent) were black. African Americans were only 13 percent of the country’s total population in both 2016 and 2015. Thus, in 2016 police killed black people with a frequency equal to 185 percent of the black proportion (or percentage) of the total US population. While the year before cops killed black people with a frequency equal to 207 percent of the black proportion of the U.S. population. Thus let’s average the defense and say police disproportionately killed African Americans at twice, or two times the rate, or in proportions 100 percent greater than the 13 percent, that is the black portion of the U.S. total population.

2, The numbers discussed below are taken from the following sources: The Guardian’s Counted Project, which tabulated police killings in 2015 and 2016. For simplicity I am using only data for 2016. Numbers on the demographic distribution of state populations come from U.S. Census population estimates for 2016. For the categories white and African American I use numbers from the census category called “one race.” But in 2016 the Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics gave Latinos their own separate category, so when discussing Latinos I use that category even though this means there is some overlap between “Latino” and the only “one race” categories of white and African American and Asian. As one charmingly absurd and telling BLS footnote put it: “Estimates for the above race groups—white, black or African American, and Asian—do not sum to totals because data are not presented for all races. Persons whose ethnicity is identified as Hispanic or Latino may be of any race.” For the demographics of low-wage workers, I use data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In all cases, I have rounded the numbers down for decimals of 0.5 or below, and rounded up for 0.6 and greater.

3. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy In America (1831), https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/de-tocqueville/democracy-america/ch18.htm.

4. In this regard the recently cancelled reality television show Cops was instructive. For lack of bank robberies, hostage negotiations, car chases, and shootouts, Cops mostly portrayed police officers telling pathetic and inebriated poor people (a lot of them white) to dump out their booze, handover their crack pipes, and explain where the fifty bucks in cash came from. The show was, despite its ideological zeal, prosaically honest.

5. For details on this reader can compare the white and black poverty rates on the Kaiser Family Foundation website page called “Poverty Rate by Race/Ethnicity.” I used the timeframe 2016.

6.  See the Kaiser Family Foundation website, the interactive database on their page called “Poverty Rate by Race/Ethnicity.”

7.  See Governing magazine’s ranking of states by wages as calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Of the seventeen states with the lowest wages, fourteen are Southern and the other three are Western. Only Virginia has median wages above the national average and that is thanks in large part to Northern Virginia’s wealthy suburbs, which are part of the high-wage Washington D.C. Metro area. “Median Wages by State,” Governing, May 2016, http://www.governing.com/gov-data/wage-average-median-pay-data-for-states.html.

8. Regina Smalls Baker, “Poverty and Place in the Context of the American South” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 2015), 1–3. The South, as defined by the U.S. Census, is made up of the states of the old Confederacy, plus Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, and Oklahoma, which, during the Civil War, was one territory.

9. James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1990), 37.

10. J.W. Cash, The Mind of the South, (New York: Random Books, 1941), 33.

11.  Keri Leigh Merritt, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

12. See “Percentage of People in Poverty by State Using 2- and 3-Year Averages: 2013–2014 and 2015–2016.” For a clearer display of states ranked by poverty rate, see “Interrelationships of 3-Year Average State Poverty Rates: 2014–2016,” https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2017/demo/p60-259.html.

13. “Characteristics of minimum wage workers, 2016,” BLS Reports Report #1067 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Washington DC, April 2017), 2.

14. “Characteristics of minimum wage workers, 2016” BLS Reports Report #1067 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Washington DC, April 2017

https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2016/home.html

Christian Parenti is an assistant clinical professor in New York University’s Global Liberal Studies Program. He has published four books, the most recent being, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (Nation Books, 2011). Parenti has reported extensively from Afghanistan, Iraq, and various parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America; his articles have appeared in The Nation, Fortune, The London Review of Books, The New York Times, and Jacobin.

By Curtis Price

May 9, 2021

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Sick From Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction by Jim Downs (Oxford University Press, 2015

According to popular image, the end of slavery was an era of liberation, a happy ending to a bitter war, with jubilant ex-slaves embracing and flourishing under new freedoms denied in the regime of Southern chattel slavery. In this absorbing and well-documented book, Jim Downs questions this interpretation.

