Disproportionate Repetitions

A couple of weeks ago I read a New York Times editorial about the use of credit-screenings by employers on potential employees. The editorial talked about a recent study that suggests that such practices unfairly designate prospective job-seekers as poor job candidates when in fact there is evidence that poor credit history does not necessarily signify a poor job prospect and the likelihood that "most of those who suffered degraded credit ratings during the recession either lost their job, lacked medical insurance or incurred debt when they were injured or got sick."

But I don't necessarily want to speak to those issues here. You can read the Times' editorial (it's really short). I want to talk about these two sentences:

"The study also underscored the fact that African-American families have been disproportionately affected. They had fewer assets to start with, and were easy targets for predatory subprime lenders who led them deeper into debt." 

Can a sentence become tokenized?

If I had a dime for every time an article about class-based inequality, from news sources both on the Right and on the Left, includes a sentence or two mentioning how African Americans (and usually Latino/as) are "disproportionately" represented in some demographic -- be it the unemployed, the imprisoned, or simply the poor -- I would be a rich man (which is different from being a wealthy man -- and that's important!). It is impossible, I think, to not notice the ubiquity of this repetition.

Almost like the token racialized subject, the sentence about "disproportionate" effects for African Americans is a required piece of any article on inequality that is itself a disproportionate repetition, appearing so many times so as to normalize the poverty of blackness in America, to turn the effects of violence into solidified facts of our socio-economic world.

I will take this opportunity of my first post here at Liberal D.O.G.MA to make clear one of my fundamental positions that will underlie a lot of what I will probably be writing on this blog: Disparities of wealth and income which play out according to racial demographics cannot merely be reduced to an explanation based on class. I will always vehemently reject and refuse the assertion, "It's really about class, not race."

In this blog of three liberals (and let me quickly say that I am a "liberal" on our two-dimensional political spectrum here in the U.S., but I am suspicious of the merits of [neo]liberalism as a political project towards which it is worth retaining an unwavering commitment), I situate myself as someone deeply concerned with material inequalities, but who also does not reduce inequality to issues of pure class struggle. I will always insist on attending to differences in race, sex, gender, sexuality, and other identities as they inflect and complicate strict class-based analysis.

This is because of my attentions to the continuities of history -- even as I wish to attend to ruptures as well. (Us African Americanists can be notorious for insistently invoking the "both/and" all the time!)

To return to the Times' own language, pasted with different emphasis: "The study also underscored the fact that African-American families have been disproportionately affected. They had fewer assets to start with, and were easy targets for predatory subprime lenders who led them deeper into debt."

That phrase I bolded and underlined is taken so much for granted so often in these instantiations of what I want to call disproportionate repetitions. I don't think mainstream dialogue really feels the weight of just what that means. There is so much violence written into that short phrase, from slavery and the unpaid labor that literally built this country's (not just the South's) wealth and power to slavery's aftermath in lynchings and the formations of police forces to control criminal (read as "black" -- see nineteenth-century newspaper editorials or Mayoral speeches for evidence; also read Bryan Wagner's awesome book Disturbing the Peace) people.

My point, I guess, is that while a strictly class-based analysis of material inequality works for a history-less population, it doesn't work in the real world where history -- especially the history of race -- continues to matter.

We need to investigate what's packed up in the "to start with" that always appears, be it implicitly or explicitly, in these disproportionate repetitions and pause to feel the weight of those words.

Where you "start" a story matters.