Living with Hate in American Politics and Religion

How Popular Culture Can Defuse Intractable Differences

Jeffrey Israel

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780231548755
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Jeffrey Israel offers an innovative argument for the power of playfulness in popular culture to make our capacity for coexistence imaginable. He explores how people from different backgrounds can pursue justice together, even as they play with their divisive grudges, prejudices, and desires in their cultural lives.

1

JEWISHNESS, RACE, AND POLITICAL EMOTIONS

There is a classic scene in Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing when Mookie, played by Lee, tries to talk to his coworker Pino, played by John Turturro, about his racial hypocrisy. Mookie is black and works at Sal’s pizzeria in Brooklyn with Pino, who is Italian. Mookie presses Pino to explain the fact that all of his favorite sports figures and entertainers are black, given that he constantly expresses racist attitudes: “Pino, all you ever talk about is nigger this, nigger that, when all your favorite people are so-called niggers.” The conversation goes nowhere, and the scene breaks off in frustration. Then there is a cut to Mookie, facing the camera directly, unloading in a slur-filled rant about Pino: “You dago, wop, guinea, garlic-breath, pizza-slinging, spaghetti-bending, Vic Damone, Perry Como, Luciano Pavarotti, Sole Mio, nonsinging motherfucker!”

Then we cut to Pino facing the camera ranting: “You gold-teeth-gold-chain-wearing, fried-chicken-and-biscuit-eating, monkey, ape, baboon, big thigh, fast-running, high-jumping, spear-chucking, three-hundred-sixty-degree-basketball-dunking titsun spade moulan yan! Take your fucking piece of pizza and go the fuck back to Africa.” Then Stevie, who is Puerto Rican: “You little slanty-eyed, me-no-speaky-American, own-every-fruit-and-vegetable-stand-in-New-York, bullshit Reverend Sun Myung Moon, Summer Olympics ’88, Korean kickboxing son of a bitch!” Then the white cop, Officer Gary Long: “You Goya bean-eating, fifteen in a car, thirty in an apartment, pointed shoes, red-wearing, Menudo, mira-mira, Puerto Rican cocksucker. Yeah, you!” Then Sonny, who is Korean: “‘It’s cheap, I got a good price for you!’ Mayor Koch, ‘How I’m doing?’ chocolate-egg-cream-drinking, bagel-and-lox B’nai B’rith Jew asshole!” The barrage of rants only stops when radio DJ Mister Señor Love Daddy, who generally presides over the film with wisdom, intervenes: “Yo! Hold up! Time out! Time out! Y’all take a chill! Ya need to cool that shit out! And that’s the double truth.”

Do the Right Thing is a landmark of rough play in American public culture. With this film and others, especially his post-9/11 film 25th Hour, Spike Lee has established himself as one of the artistic heroes of the new political love. In the scene I have just described, the juxtaposition of Mookie, Pino, Stevie, Officer Long, and Sonny screaming racial slurs and stereotypes at the camera has the simultaneous effect of highlighting the fraught differences between these characters and what they share in common. Whatever their differences, each character has simmering in his gut some set of nasty, unfair, dehumanizing thoughts and emotions about people in another group. I will investigate the ultimately humanizing effect of this verbal collage of dehumanization in chapter 5. For the moment, though, I want to focus on the shift in mood and language from Mookie’s attempt at an earnest discussion about race with Pino to his unrestrained rant and the rants that follow.

When the conversation between Mookie and Pino starts, over the cigarette machine in Sal’s, it has an intimate quality. The lighting is soft, and so is the contemplative jazz score in the background. When the conversation breaks off, the music shuts off too, and we’re in the street with Mookie spouting furiously. We see Mookie reaching out to Pino with curiosity and generosity. Then we see him enraged, attacking Pino with derogatory language about Italians. The rant is functionally a monologue to the film’s audience, but I do not think we should interpret it as revelatory of Mookie’s singular authentic self. Neither earnest Mookie nor ranting Mookie is “the true Mookie.” He is both. And his capacity for love and friendship across group boundaries is not incompatible with the derogatory resentment that he carries with him about Pino and maybe all Italians in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn.1 Like Radio Raheem, who wears the words spelled out on enormous rings, one on each hand, Mookie carries both love and hate ready at hand.

The search for political love in America is the search for the earnestness, curiosity, generosity, and solicitousness we can share despite the grudges that we will inevitably harbor against each other. It is a readiness to slip into the mood of the contemplative jazz sax that plays while Mookie reaches out to Pino.2 But political love, like the soft mood in the film just before the rant scene, must have an emotional basis that is different from the emotions that ultimately burst out as derogatory rage. The core argument of this book is that broadly shared political love is possible if all kinds of Americans can cultivate it together in the common domain of the political, even as we express our divisive unmitigated rage creatively in the domain of play. In this chapter I will explain what I mean by “political emotions,” how they differ from other kinds of emotions, and why we need to cultivate political love in particular. I rely heavily on Martha Nussbaum’s overall approach to political emotions and political justice. Though at the end of this chapter I will argue that her account is not yet sufficient and requires additional elements, which I will develop in the subsequent chapters.