 The same troops that sung “John Brown’s Body” on marches, when confronted first-hand with disease and illness among slaves, closed down the informal settlements that had formed on the perimeter of Union camps, forcing newly free slaves away from Army bases.  Sometimes Union soldiers kidnapped escaped slaves and sold them back to their former masters. This continued after the war ended with military and Freedmen’s Bureau officials, obsessed with black bodies only as a source of labor, entering freedmen camps and communities, removing able-bodied men and shipping them to work on distant plantations.  (1)

As Downs notes, “many free slaves died once they secured refuge behind Union camps. Even after the war ended, they continually struggled to survive in a region torn apart by disease and destruction.”  (2) To Harriet Jacobs, a northern aid worker comforting sick freewomen surrounded by the dead and dying in Washington, D.C., wrote how their eyes seemed to cry: “is this freedom?” (3)

These conditions continued in the post-war period, when the Freedmen’s Bureau set up by Northern authorities, prioritized ex-slave health only as a means to get ex-slaves to return to the fields they had just fled. The objective of the Freedmen’s Bureau Medical Division was to support the emerging free labor system in the South and, by restoring workers’ health, return the region to productivity while avoiding “dependency” on government largesse.

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Toward the end of the Civil War, thousands of slaves abandoned plantations and escaped behind Union lines, what W.E.B. DuBois famously labeled “a general strike” against the plantation system. But they arrived sick and famished, having trekked great distances, and at considerable personal cost. Their forced mobility, always on the run, meant that freedmen lost community ties, ties that had nourished slaves throughout slavery’s harsh regimens.

As the collapse of the Confederacy accelerated, in large part because of a refusal – the second, yet unacknowledged general strike of the Civil War – by Confederate draftees to fight “a rich man’s war,” kinship bonds among slaves further eroded and families were thrown on their own resources. Medical care that slaves had gotten on plantations or through informal systems of folk medicine within the slave community vanished.

Although a sense of personal and collective agency had helped slaves flee bondage, the other side of the coin that hasn’t gotten attention, as Downs points out, is that ex-slaves faced obstacles “that could not be defeated, no matter how willing or independent they may have been.” Ex-slaves confronted multiple biological crises – the need of bodies for nourishment, shelter, and respite from illness – that even the keenest sense of autonomy could not vanquish. (4)

The Union army had neither the resources nor the political will to address this onslaught of mass suffering. To Union commanders, the presence of so many sick and debilitated slaves hindered war efforts. The Emancipation Proclamation carried no clauses governing Northern armies’ responsibilities towards escapees nor any funding to address their plight, in large part because the Emancipation Proclamation was conceived in narrow strategic terms as an economic weapon undermining the South’s plantation work force, not as a measure promoting social or human rights for African-Americans. (5)

The Union army saw escaped slaves only as a potential source of extra man-power for the war, to relieve grunt work falling on white Northern soldiers. Able-bodied male slaves either signed on voluntarily or were forced to enlist for rations and shelter. Sometimes raids were conducted in camps and freedmen’s communities (a practice that continued, although reduced, during the post-war period with a few local representatives of the Freedmen’s Bureau.)

Women, children, the elderly, sick and disabled presented a special problem. In the eyes of Union commanders, sick slaves, women and children hindered mobility and used up scarce resources.  At times, escaped slaves were viewed only for their monetary value as chattel, such as when General Benjamin Butler wrote that “… more than $60,000 worth of them had come in” in describing an influx of escaped slaves behind Union lines.  Old slave pens from chattel days were re-opened by Northern troops as holding areas for escaped “contraband.” (6)

Without warning, Army officials sometimes suddenly broke up slave encampments, even after promising safety, and scattered escaped slaves elsewhere, even if this meant their risk of death from starvation or the spread of infectious diseases. Slaves, as Downs points out in his description of one slave family’s ordeals, “did not die from complicated medical illnesses or unknown diseases, they died because they did not have basic necessities.” (7)

The Army and, later, Freedmen’s Bureau officials wanted local authorities to take on responsibility for the welfare of ex-slaves, but local officials refused. Hostile to Emancipation, local officials in the South saw slaves as traitors getting their just deserts for abandoning the plantation. Ex-slaves were taunted over what they had lost from rejecting “benevolent” masters.  Many Southern officials found an opt-out by declaring since former slaves were never legally constituted as citizens, they were ineligible for local aid. (8)

This resistance to treating the medical conditions or providing basic social services of ex-slaves was a permanent feature of Southern official response from the end of the Civil War through Reconstruction – and beyond. To make matters worse, crop failures and drought swept through a South destroyed by war in the years after war’s end, making slaves’ survival even more precarious as available resources went to whites first.

Reacting to ground-level reports of the growing plight of emancipated slaves, the Federal government felt forced to act, setting up the Freedmen’s Bureau as a temporary stop-gap to assist desperate slaves’ entry into the new world of free labor. The Medical Division of the Freedmen’s Bureau, one of several sub-departments of the Bureau, each tackling an aspect of ex-slave welfare, was established by the War Department. The Medical Division built over 40 hospitals to tend to freemen’s health and hired over a hundred doctors. But these measures were just a drop in the bucket in proportion to the growing need. Very quickly, the hospitals became de facto poor houses, providing housing, food and clothing to emaciated ex-slaves.

