#cedric johnson

[kayyybay]

These are the injured bengals going into this weeks matchup against Minnesota

sidenote: what happened to cordell's shoulder?! dude is gonna be out til february!!!

[weil-weil-lautre]

Out of this post-World War II urban-spatial transformation, race emerged as the dominant symbolic language for understanding American inequality. The combination of home ownership, access to suburban school districts, police protection, tax-relief, and relative economic advantage formed the material basis for the conservative positions of many whites who came to support the New Right, but we know that not all whites embraced such conservatism. Relative urbanity, union-membership, civic organizations, religion, familial and community traditions of activism, and other idiosyncratic factors continued to matter in shaping political ideology and policy commitments even in suburbia. “White” became a synonym for middle class, suburban, law-abiding, virtuous, property-owning, hardworking, and self-governing, and “black” came to function as a euphemism for poor, urban, criminal, dysfunctional, dispossessed, lazy, and dependent. Whiteness discourse accepts and legitimizes these symbolic markers of post-war class structure, without undertaking a more nuanced examination of actual material and political interests, how they are formed, articulated and contested within specific historical-local contexts.

Cedric Johnson, The Wages of Roediger: Why Three Decades of Whiteness Studies Has Not Produced the Left We Need

[zwischenstadt]

Post-war economic development improved the living conditions of millions of Americans and elevated a new middle-class consumer identity as a dominant social and cultural aspiration. As early as the Woodrow Wilson administration’s “Own Your Own Home” campaign, American politicians, commercial and real estate interests promoted homeownership as an antidote to left labor militancy.36 The turn to housing and real estate development as an economic growth model and political maneuver against labor insurgency would gain ground amid the Depression. Beginning with the New Deal establishment of the Federal Housing Administration and expansion after World War II under the leadership of Harry Truman, the US embarked on a housing revolution, a process of mortgage lending, massive highway and infrastructure development, and new home construction that transformed millions into nominal property-holders and members of the new middle class. Suburban development and all manner of consumer activity propagated a new consumer-class identity, sweeping away old urban ethnic and proletarian affinities, and cementing the loyalty of more secure workers to the Cold War growth trajectory of defense spending, urban renewal and suburbanization. Woven into this same process of suburbanization were policies that resegregated the black urban poor through tower block public housing, freeway construction and practices like redlining, which combined to devalue and deter investment in central city neighborhoods. Out of this post-World War II urban-spatial transformation, race emerged as the dominant symbolic language for understanding American inequality. The combination of home ownership, access to suburban school districts, police protection, tax-relief, and relative economic advantage formed the material basis for the conservative positions of many whites who came to support the New Right, but we know that not all whites embraced such conservatism. Relative urbanity, union-membership, civic organizations, religion, familial and community traditions of activism, and other idiosyncratic factors continued to matter in shaping political ideology and policy commitments even in suburbia. “White” became a synonym for middle class, suburban, law-abiding, virtuous, property-owning, hardworking, and self-governing, and “black” came to function as a euphemism for poor, urban, criminal, dysfunctional, dispossessed, lazy, and dependent. Whiteness discourse accepts and legitimizes these symbolic markers of post-war class structure, without undertaking a more nuanced examination of actual material and political interests, how they are formed, articulated and contested within specific historical-local contexts.

Cedric Johnson, “The Wages of Roediger: Why Three Decades of Whiteness Studies Has Not Produced the Left We Need”

https://nonsite.org/the-wages-of-roediger-why-three-decades-of-whiteness-studies-has-not-produced-the-left-we-need/

[realtapiocafan]

they're backkkk (for offseason workouts lol) (well not ja'marr, he's in milan) (and not joe, pretty sure he's still in la) (oh and not trey... idk where he is actually, probably fishing) (but everyone ELSE they're backkkk!)

(warning: lots of photos under the cut, proceed if you're a bengals sicko like me)

(also fun game: try to name all of these players) (i tried doing it 😓) (you can see my struggle in the tags)

[weil-weil-lautre]

DuBois’s account of white workers is poetic and tragic, but inaccurate. He presents white workers as widely enjoying civic and economic benefits that many never possessed. There is ample evidence that the defeat of Reconstruction actually hurt white workers, and that many were aware enough of this fact to find common cause with blacks despite the rising reactionary tide. “It is difficult to see where the great gains for lower-class whites are to be found in this situation,” sociologist Jack Bloom wrote of the fall of Reconstruction, “Many of them lost the right to vote. They were subject to the harsh terms of their employers, and they remained without labor unions, to counter the power the wealthy retained. When they did try to form unions, they found the region’s tradition of violence turned against them.” Working-class whites fared better relative to blacks, in many cases, but the greatest gains of the Jim Crow system were reserved for the merchant-landlord class and New South industrialists. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the percentage of farmers who were tenants grew from 59.9 percent to 65.4 percent. In the year that DuBois’s Black Reconstruction was published, 3 million blacks and 5.5 million whites, one-quarter of all Southerners, were tenant farmers.

