Necessary Academia #2: The fallacy of American meritocracy & its bodyguard
On night one of the Republican National Convention, Donald J. Trump was referred to as “The Bodyguard of Western Civilization”. At first, my inclination was to write about the dog-whistle in that language, however, on second thought, I think there is a more important discussion adjacent to that language about the social construct that is race and the false notion of an American meritocracy that it feeds on for sustenance.
It should be noted, before moving on, the significance of a fairly explicit reference to the superiority of Western culture/civilization-and the made-up “races” within it-that implores a singular human being capable of defending and protecting its power. Without getting into the dark nationalist and white supremacist undertones of that language, it would appear to me plainly anti-conservative and anti-American (for whatever that phrase is worth) to assign that level of absolute and totalitarian authority to a single human being in dictating and protecting a specific vision for the American experiment in governance. Nonetheless, let’s leave that for another day and discuss racism.
After referring to the President as the police chief of the west, and making it clear he believes it is an American value that religious observance (I’m guessing he’s mainly referring to one religion) is more virtuous than sports betting (debatable), Charlie Kirk-founder of a conservative non-profit-claimed that Americans “judge people on their actions, not on their immutable characteristics”. That sounds fair, right? Honestly, this is something I’ve heard from both of my middle-aged, progressively-minded parents over the last five years in discussions of affirmative action, mass incarceration or representation in the arts.
I believe Kirk’s quote is the most insidious phrase we heard on night one of the RNC, and the most damaging to the fight to dismantle systemic racism. Let’s be clear: what Kirk is arguing is that we should judge Americans-and subsequently build legal, criminal, housing, health insurance and education systems-based on people’s provable, discernible actions, not impregnable character traits such as race or sex. Kirk is invoking a long-held American political and philosophical fallacy that American society is built upon a foundation of equal opportunity and meritocracy. From this vantage point, if women are making 85 cents on the dollar, it is because they’re not as capable in equivalent work positions, and if black and brown men are disproportionately represented in prisons, it is because they are inherently more violent and criminal. This is a way of thinking that leads to building more prisons in the 1980s-90s when police forces were literally rounding up more black and brown people than they could fit into existing facilities, rather than contemplating the structural flaws in a society that is imprisoning its citizens at a rate that overwhelms our prison infrastructure.
This is what happens when you lay the structure of a nation and its economy on slave labor from people of a specific range of skin tone from a particular continent, while propagating the notion that these persons belong to a socially constructed race of inborn inferiority. Behind the perpetuation of the falsehood of an American meritocracy is the social construct that is the idea of race itself. Skin color/shade is an identifiable genetic characteristic that has no bearing or correlation to a human’s socioeconomic status or mobility. There is a spectrum of color in the homo sapiens species that has no innate relation to human character traits or self-evident rights. Race, on the other hand, is unequivocally a social construct designed to justify the dehumanization necessary to the establishment and preservation of the trans-atlantic slave trade.
Without a doubt, we as Americans can argue over the proper course of action, or rather recourse, in dismantling the racist structures this country’s economy and society is built upon. But for all the nuance of race relations one thing is simple: the sociological, psychological, political and interpersonal effort it takes to dehumanize an entire continent’s worth of the human species to the point of comfortability kidnapping and enslaving them cannot be erased by emancipation or desegregation. What we are watching play out at the RNC is not simply American nationalism or exceptionalism, it’s denial and furthermore, it is an abusive disorientation that anyone insistent upon preserving human civil rights must interrogate and disarm.
Western civilization does not need a bodyguard, it needs a reality check and a deep reconciliation with the truth.
A discussion over whether we should have a positive/negative take on the American journey toward legitimate faithfulness to any of its ideals of freedom and self-evident rights is merely political. There is nowhere to go except backward if we cannot reconcile the reality of our inability to uphold those ideals thus far for anyone outside the white male American caste. Of course, the idea of moving backwards in our race relations and social justice is only thinly veiled in the slogan on Trump’s red hats.
Charlie Kirk never used the n-word, and the RNC had black and brown speakers on stage supporting Trump. Nikki Haley did not suggest resegregating schools, she simply said America is not a racist country. That is more damaging to sweeping, structural change than QAnon conspiracy theories or any of Trump’s blatantly bigoted rhetoric. The belief in an American meritocracy is crippling to any impactful discussion of social justice or potential legislative reform that must follow.
The idea of America was founded on an equal opportunity for upward socioeconomic mobility that correlated directly to the sweat and effort put forth. The reality of America was built on plantation owning elites enslaving Africans and passing down their accrued generational wealth. Even now, race aside, a handful of people own half the stock market, leaving little space for the idealized American dream to play out as imagined. But add that extraordinary wealth disparity to a perception of a socially constructed black race-an idea formulated and propagated for no other reason than to justify slavery by means of dehumanization-and this is where black and brown people find themsleves trapped in marginalization in America.
This is where you find Jacob Blake, a black father in Wisconsin, shot multiple times by the cops with his kids in the car, and a nationwide discussion of whether or not he deserved it. This is how you find the cops who killed Breonna Taylor facing no punishment. This is how you find black and brown men and women in prison serving mandatory 15-30 year sentences for doing/selling a drug that is legal in a handful of states. This is how you end up with an America more segregated than before Plessy v. Ferguson.
What Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump and lots of speakers for the RNC do not want you to understand is that in America, you cannot make it to that ethereal city on a hill where you are judged by your actions unless you are born with certain immutable characteristics. If we pretend we are measured in America primarily by our actions, we are resigning to the notion that massive disparities in incarceration rates and wealth (among many other things) reveal nothing other than-you guessed it-immutable character traits based on race, gender or sexual orientation. The ability to persevere toward a degree of civil rights and opportunity for social mobility that America’s founding white men argued for is attainable only if we categorically disavow that fallacy.
We must let go of the notion of racist as an identity or label. When we self-report, nearly everyone thinks they are a better than average driver and middle class, but in reality we can’t all be the middle class and it took me three tries to get my driver’s license, so someone’s got to be better than me, I hope. No one wants to think they’re racist or even worse, identify as racist. But if we understand racism as a structural way of thinking or interpreting what we see in American society, it may be easier to reconcile that almost all of us employ racist thinking. And it traces back to the roots of skin color and race being manipulated as a social construct to justify a very specific instance of slavery.
We cannot dehumanize and enslave an entire continent’s worth of people based on a made up race we assign to them and then deny that very subjugation. You can take down fencing and barbed wire but the mentality, the structures, the deep understanding and ideology that went into holding them captive in the first place perseveres and pervades American society. And as long as we perpetuate the notion of meritocracy in America, we can rest assured we will never have one.