Contributing to high death rates among ex-slaves were the racialized concepts of African health that dominated U.S. medicine in the Civil War era. Because slaves were wrongly seen as immune to malaria because of their African heritage, malaria cases among black troops, for instance, were ignored. Northern doctors sent to practice in Medical Division hospitals thought people of African ancestry had weaker constitutions than whites and thus when fell sick were either under-treated or outright ignored.  Some Northern Medical Division doctors, even when sent, refused to treat freedmen. Charles Cox, an Illinois Democrat congressman speaking in opposition to the Freedmen’s Bureau legislation, no doubt spoke for many in the North when he said, “no government farming system, no charitable black scheme can wash out the color of the negro, change his inferior nature or save him from his inevitable fate.” (9 )

The passage of the Freedmen’s Bureau bill led to a drop-off in involvement of Abolitionist Benevolent groups as former activists felt – wrongly, as it turns out – that the Federal government was now taking over work that had previously been done voluntarily by Northern abolitionist groups. Aid workers remained, but were sidelined and their observations ignored. At no point was any opportunity given by Northern authorities to freedmen to define their own needs. The anecdotes of suffering supplied by abolitionists were quickly replaced by the cold, impersonal calculus of raw numbers with no names attached.

The newly changed status from slave to freedmen needing to making their way as workers in a free labor economy meant that health benefits that were formerly provided on the plantation now had to be introduced into individual labor contracts – if offered at all. Often the costs were too high for freedmen to pay from their meager wages, so health benefits stayed unused as new employers – often the same slave owners as before – now transferred the costs of reproduction to workers in accordance with the principles of the free labor system.

President Andrew Johnson, hostile to the Freedmen’s Bureau from the start, was determined to reinstate the old system of labor control inherited from slavery with power now shunted to employers. To Johnson, all Bureau activities cultivated a culture of “dependency” that had to be tenaciously fought.

 Instead of taking up care of freedmen, however, the ex-slave owners ignored their plight, leaving the stench of rotting bodies hanging in the air as corpses piled up in city streets. In Chattanooga, for instance, one Army official wrote that freed slaves were “dying by scores – that sometimes thirty per day dies & are carried out by wagon loads, without coffins, and thrown promiscuously, like brutes, into a trench.” (10)

O.O. Howard, then head of the Bureau, ignored Johnson and set up medical facilities anyway. But even Howard bucking the system was done with a commitment to the same goals. As Howard wrote, “the negro should understand that he is really free, but on no account, if able to work, should he harbor the thought that the Government will support him in idleness.” (11) When confronted with rising numbers demanding help, Howard concluded the problem was not unmet needs but instead a dangerous trend toward permanent dependence on state intervention.

(DuBois, in Black Reconstruction only mentions the Medical Division in passing but cites success stories such as the death rate among ex-slaves being reduced from 30% to 2.03%. Dubois couldn’t have been aware that the Medical Division’s statistics should be treated as suspect, inflated to make the Division’s work appear more successful than it was.)

This, of course, was done to justify winding-down services and proving to Congress that the war against “dependency” had been won.  Federal Reconstruction officials as a whole needed to paint for Northern public opinion optimistic pictures of a booming South. To this end, Northern journalists were given tours touting the South’s rebirth under Northern tutelage, tours that showed happy freedmen working in fields and masked mounting black suffering offstage.) (12)

In many rural areas, where need was the greatest, overworked Division doctors lacked both time and resources to comply with the Division’s onerous bureaucratic reporting standards, leading to case undercounts. In the countryside, many ex-slaves died anonymous, unrecorded deaths from illness and starvation in bushes and forests without ever encountering a Medical Division doctor.

Yet even at their height, Medical Division hospitals could only treat an average of 20 patients at a time. Sometimes, hospitals and aid programs were forced off their sites so the land could be returned to former slave-owners.  Howard at first hoped to recruit doctors from the military to staff medical programs. But most Northern Army doctors left the South, with many openly expressing their lack of interest in treating black patients. (13)

Starved of funding, pressured by Northern officials to shut down as soon as possible, local hospitals were forced to improvise. Some Doctors hired patients to do menial work and were paid in food rations. Hospitals were told by Howard to grow their own vegetables on scraps of unused land to lower costs, A few defied Federal authorities and hired local workers anyway. Outside associations such as the Colored Benevolent Societies raised funds and provided food and clothing.

