Identity: An American Ideological Franchise
Identity: An American Ideological Franchise
Most of what I know about American Identity Politics I learned in Bahia from Louis Gates Jr.
In an episode of "Black in Latin America", a series on race aired on PBS on the 3rd of May 2011, Harvard Professor of Black Studies, Public Intellectual and television personality Louis Gates Jr. went on an intrepid exploration of race somewhere deep in the guts of what was probably the Mercado Modelo of Sao Salvador, Brazil.
There, in an impromptu field research encampment, which would have made Gustav Fritsch jealous, Gates gathered a small group of dark-skinned men who he made stand in a semi-circle in front of the lacherou eye of the camera. In one of the most grotesque episodes that American television has produced–a machine that hardly has shown any restraint in producing and promoting the grotesque and the obscene–the Harvard professor sporting the conspicuous light-linen-in-the-tropics uniform, asked these half naked labourers to extend their arms and hold them next to each other’s to assess and compare pigmentation.
The Brazilians who come from one of the most violent and depressed urban areas of Brazil obey and exhibit for Gates' racial catalogue their various shades of humanity, which the professor goes on to explain in a tone of bemused disbelief to his American acolytes watching in Cambridge and New York, that these half naked men, incredibly (gates gesticulates his surprise wildly), call themselves black. In order to claim membership, Gates then adds his own skin to the pile before finishing the segment rehabilitating his captives with words of fraternity and, what we now call inclusion: "the good thing" he says "is that we are all black."
Perhaps it takes an understanding of the native voices and inflections to see the sense of embarassment in the face of the subjects in the face of this impromptu project of colonial anthropology. The men tamely obliged and rather than contempt, their voices seem to expresse paternal forbearance. The American tourists needs to be offered explanations that most other adults don't. Embarassment is, at times, the price of hospitality.
This is not the last or latest public exercise of pop-eugenics that I can remember from the American version of progressivism. A lot has happened on the American left in the decade that passed since I first saw the PBS sequence. However, Gates' little excursion into the dark territories of imperial anthopology is the one that, even after the multitude of barbarities that the early 21st century has offered in the three ring circus that we are in the habit of calling the "American cultural and political landscape", has stayed with me with the loyalty of a recurring nightmare.
It might be that Brazil remains, at least in my imagination, my second home and where a lot of the most memorable days of my childhood took place; it might be that Bahia remains in my sentimental geography and in my family's lore the source of all thigns good–Vinicius, Toquinho, Chico Amado, Caetano, Itapuã, Gal the first glimpse of Capoeira, the Pelourinho and my father drinking beer above the market–it might be that the filthy grasp of the small and lecherous American political ideary soiled the bright morning, the proud glance over the water, the otherworldly sounds and colours of the city turning them into an exotic objects of political and moral pity in an odious expression of condescension. It might be all of these things that made such a hideous impression and served as the epilogue to my almost twenty years lived between the madness of the American right and the madness of the American left. But that is certainly not all.
While most of the ideological construction of an order of moral fitness according to biological characteristics in the American left had been offered, before and after Gates' trip to Brazil, in poor ideas formulated in incompetent prose and the allucinatory camp of American network intellectualism; in Bahia the professor engaged in something entirely different. There, in a market, Gates stood for exhibition what he deemed to be black folks next to each other to measure their anatomical characteristics for the purpose of racial taxonomization.
The scene is only distinctive from what one could imagine might have been performed during the production of a roster of trafficked human goods under Portuguese commerce anytime between 1582 and 1851 in one of the very same markets of the very same port.
The presumption that Gates intention was to cast a positive light on his subjects and their presumed ethnicity does not help. Anyone offering the human merces to owners of sugar plantations, estates or mines during those four centuries of agony was also very likely involved in offering a positive assessment of the subjects of his claims to increase the appeal and raise the bids.
Without any irony—none he could afford anyway—Gates took political possession of these men in the extension of their naked and visible sufficiently-dark skin to reap the political fruits on whose commerce he has built his august career. The venerable American elder of the awaken left, took not only these men's bodies to work his field (to wit, black studies and its political mills) but just as notably and considerably more importantly, he claimed shared ownership of their putative suffering, oppression and disposession, in short, of their physical and political semblance.
In 2020, Gates Jr. told the New York Times in support of candidate Michael Bloomberg "I know Mike Bloomberg socially…every summer I go to a dinner on Martha’s Vineyard with Mike Bloomberg." It is indeed the man who had dinner every summer with Bloomberg in Martha’s Vineyard, who called the nameless man with dark complexion selling chicken in the market in Salvador "brother" and in so doing he offers me a sobering glimpse of two matters that would become central to my understanding of American regressivism, the kind that about half a decade later would bloom into the dark flowers that line the roads of Wokistan.
First and foremost and likely taking a line from the political disciples off Nietzsche, Gates showed me how powerful a political asset victimisation was. In a political environment like the one dominated by moral piety such as the American, powerlessness was not only an expression of sanctity but the mark of omnipotent moral power. The suffering of the sufferer being the condiciones sine quibus non, the sufferer as the bearer of that power is impervious to contestation. Of course, it is hard to assess the legitimacy of the suffering in question in the case of the public man, who dines in Martha’s Vineyard but to settle that question, the American ideological machine has guaranteed a visible and readily identifiable certification, to wit, cutaneous pigmentation.
The second lesson from Gates Jr. expedition was concerned something that I had intuited since my very first hours set loose in the American wasteland that in the early nineties was Worcester, Massachussets. The American mind was always willing to apply colour thickly to cover over what the good, democratic Americans soul feared most: socio-economic class distinctions. If color depersonalized—and over the next two generations of American regressivism this ceased to be a problem predicament to be overcome—it also was capable of operating a miraculous act: in one of the most unequal societies in the west, colour declassed.
Here was Gates, then with a six figure salary from Harvard, television shows and various other profitable engagements claiming membership in the fraternity of the dispossessed in the confines of economic and political abjection in the north of Brazil where other members brought home 2 dollars a day. And yet, we can safely assume that when the cameras stopped rolling and the men parted way, Gates Jr. returned to his Cambridge life with occasional Martha’s Vineyard dinners and the men in Salvador returned to the jobs and eager salaries. For Gates Jr. brothers, there would be no place in the Thanksgiving table nor teachable moments in the White House.
This is not a minor issue, the instrumentalization of questions of racial justice//among them historical questions—to dismantle the political machinery built around socio-economic class has rendered an invaluable service to a vast section of the most reactionary political sontellations. So much so, that more than ten year after Gates Jr., American regressivism has actively and openly chased away exponents of class politics from the political temples of the traditional left accused of not paying sufficient homage to the foundational role of race in the architecture of social and economic injustice.
And indeed it is only race that can give Gates Jr. membership among the dispossessed. In all other respects, the political set that includes Gates Jr and the men in the market in Bahia is an empty set and their biographies do not intersect in any other way than in the farcical encounter that the PBS camera captured in Brazil.
Gates had and still has no familial or political kinship with these men and no deployment of the rather confused idea of intersectionality, no matter how acquiesced to or lauded, can grant him that. And here, indeed, is perhaps the most perverse aspects of Gates Jr. political project and that of its inheritors in the American identitarian left: when one corrects for colour, the fact remains that most of the welfare of Mr Gates Jr is a more or less direct product of the precarity, economic and political disenfranchisement of, among many others, men he called brothers.