THE FRAUDS OF COLORBLINDNESS IN AMERICA, or why the rise of Trumphism should not be surprising to anyone

Paula Ioanide, The Emotional Politics of Racism: How Feelings Trump Facts in an Era of Colorblindness ((Stanford: Stanford U. Press, 2015) (From the backcover: "With stop-and-frisk laws, new immigration policies, and cuts to social welfare programs, majorities in the United States have increasingly intensified forms of punishment and marginalization against Black, Latino, Arab and Muslim people in the United States, even as a majority of citizens claim to support 'colorblindness' and racial equality. With this book, Pauls Ioanide examines how emotion has prominently figured into these contemporary expressions of racial discrimination and violence, and how these widespread fears have played a central role in justifying the expansion of our military and prison system. But Ioanide also argues that within each of these cases there is opportunity for new mobilizations, for ethical witnessing: we must also popularize desires for justice and increase people's receptivity to the testimonies of the oppressed by reorganizing embodied and unconscious structures of feeling." From the text: "Emotional rewards and losses attached to contemporary expressions of gendered racism, nativism, and imperialism play an integral role in shaping the generalizable conditions of our time." Id. at 9. "The challenge we face is not that people have stopped talking about race and sexuality. Color-blind terms such as 'criminals,' 'drug dealers,' 'thugs,' 'gangsters,' 'urban underclass,' 'inner cities,' terrorists,' hijackers,' 'suicide bombers,' 'Islamic fundamentalists,' 'welfare queeens,' 'crack mothers,' 'hyperfertile mothers,' 'illegal aliens,' 'gangs,' 'drug cartels,' and 'taxpayer burdens' have become coded lingua franca used by dominant U.S. publics to talk about race, gender, sexuality, and nationality. Rather, our core challenge is that these putatively color-blind terms are used to espouse the hegemonic belief that the 'behavioral deficiences' of Black, Latino/a, Arab, and Muslim people are the primary cause of these groups' marginalization. Those who believe that Black, Latino/a, Arab, Muslim people are culturally dysfunctional often believe that the violence, discrimination, and exclusion that these groups regularly experience are either self-induced or deserved." Id. at  9-10. "The ingenuity of post-civil rights nativist groups was to cultivate anti-Mexican and anti-undocumented immigrant sentiments in color-blind and coded rather than explicitly racists ways. []But not everyone in anti-Mexican and anti0Latino/a nativist emotional economies was motivated by blatant white supremacist views. Indeed, the effectiveness of these color-blind, gendered, and racially coded discourses lay in their ability to recruit moderates, liberals, and immigrants themselves to identify and support exclusionary policies and outcomes based on their sense of economic loss and eroding natural resources, the moral righteousness of being law abiding and self-sufficient, and their heteronormative family ideals." Id. at 131-132. "Perhaps the most disheartening effect of the rising dominance of nativist fantasies, feelings, and state discourses about undocumented immigrants is the way that Latino/a. Asian, Africans, Caribbean, and other immigrants have themselves been encouraged to participate in economies of shame, stigmatization, and blame tied to criminality, welfare dependence, and illegality. To distinguish themselves as good immigrants, Latino/a, Asian, Caribbean, African, and other documented immigrants have sometimes taken hard anti-undocumented immigrant positions. Not wanting to be perceived as illegal or dependent on welfare or as taxpayer burdens, some immigrants have elected to adopt extreme stances on self-reliance, hard work, and personal responsibility. Such stances, particularly when Latino/a, Asian, African, or other immigrants of color hold them, effectively reinforce a dominant public climate that discourages immigrants to feel entitle to public goods they have helped subsidize. Although these immigrants are admirable for their self-determination and networks of familial and communal self-reliance, such 'pull yourself up by your own bootstraps' endorsements ultimately support neoliberal and conservative agendas that seek further privatization and divestment from social welfare safety nets." Id at 132-133. Connects the many dots between, among other things, NYPD's rape of  Abner Louima, the U.S. military's rape of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Clinton's embrace of the republican welfare reforms, neoliberalism's abandonment and shaming of the poor, New Orlean's and the Bush administration's abandonment of poor people of color in the aftermath of Katrina, and White America's criminalization of mainly, but not exclusively, Latino/a immigrants. This book is an important read.).