But Federal officials used this outside support as an excuse to further cut funding. The primary objective was to get fields back running again. As Downs notes, “ . . . Radical Republicans and members of Johnson’s administration who otherwise disagreed on the objectives of the Bureau – shared a view of ill-health as it related to one’s ability to perform arduous field labor.” (14) Later, in 1866, the Radical Republicans argued for able-bodied freedmen to be denied health care or assistance if they didn’t go back to the fields – a position indistinguishable from Johnson’s.

Left out in both Johnson and Radical Republican calculus was any acknowledgement of the role of war and internal displacement in stoking illness. Everything was narrowed to simplistic ideas of a “will to work” that was either present or not. The larger structural impediments to employment such as a ruined economy and infrastructure were never considered

During this period, dating roughly from 1862-1865, smallpox raged throughout the South, undoubtedly aided by freedmens forced dispersion. Smallpox carried a stigma of affecting the immoral, poor and promiscuous and carriers avoided public attention, making it harder to practice quarantine. Ex-slaves, for instance, hid evidence of infection from white eyes because they feared being told infection was God’s disproval of Emancipation. As smallpox spread up the Atlantic coast, military officials in D.C. pressured many freedmen to go back over the Potomac River, where they were warehoused in former slave pens in Alexandria; others were just abandoned to die. (15)

Smallpox was spread by large movements of freedmen, often forced out by local Freedmen’s Bureau to seek services elsewhere. Tragically, many freedmen viewed freedom as the right to go wherever they pleased and thus unwittingly carried smallpox with them.

Susceptibility to illnesses such as smallpox for both Northern and Southern officials became one more sign confirming Africans’ inherent racial inferiority. The role of overcrowding and lack of housing escaped notice as a cause, even as both factors were acknowledged as exacerbating conditions when applied to whites. Instead, smallpox offered “proof” that blacks and whites had different biologies. Widely accepted as fact was the theory that African slaves were inherently doomed to die out, like Native Americans, and treatment was futile in stopping this inevitable outcome. As one religious leader spoke in 1863 about Africans, “Like his brother the Indian of the forest, he must melt away and disappear forever among the midst of us.”  (16)

These views were also held in the top leadership of the Freedmen’s Bureau Medical Division and officials refused to provide adequate funds to build separate facilities – pest houses – to house the infected. The logic was since freedmen were inevitably slated to become extinct, efforts to stem the spread of smallpox through basic sanitation measures and vaccination were futile. Thus, Federal officials refused to follow long-known strategies for containing smallpox that had been standard practices for decades.

Occasionally, freedmen organized to demand better protection. In New Bern, North Carolina, a group of freedmen successfully approached a commander alleging the Freedmen’s Bureau superintendent committed “oppression and outrages.” In Columbia, SC, ex-slaves demanded an end to the unsanitary conditions at the local smallpox hospital. At other times, freedmen, not trusting the Northern military with their health and exercising what they felt was their new freedoms, refused to cooperate with Union army campaigns for mass vaccinations. (17) But such protests were rare.

By the time the Freedmen’s Bureau Medical Division was shut, few of its hospitals remained. Although a handful of dedicated doctors and Northern volunteers continued to provide health care to newly emancipated slaves, these scattered efforts could never meet the overwhelming need. From then on, freedmen would be at the mercy of employers or their own wits and the first experiment with government-sponsored health care consigned to history.

***

In many ways, the end days of the Confederacy saw a horizontal shift in suffering as Union troops and later Freedmens’ Bureau officials, confronted with the immense suffering of escaped slaves, refused to respond, leaving tens of thousands to die of hunger, exposure, and disease. Why are these circumstances unknown? As Downs points out,

“The few and scattered references of freedpeople suffering from the challenges of emancipation have been overlooked because these episodes do not fit into the patriotic narratives of the Civil War. Frozen feet and starvation complicate accounts dominated by heroic black soldiers or freedwomen in Union camps caring for both freed slaves and Northern troops. These carefully cast representations of freedpeople were often created by white authors in the late nineteenth century who strove to highlight the happy outcomes brought by emancipation. Recounting the hardships endured by former slaves during emancipation risked sending the erroneous message that the institution of slavery was no wholly cruel – inadvertently supporting the argument of antebellum pro-slavery advocates in response to the abolitionist movement” (18)

Alongside the exalted phrases of the Emancipation Proclamation and stirring accounts of black freedom during Reconstruction, we also need to center the experience of an anonymous freedwoman living in a dump cart in Montgomery who passed out while giving birth, only to find when she woke that hogs had devoured her baby. (19 130) She too is a face of Reconstruction and her baby’s death a case of social murder, perpetrated by the indifference of both Northern and Southern authorities alike, when confronted with the mass suffering of ex-slaves in the Civil War and Reconstruction eras.

Notes

1) Jim Downs, Sick From Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 37, 123.

