by Anthony Schiappa
Social
media users are in a colitic fit over the name “Washington Redskins.”
It’s
racist as hell. Everyone knows that, even the “get over it” crowd, which
refuses to take its own advice. As a few bloggers have pointed out, the mascot
would be racist even if no American Indian found it offensive, though this
point itself smacks of white liberal paternalism.
On
the other hand, 90,000 mostly white sports fans aping the tribes that their
country eradicated is exactly the kind of grotesque image that neatly captures
contemporary American culture. Naturally, its sublime truth must be hidden from
view. Sweeping under the rug any honest depiction of our grim history—that’s
one thing that liberals and conservatives can agree upon.
In
fact, if it weren’t for the outrage at racist team mascots, most people, except
perhaps gamblers, would never give a second thought to the plight of the
American Indian.
So
the zeal with which name-changing efforts have been supported by non-Indians
makes me wonder about the underlying motivations of these do-gooders. Why the
sudden concern for a group that is usually forgotten? Partially, it seems as
though nerds are getting some revenge against the suffocating jock culture they
grew up in; others seem to get their kicks harassing a sleazy one-percenter
like Dan Snyder. Much of it is simply the knee-jerk outrage of the Internet.
There
is, of course, more to it. A name change for the Redskins, the third most
valuable franchise in the NFL, would indeed be symbolically powerful, but
there’s the rub. It would do nothing to address the daily realities of racism,
manifested in the universal horror of poverty. Those realities would only be
further obscured by a strictly symbolic political victory, because things
really aren’t getting better. They’re getting worse.
And
to those who would counter that a name change would “send a message” or “raise
consciousness,” I challenge you to explain what that means in concrete terms
without sounding like an imbecile.
Because
the far more destructive consequences of racism can be found in economic
statistics on the majority of American Indians who don’t, incidentally, own
casinos. Twenty-five percent of Native Americans live in poverty; in non-urban
counties, the number jumps to 60%. Reservations, many of which are on isolated
sites chosen by the federal government as part of its program of extermination,
are among the poorest places in the country, no different than what we
euphemistically call “the developing world.” On the Blackfoot reservation in
Montana, unemployment hovers at 69%, three times as high as the national rate
at the height of the Great Depression. Of America’s high-poverty communities,
American Indians have the lowest rate of full-time job holders, at 36%.
This
means little or no access to healthcare, education, infrastructure, and other
basic services. It also means poverty’s daily indignities and ceaseless toil,
born of “crushing necessity,” as Céline put it. Yes, there is the melodrama of
the poor’s suffering, but there are also the petty hardships and bad trade-offs
that comprise everyday life.
And
here we come to the limits of multicultural liberalism, which cannot confront the animating matrix of all forms of social domination, the capitalist
economy. It is the economic hierarchy—of the robbers and the robbed—that
sustains all other social hierarchies. Equality will not be achieved without a direct
confrontation with the objective force of capital. This means a total and unequivocal
rejection of capitalism and the formulation of something like an explicitly
socialist framework.
This
is why the multicultural liberal ethic, of “realizing the possibilities of here
and now” and the dismissal of any subjects like economic exploitation as
“flattening,” is a dead end. Whatever its alleged good intentions, a strategy
of “making do” will never ameliorate the coercive violence of our economic
system, nor can it ever fundamentally alter it. It can only democratize access
to its bankrupt channels, redistributing poverty more evenly among all demographics,
joining exploiters and exploited in shared intersectional identities.
Unable
to address capitalism’s structuring of all social experience, liberalism fights
its empty battles within the spectacle of symbolism and representation. As a
result, nothing is accomplished. And it never will be. Its activity,
masquerading as political action, unconcerned with challenging the established order,
can only reinforce it. "Multiculturalism" emerges as jargon for
academic careerists, whose trash remedies legitimize our current sordid
social conditions and freeze them into permanence.
In
the case of the Redskins controversy, their approach could have unintended
consequences. Such symbolic victories slyly provide cover for continued
economic exclusion. Triumph in the realm of appearances means defeat in lived
experience. While it may be morally right for these mascots to be abolished,
lifting that fight out of the context of poverty and its attendant miseries
could cause the plight of the American Indian to further recede
into the multicultural fog. They may, in fact, become even more invisible.
It’s
yet another trade-off that the wretched continually confront. For the
symbol-minded, it’s a trade worth making.