Cedric Johnson, The Wages of Roediger: Why Three Decades of Whiteness Studies Has Not Produced the Left We Need

[weil-weil-lautre]

The work of building solidarity lies elsewhere, not in therapy aimed at self-actualization, but in lived social relations and sustained political work that transforms participants’ social consciousness and collective sense of historical possibility. Those everyday social relations and the context of political work are always defined by the presence of differences, whether those are differences of background, perspective, maturity, knowledge, insight, power, capacity, and passions, and none of these are calibrated strictly in concert with racial, ethnic, gender or other corporeal identities. Although Roediger and others condemn “class reductionism,” their work too often succumbs to a reductionist view of black political life that does not comprehend different material interests and ideological positions among African Americans. What is lost in the din of whiteness discourse, and certainly in the reparations hustle that Roediger defends, are the strategic choices made by black people who have sought working-class solidarity and action, despite the fact of political disenfranchisement, segregation, and repression. It would seem that latter-day historians, activists and bloggers are more preoccupied with difference than those black teamsters who joined the 1892 general strike in New Orleans, or those African American and Puerto Rican parents who fought alongside white teachers, social workers and community organizers to end lead poisoning in Rochester. We should be able to talk about situated-class experiences, i.e., ascriptive gender and racial hierarchies, sectoral and regional variations in working lives, unique occupational subcultures, idiosyncratic worker concerns and daily issues, without losing sight of the fundamental capitalist class relation of exploitation, and the dependency on wage labor endured by the vast majority of the U.S. population. Moreover, when we discuss what are often treated as discrete identity-based issues, i.e. matters of hyperpolicing, health disparities, urban unemployment, environmental racism, the gender gap in wages, affordable housing crises and gentrification, we should be clear that those problems originate from the tremendous power capital wields over all of our lives, and contesting that power is essential to addressing those specific concerns and creating a more just state of affairs.

Cedric Johnson, The Wages of Roediger: Why Three Decades of Whiteness Studies Has Not Produced the Left We Need

As it took formal shape during the Reagan-Bush years, whiteness studies set out to counter the myth that working-class solidarity springs organically from shared oppression, and to show that such solidarity is always contingent. In the process, however, whiteness studies has painted working-class solidarity into a corner analytically, treating solidarity as always and everywhere hemmed in by racial difference. From the most cynical view, the pursuit of a working-class, anti-capitalist politics is always elusive and impotent. Working-class solidarity, however, like all other forms of alliance and common cause, is forged through politics, an imperfect and unwieldy process of discovering and advancing common interests through debate, conflict, bonding, experimentation, sustained work, failures and victories. Such solidarity is not given, nor permanent. Its value is not intrinsic, but rather its worth should be measured by the degree to which anti-capitalist solidarity alters the balance of class forces in a progressive way, and imposes more just, non-alienated, non-exploitative modes of working and living. Differences of opinion and passion are preconditions of political life. We should not be uneasy about these social realities, or unnerved by the difficult work of building counterpower. The only ones who should be uneasy about solidarity are the bosses.

[weil-weil-lautre]

What Will It Take to End the Policing Crisis? Against the Technological Fix

[weil-weil-lautre]

I do not question Roediger’s political commitments here, only that his arguments regarding whiteness, and approach to thinking about how class interests are actually formed, articulated and advanced, particularly among white and black workers, do not help us to advance the intellectual and political project of anti-capitalism. Whiteness has come to function not so much as an analysis of interests in historical motion, but rather, it functions as catechism—America’s original sin is racism and redemption in the post-political hereafter lies in white atonement. With respect to class struggle and the maintenance of consent and order by dominant classes, the devil is in the details of history, details that fall out of focus when we evoke “white interests” as a metanarrative of what is wrong with American politics. Roediger’s work has advanced an approach to thinking about history and contemporary politics that reifies whiteness, even as it explores its social construction, presupposes that racial identity is the foremost shaper of working-class thought and action, and silences interracial solidarity.

Cedric Johnson