2) Downs, Sick From Freedom, 6.

3) Downs, Sick From Freedom, 162.

4) Downs, Sick From Freedom, 6.

5) Downs, Sick From Freedom, 38.

6) Ibid.

7) Downs, Sick From Freedom, 21.

8) Downs, Sick From Freedom, 68.

9) Downs, Sick From Freedom, 61.

10) Downs, Sick From Freedom, 27.

11) Downs, Sick From Freedom, 73.

12) Downs, Sick From Freedom, 144.

13) Downs, Sick From Freedom, 83.

14) Downs, Sick From Freedom, 93.

15) Downs, Sick From Freedom, 99.

16) Downs, Sick From Freedom, 103.

17) Downs, Sick From Freedom, 109.

18) Downs, Sick From Freedom, 6.

19) Downs, Sick From Freedom, 130.

Further Reading

Harris, Paul. “How the end of slavery led to starvation and death for millions of black Americans. “ The Guardian, January 16, 2012. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jun/16/slavery-starvation-civil-war?fbclid=IwAR1Zv08337Uwv090IoP_RWnWTYcEWVt6F3hcsjwj-rADQR13hWGoQtaM6Sk

By Pekah Wallace

Posted May 9, 2021

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We can pay attention to things that beg out empathy, or indulge in personally destructive, narcissistic and attention-seeking behaviors and self-aggrandizement…

The Seventh Edition Hard Crackers Release-Party was celebrated Sunday, October 27, 2019,at Freddie’s Bar and Backroom, Brooklyn, NY. A dive of sorts, and a throwback to times and places in the Boroughs where writers like Eugene O’Neill, surrounded by some of the most motley crew, was inspired to write masterpieces. The Iceman Cometh comes to mind.

If bad weather conditions were any predictor that the event would mark its final publication of Hard Crackers, Chronicles of Every Day Life, the size of the turnout told a different story. We started out for New York plenty early, and what should have easily been a two-hour sprint from Connecticut, became four hazardous, long hours, wrestling a rainstorm out of hell. The wipers never caught a break, neither did our eyes, peeled back, as blinding heavy downpours turned to perilous flooding. At no point did we think we’d make it there. On board were two of the most important pieces of cargo entrusted to my care. Jay, my son, and Noel Ignatiev, founder and chief editor of Hard Crackers. Noel was unusually excited to celebrate yet another publication of Hard Crackers. But foremost in his thoughts was his special invited guest, James Livingston, whom he would be meeting, in person, for the first time. He trusted me to get him there, if not on time, in one piece.

By the time we arrived at the Backroom, weather conditions had just begun to open up. The event was a success, surprisingly well attended, in spite of bad weather! Livingston read from his autobiography, someone played the guitar, and Noel spoke, as the many young aspiring revolutionaries listened, transfixed. Also present were some members of the Board, John Garvey, Mike Morgan and Geert Dhondt. I also recall seeing Matthew Capri. Ignatiev sold many copies of Hard Crackers that day which meant more money for publication of the next edition, and that pleased him very much. Making tbe budget of several thousand dollars, to get each edition of Hard Crackers to press, was hard work,

However, In spite of his illness and doctors’ appointments, sometimes twice a week, Ignatiev needed to make new connections daily and nurture old ones, to assure continued flow of subscriptions to Hard Crackers. He sought and encouraged new writers, reviewed and edited all submissions to Hard Crackers, at the same, worked diligently to finish writing his novel, Acceptable Men, dormant for 20 years. Between times, he practiced his Cello, and any of a number of harmonicas he kept nearby in his desk drawer.

Early to bed and early to rise, Ignatiev maintained a strict routine, a daily constant, steady discipline. He had lost a lot of weight but remained strong and vibrant, often getting ahead of the day, he showered, shaved, dressed, to take himself and Miles for a leisurely walk. At the end of a very busy and productive day, he walked Miles again, took in an occasional movie or a tennis match, checked in on social media happenings, or chatted with a friend, as he settled in for the next 8 to 10 hours, connected to a feeding tube, and a noisy suction pump which swallowed for him. Yet, Ignatiev never complained, hopeful he would swallow again, as he looked forward to his impending corrective surgery.

Clearly, none of this was good enough for Jarrod Shanahan, a so-called comrade and disgruntled former member of the Hard Crackers Board, who, we later learned, spent countless hours begrudgingly trolling Ignatiev’s every move on social media, in an attempt to undermine Ignatiev’s integrity and position as editor in chief.

