Re: <nettime> what exactly is breaking?

[Dan S Wang <danswang@protonmail.com>]

Dear Felix,

With this refreshed invitation, I’ll take a stab at keeping the conversation going.

As for breaks, ruptures, and discontinuities, I wonder about Nixon’s Silent Majority, about whether it exists anymore. When Trump finally emerged from his bunker, his retreat from White House protestors for which he was roundly ridiculed, to make his first statement to the nation after a week of historic unrest, predictably he went whole hog, so to speak, for the “law and order” message. His imagined audience was that of the fearful and disgusted “good” Americans, the “hard working” Americans, the Americans of “family values”—all quotation marks denoting code for white.

It worked for Nixon in 1968 and created a lasting strategic pole around which both Republicans and Democrats had to navigate and repeatedly return to, from Reagan’s War on Drugs to the tough-on-crime bills of the Bill Clinton era. Will it work for Trump??

Based on the last ten days, I will say no, it won’t work. Back in ’68 white flight was a full force gale, a process underway and yet to be named, and expressed in extremes bad and worse around nearly every sizable US city in the then-most populated regions of the country. It was a process of re-spatializing racial groupings, one that hastened the de-emphasis of the various Euro-American ethnic identifications of the old city (identities in relation to each other) in favor of suburban whiteness (a single identity opposed to blackness). Nixon’s sense for the shift was accurate, and he capitalized on it. The militancies of the ghettos and the campuses, the rhetoric and imagery, were harnessed in the service of a reactionary response. And it worked so well that it provided the Republican road map for the next generation.

Something’s different now. For starters, anyone can see that the hordes of protestors are a multiracial/multiethnic swarm. This is generation Q, queer in all ways, in all colors. These are the trans kids who were out blocking traffic the night that Trump “won” three years ago. These are the black skateboarders, the girl bud tenders, the trans cos players, the generation that survived school shootings, and the people entertaining each other on Twitch. These are the people who, when they assemble en masse as they have in well over a hundred US cities now for days on end, to torch police cars and dance in the streets, make me a lot less worried about chan subcultures. Add to this the multiple concurrent media narratives, no longer monopolized by corporate channels, equalizing everything from ABC to Unicorn Riot to TMZ, not to mention the ever-present wildcards of anybody with a smart phone and social media account (as in the original footage of the murder of George Floyd). The law & order response cannot reductively characterize this huge street opposition and accompanying flood of images for messaging purposes. The best Trump could do was to pull out the “Antifa” bogeyman, an enemy believed in only by the most provincial segments of his right wing base.

The courage and creativity of the young Black organizers—and the pure rage of the disenfranchised and police-targeted Black masses—are undoubtedly the engine of this uprising. That said, another difference between now and the formations that emerged from Ferguson less than six years ago is the level and dedication of white allyship. I have been greatly heartened by the vocal support expressed by white people from various quarters, especially as conservatives and corporate media have—as usual—attempted to elevate the narrative of burning and looting. The Obama era campus subcultures of safe spaces, trigger warnings, and privilege politics seem to have matured into a rather sophisticated understanding of what white people can and should do when the streets erupt. But even deeper than that, I see a meaningful change in urban consciousness at work. By now we’ve had two generations of privileged people choosing to reside in cities. Though comparatively advantaged by their education, color, and wealth, these make up a class of urban dwellers who are familiar with the ills of urban poverty—not as personal experience, but as a condition under which their neighbors, employees, and many thousands of fellow city residents suffer. A great many of these people are white and unlike their parents and grandparents, they won’t be fleeing the city and instead see these problems of police brutality as their own responsibility. For once, the white liberals aren’t reflexively cutting the cord at the sight of a burning police car; their empathy goes in the direction of their black and brown neighbors. Of course I don’t want to overstate this, and one violent act targeting a white person can change everything, but I sense a meaningful difference, a genuine break from whiteness as a social formation with a necessarily reactionary politics.

Further, the suburbs aren’t what they used to be, either. The Republican hold on these areas was keyed into the dual benefits of economic prosperity (low taxes) and personal security (low crime rates), both reinforced and visibly signified as racial homogeneity. But a commuter’s distance from the city is no longer any guarantee of security, personal or economic. Nor are today's suburbs racially homogenous. Formerly solidly Republican counties from Orange south of LA to Gwinnett outside Atlanta have gained large numbers of Asian and Latinx households, contributing to swing voting trends, bring multilingualism into the schools, and introduce POC that in some areas of life metrics clearly outperform whites. The law & order message is about protecting what white people have, about preserving their perfect world. When that world so obviously no longer exists, the message doesn’t resonate as strongly.

So, yes, I am sensing a break with the political legacy of ’68 and it was the widespread and immediate derision that rained down on Trump’s latest performance that crystallized it for me. He didn’t even get an hour’s worth of media dominance out of it before the backlash came at him from a range of prominent voices, making apparent his current political weakness. But without question we remain in an emergency situation, in an extremely dangerous moment—to mention one step in the slope towards outright fascism, over the weekend the UCLA stadium was used to detain hundreds of protestors corralled from the streets LA, conjuring spectres of Dirty War-style technicians of repression at work on US soil. COVID-19 will soon rage in a second surge—it’s already happening in the red counties that insisted on reopening two weeks ago. And what of the 40 million unemployed? Yet another factor, increasing desperation the only certainty.

Keep pushing and keep safe, everybody.

Dan W.


—Resident Artist, 18th Street Arts Center
IG: type_rounds_1968
danswang.xyz




On 02.06.20 19:48, tbyfield wrote:
These kinds of language games aren't as silly as they might seem at
first glance, because pop phrases like that hint — as if through a glass
or scanner darkly — diffuse assumptions about where we see ourselves
historically. A world where people are drawn to seeing anything and
everything as *broken* is a world in the past tense; all you can do is
*rebuild* — another word that tracks "is broken" with almost hilarious
precision...

Perhaps I was unclear, or insufficiently versed US conservative
rhetoric, but my intention was not inquire about things that
are broken (and hence in need of fixing) but about historical
discontinuities, about possible breaks with established patterns that
open up space for new dynamics, for the better or worse.




-- 

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