on postmodern racism
Music: Iron & Wine: Around the Well (2009)
For many, many years I resisted using the term "postmodern" because I thought it was a placeholder word for the many ways in which modernity was realizing itself. I thought at the heart of modernity was a certain dream or fantasy---a moment, say, signified by those futuristic commercials for eyeglasses that adjust their tint to the amount of available sunlight. While I do prefer to think of the postmodern as a temporal conception---a kind of futurity ensconced principally in film, architecture, and high theory---I have become more comfortable using the label to describe novel shifts in the popular imaginary, especially shifts hastened by a change in the forces of production. In the context of the contemporary media cycle---a cycle that is content to broadcast low quality, YouTube videos as archival footage, for example---I think the nomination process for Sonia Sotomayor is generating a discourse that one is hard-pressed to term anything other than "postmodern." Something has changed, and our dominant U.S. rhetorical theories are incapable of describing this change.
I'm thinking, principally, of how certain "conservative" (read, not conservative at all, but something quite new) talking heads are calling Sotomayor a "racist." Newt Gingrich made the claim first, but yesterday on the political shows Rush Limbaugh was given much airplay for his follow-up:
Rush "Are You Getting This AP?" Limbaugh is certainly amplifying his remarks for attention: "Obama is the greatest living example of a reverse racist, and now he's appointed one...to the U.S. Supreme Court," said Limbaugh. "So now he's got a hack. He got a party hack that he's put on the court that's likely to be confirmed. . . . We are confronting a radical assault on this nation, a radical assault today on the U.S. Supreme Court, and moderates in the Republican party are distracting our ability to organize the opposition." The argument has three claims: (1) Sotomayor is a racist; and (2) her appointment is part of a larger, "liberal" conspiracy to take over the U.S. government; (3) Republican moderates are letting it happen.
Of course, the claim that Sotomayor is a racist is simply preposterous and is very difficult to take seriously. The judge claimed that her experience as a Hispanic influences how she thinks. My experience as a southern white boy in bumblefuck Georgia in a low-income/working class family certainly influences how I think. The second claim is also ridiculous: what I see is neoliberalism back in the house a la Bill Clinton. Sotomayor's record, for the record, is fairly conservative (or to use the MSM word, "moderate") from what I'm reading. Her record on free speech is pretty much a bummer, and her stance on abortion-related issues is uncertain. I'm not particularly thrilled about her appointment, myself.
The postmodern element of these attacks, however, is located in the third claim. Limbaugh and others are arguing that moderates are playing it too safe. The truth is that Limbaugh and Gingrich are saying this vituperative stuff so that moderates don't have to. Politically, failing to confirm Sotomayor is akin to suicide, and the Republichristians know this. Gingrich and Limbaugh, however, are functioning something like an airbladder, keeping a certain cultural agenda afloat while so-called moderates work to make the confirmation hearings as fair as possible. There is, in other words, a certain symbiosis in this rhetoric---one that was made plain when, for a brief month period, Limbaugh was half-jokingly hailed as the leader of the GOP.
People of color are now in prominent positions of power and spectacle. It is astonishing to me that the "race card" is still being dealt for political labor, although I probably should confess that the idealistic reality of the academy---our active working toward equality---shields me from the harsher, brute reality of non-academic careers. I suppose this absurd rhetoric is proof positive there is no such thing as post-racial politics. Same as it ever was . . . but with one difference: in the days of acceptable racism, one would use racial slurs without a thought. Today, the racists exercise their racism by calling the racialized Other racists.