On November 9, 2019 Ignatiev passed; 13 days after the Hard Crackers Release- Party, and only seven days after arriving in Arizona to visit his grandchildren.  If death did not land the final blow, Shanahan, stabbed Ignatiev in the back, defenseless. Such cowardly act he could not have ventured on his own, without the help of members of the Hard Crackers Board, in particular, his handmaiden and partner in crime, Zhandarka Kurti, Ignatiev’s second most pernicious nemesis. I am not surprised Kurti would aid and abet placing Shanahan’s bellicose pen, front and center of the organization’s attempt to pay tribute to the work and life of Ignatiev.

On at least two occasions, Ignatiev rejected articles Shanahan submitted to Hard Crackers for publication. The first led to Ignatiev quitting the beloved magazine he founded, because of push-back form Shanahan and Kerti. With no discernable leader in place, Ignatiev resumed the role of editor in chief, on condition he hold ultimate authority to decide which articles make it into the magazine and which did not. Too much for Shanahan’s fragile ego, he quit the Board, claiming to avoid arguing with Ignatiev. Nonetheless, he continued to submit articles to Hard Crackers. His final submission bore no identifying markers authentic to Hard Crackers appeal to unite the working class of all races. It was clear to Ignatiev that Shanahan was not writing for Hard Crackers, but himself.  The article was academically obtuse, unwieldy, and its focus undecipherable. Ignatiev again rejected the article, before and after several unsuccessful attempts by other members of the Board to resuscitate it. 

It was around this time Ignatiev discovered that Kerti, unbeknown to Ignatiev, had placed in the archives one of Shanahan’s earlier articles Ignatiev had rejected. Kerti did not return Ignatiev’s call to inquire into her actions and, unceremoniously, Ignatiev removed the article from the archives, and blocked Kerti from future access to the archives.

Ignatiev died a month later. Shanahan and Kerti, unable to bring themselves to the podium at his celebratory memorial, strolled haplessly about, inseparable, claiming no pretentions or humility, conscience or remorse. Judas, a better man, would have run off and killed himself. Immediately thereafter, Kerti assumed the reins of Hard Crackers, James Murray and Curtis Price, resigned the Board, and Shanahan simultaneously resumed his position on the Board. Price went on to found Gasoline and Grits.

Whatever cheap fix Shanahan and Kerti and others may have derived from their impetuous, childish and malicious rants, to now claim themselves “revolutionaries who knew [Ignatiev] best,” is fiction, and an insult to Ignatiev and other revolutionaries everywhere. Shanahan and Kerti violated the golden rule and tried to extract special privileges from Hard Crackers for purposes of personal and professional gain. Failing to have his way, Shanahan blamed Ignatiev for his tortured ego, and set out to undermine Ignatiev’s reputation to others.

I have read the remaining submissions, including those by M. Treloar, Robert Gerst, Justine Johnson, John Strucker, John Bracey, Geert Dhondt, Cloee Cooper, Gary Fields, Don Hamerquist, Avery D’Agostino, Jay Kaspian Kang, John Garvey, and The Left Hook. While I admire Dhondt’s thoughtful inclusion of correspondence, in real time, between Ignatiev and the late Joel Olson his dear friend and comrade, as well as some excerpts from Ignatiev’s novel, Acceptable Men, Dhondt failed to assume greater liberty to countenance the very close, friendship he and his family have shared with Ignatiev over many years. Dhondt seemed to have safely avoided such personal endeavor, that would have otherwise smacked at the heart of the condescending, and hostile diatribe by Shanahan and his alliances. I view this as an opportunity missed.

A prominent, world-renowned historian and revolutionary, Ignatiev’s work speaks for itself. An anthology of his personal writings, essays, interviews, excerpts from his novels, and instructive submissions, would have best served as Tribute to his life and life’s mission.

Pekah Wallace, human rights law enforcement administrator and activist, is the surviving partner of Noel Ignatiev.

Appendix

We are attaching an article by Shanahan that Noel refused to print so readers can judge for themselves how appropriate this text was for Hard Crackers. Contrary to Kerti’s self-serving, moaning about Ignatiev’s heavy editorial hand, as anyone can see this poorly written, pompous gibberish and ad hominem sectarian attacks (although John Garvey swore it had echoes of “The1844 Manuscripts”) had no place in Hard Crackers – or any other self-respecting publication, for that matter.

Invisibility and Blindness

By Jarrod Shanahan

Beep beep beep…Since their installation in 2013, the shrill exclamation sounding day and night at Chicago Transit Authority bus stops has injected a subtle yet incessant irritation into the ordinary perturbation of waiting for a bus that may or may not be coming anytime soon. I’m not the first, and I won’t be the last, to declare this beeping a major annoyance.

Beep beep beep…Thirty times per minute.Where the fuck is my bus?It’s hot. I need not describe the heat in Chicago any more than the cold. The sun catches on a corner of the South Side bus shelter, furnishing a sliver of shade shielding all but an elbow I must today sacrifice to the risk of melanoma some decades down the line.

Beep beep beep…I struggle to hold my focus on some essential classic of critical scholarship, as the author stacks chic buzzwords likethey’re preparing full house in poker, coins needless neologisms of their own, and drops the names of their scholar friends for having first identified social phenomena experienced by hundreds of millions of people in their daily lives.

Beep beep beep…Neoliberal modalities of governance in the affective regime of the spatio-temporal metropole in the biopoliticalanthropocene, qua the biopoliticalanthropocene…Thinking back to when I first encountered sentences like this, and thought myself the hopeless inferior of their author, incapable of ever soaring to such Olympian heights, my face flushes and the page becomes a blur…

Beep beep beep BOOM! With great dramatic flair, a middle-aged black man standing three feet away from me has smashed an empty energy drink can completely flat. With great intent he rubs the aluminummedallion between his hands to inspect the thoroughness of the work. Satisfied, he paces ten steps to the periphery of the concrete. I observe, sipping Starbucks through a metal straw protruding from an otherwise plastic cup, which someone I had a crush on once assured me would spare a duck an untimely death. He reaches the corner of the concrete, where the bus station gives way to grassabutting an embattled woodland adjoining the Metra tracks. Then, with great sobriety, he hurls the disc into this woods.

Beep beep beep… For fuck’s sake!, I mutter, shaking my head conspicuously. He was standing next to a trash can to begin with!How inconsiderate can a person be?

Beep beep beep… The book is hopeless, and I’m not about to morph into Captain Planet and fight with a stranger over a singular piece of litter on a planet likely polluted beyond redemption. Instead I produce a Clif Bar, one of those candy bars for people who think they’re above candy bars. I struggle to keep chocolate off my hands and face as I devour this healthy snack in the midday heat, noting with satisfaction a seal of approval from the Rainforest Alliance on the product’s wrapper. I then promptly deposit the wrapper in a prominent garbage can, two feet from the spot where the man originally crushed the can, and to which he has now returned. I pace back to my precarious refuge from the sun, stare down the block, and note, with a heavy sigh, the absence of an oncoming bus.

“Hey…” the man asks me tentatively,“…is there a trash can there?”

I stare blankly. Having recently relocated from New York City, it has been hard adjusting to social customs of the Midwest, where apparently not everybody who engages you on the street is looking to rip you off or start a fight.

“Oh my god,” he continues, staring intently at the can “there is a trash can there!”

“Yeah, man…” is all I can muster. Is he fucking with me?

“I can’t see!” he exclaims. “Well… I can kind of see it now, that you pointed it out.”

I look into his eyes for the first time. He’s blind! The exact fucking person the beeping is meant for, calling through the darkness like a beacon in an otherwise endless sea.

“Man,” he chuckles.” I do that every day! I never knew there was a trash can there. I like my energy drink before I get on the bus. I used to carry the can with me all the way downtown to throw it away, but I didn’t want to spill it on anyone.”

I notice at once he’s not walking with a cane. How does he get around? I mumble something sufficiently convivial, as the bus approaches at last. I hear it one last time as the doors shut behind me: Beep beep beep…

As the driver glides the massive two-part articulated bus gracefully through the tight concrete confines undergirding the Metra tracks and onto Lake Shore Drive, opening the emerald vista of Lake Michigan vanishing into a hazy horizon, my mind wanders to the major story that has consumed the energy of many intelligent people in my social world on this beautiful summer day. Several short videoscherry-picked from a weekend-long conference of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)have become the latest “viral” sensation, on which everybody feels the need to comment. The children of cable news have all become talking heads, fashioning their daily rations of news into spicy hot takes.

In one of these clips, a conference organizer alerts attendees to disabilities among their comrades of which the listener may be unaware – in other words, they are invisible – urging considerate treatment of those who suffer them, and listing the amenities available for people who have a difficult time navigating the environments of a loud and messy national political conference. In another, an angry speaker takes issue with the use of the word “guys” as a generic term used to mean “people,” which in addition to reproducing the stubborn linguistic tendency in English to generalize masculine nouns, can be particularly hurtful to people who struggle in their social and professional lives to not be identified as men. As my friend Rebecca Hill put it: “On the scale of annoying things at meetings, this isn’t that big a deal.” How desperate must the haters be, she added “if this is the worst thing they could dig up for a ‘gotcha’?”

It wasn’t a big deal. But it became one. These short videos were abstracted from an entire weekend of debate and served up with no explanation save for “meanwhile, at the DSA.” By all accounts, over the duration of this conference,the largest and certainly most viable leftist organization in the United States struggled with fundamental questions implied by a deepening social crisis that calls for decisive action, and for which no rival left organization seems to have a better plan. With no mention of the broader conference, theseisolated clips were shared and viewed hundreds of thousands of times. The clips originated, it seems with other leftists eager to mock the organization, but quickly gained traction within the right-wing media, where the moral panic about “political correctness” run amok has simmered for decades, stoked with great alacrity by white male professors of a certain age who blame feminism for their students refusing to sleep with themand “identity politics” for being asked to not use chauvinistic language, or losing out on a job to someone who isn’t a white man.

Once in the hands of the right, these clips were used, as always, to deride and discredit all who seek to build a society according to the principles: from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.By this point, the right’s work was largely done for it: the putative leftists sharing these videos had heaped derision in nearly identical terms as the Fox News article the story eventually earned. Leftist enemies of “identity politics” worked organically with reactionaries and outright fascists to reduce the entirety of the discussion surrounding the DSA conference to the content these short clips, and reduce the project of human emancipation to a punchline.

As a denouement of this sad spectacle, the avowednational chauvinist Angela Nagel relished a softball interview on the television program of Tucker Carlson, an avowed enemy of the working class and perhaps the closest mainstream pundit to the white nationalist movement, where the two chuckled together about the idiocy of the socialist left. Nagle, who did not attend the conference, conceded entirely to Carlson defining the convention in the terms of these stray clips, and actually upped the ante by claiming “everycampaign on the left and every organization on the left” to be this way.Nagle then claimed that so-called “invisible disabilities,” meaning any disability the observer cannot immediately discern in a person, do not exist, but are simply “bourgeois narcissism,” a phrase Carlson foundparticularly funny. “I don’t think if I spent a year trying to think of a better description,” Carlson replied gleefully, “I could come up with anything more precise than that.”Nagle’s latest declaration of chauvinism, for which she still has apologists disgracing themselves, is not an isolated case, but only the most prominent case of a hearty cooperative effort by left and right wing reactionaries to mock egalitarian politics in the name of some imagined purity of “class” based organizing.

Let’s be real: Are there people here and there who weaponized fantastic claims to disability for personal gain? Yes, and sometimes that is itself a sign of serious mental health issues. Are middle-class children politicized by radical liberal theory in the comfort of classrooms often irritating, and in need of serious real world experience to temper their righteous – and thoroughly petty bourgeois – indignation? Surely. Will a massive political convention of any group lacking an authoritarian power structure attract idiosyncratic individuals and likely degenerate into a total mess? Of course! That’s partly why most of the people mocking these clips can’t put together five people to start a group of their own.But to use the most outlandish adherents of a political perspective to discredit its intent, and to misinterpret in bad faith the strivings of political organizers to build inclusive spaces, is the stuff of Fox News anti-leftist smear, not serious left analysis. In fact, it’s not much of an analysis at all.

Such smirkingridicule is the stock and trade of a new breed of “socialist” evangelists touting the politics of “class” as somehow distinct from questions of how the class is stratified, and the impact class society has on those it victimizes – whether along the lines of race, gender, dis/ability, or countless other differential experiences one must consider in order to formulate a politics worth of the name emancipatory. This project becomes particularly evil when the most common “left” response to people vocalizing the particularities of their struggles in our cruel and dehumanizing society is derisive laughter – laughter that joins the chorus of fascist derision of the project of human emancipation. 

The is nothing “leftist” about laughing in the face of somebody’s claim to harm by capitalist society. There is nothing egalitarian about claiming to know somebody’s experiences better than they do, and to dismiss them outright.Nor is arguing that the outlandish excesses of “identity politics” are a more serious issue than the problems to which these politics are meant to respond.This is the same old neoconservatism which the Nagle’s of yesteryear have been peddling for decades.The denial of the reality of diverse experiences, no matter how “invisible” they may seem to the superficial observer, is not only bad personal behavior, but a reproduction of the chauvinism that structures our class society, and keeps working people divided while Nagel’s reactionary friends like Tucker Carlson look on smirking.

Chauvinism – especially the sneering, haughty, and derisive form of it that today passes as a serious “class” perspective among a new breed of “socialist” thinkers serving up the old wine of class-reductionism in shiny new jars – has no place in a movement for human emancipation. Chauvinism begins with a willful blindness to the validity of experiences outside one’s immediate perception. It hardens when that blindness becomes a willful ignorance. And thus it becomes something truly evil.

Or, so I thought as my bus slammed to a stop at Jackson Avenue, and the man who crushed the can went tumbling onto a row of seated passengers, apologizing profusely.