A key element of Nussbaum’s account is that emotions involve cognitive processes of perception and judgment and always relate directly to something that is important to the individual having the emotion. If I am hiking in the woods and I hear breaking sticks and rustling leaves, my judgment that it is a charging bear and that my life—which is very important to me—is in danger constitutes the emotion of fear. I may feel feverish and hysterical or cold and inert, but the emotion is the perceptual judgment of a dangerous object threatening something I care about. This is important because emotions, on this account, centrally involve how we perceive the world and others in it. I heard the noise as a threatening bear. If I heard it, instead, as a gentle fawn then I would not have the same emotion.

When Mookie reaches out to Pino, he sees him as a person who might be able to open up, might be willing to have an earnest, self-critical conversation. When Mookie is ranting at the camera, by contrast, he sees Pino as a “dago, wop, guinea, garlic-breath,” etc. This shift in perceptual judgment is also an emotional shift. Emotions involve seeing-as. The broadly shared political love that I promote in this book is, then, a way of seeing—or, more generally, a way of perceiving and judging. When I describe it as “political,” I mean that it is supposed to be a way of perceiving and judging oneself and others that is open and inviting to all members of society regardless of however else they perceive and judge themselves and others.

I will explain this sense of “political” at length in what follows. What is important to register here is that there is no natural or neutral way of seeing the world and others. We shift around in response to context. But we are not mere passive respondents to context; we can also change it. And we can cultivate habits of perceptual judgment in certain contexts, while recognizing that we will see things differently in other contexts. We can shift the way that Mookie shifts. Since we are born from injustice, we will likely wear the ring of resentment on one hand, but this doesn’t mean that we can’t also wear the ring of political love on the other. If we want to live well together, then we should try to develop a way of seeing each other and ourselves—an American vision—that we can all share.

SEEING IN BLACK AND WHITE

There are a lot of good reasons to think that calling for such a vision is naive. After all, liberals have long counseled a posture of dignified civility and patience while deep structures of racial, gender, and other kinds of injustice remain intact. How can one be sure that the vision I’m offering is not yet another liberal ruse that ultimately functions to distract the historically oppressed from “the true picture of their situation”? In this section I will investigate a major reason to be skeptical about the possibility of cultivating widely shared political love in America: the integral role of white supremacy in our core political institutions and the tight hold that white supremacy has on how we perceive and judge each other.

A serious reckoning with and critique of white supremacy is a prerequisite for any legitimate American ideal. But more than this is needed if we would dare try to move forward together as a nation. Moving forward requires a bold shift of attention to new and compelling political emotions—a shift to Mookie’s solicitous way of seeing Pino. As we will see, a “shift of attention” is needed because an absolute repudiation and eradication of emotions that are tainted by the history of white supremacy is impossible. The meaning of these fraught emotions is simply too contentious and too wrapped up in who we are and what we care about. We need a political ideal of love to pursue together precisely because, inevitably, we will sometimes shift back to seeing each other according to the ugly visions that haunt us and ranting about each other with Mookie, Pino, Stevie, and the others on the street.

A skeptic about the prospect of broadly shared political love in America will rightly worry about the disturbing dissonance between the institutional “progress” claimed by liberals and the actual ways that people continue to perceive and judge each other. If we have made great strides in civil rights, in making sure that everyone is equal before the law, America is nevertheless still a place where racial oppression is pervasive. The political philosopher Charles Mills has pointed out that in societies where citizens are formally recognized as equal before the law, and minorities are ostensibly protected from discrimination, there is a tendency to see continuing racial animus as a mere remnant of retrograde attitudes that will soon disappear.3 But Mills explains that the very basis of our faith in formal equality as a value, the idea of a “social contract,” has functionally served from the very beginning to establish and perpetuate a racially hierarchical way of perceiving and judging. According to Mills, continuing instances of racial violence and exploitation are not merely lingering detritus but are part of what liberal democracies in the West were designed to protect. The social contract was designed to promise equality while perpetuating white supremacy.

The social contract is a classic idea in liberal political theory that says we can best understand the rights and obligations of a society’s members once we decide what would be fair, mutually beneficial rules for cooperation in a society where every member is free, equal, independent, rational, and self-interested and resources are scarce for all. This is an idea at the very root of American political thought, and it continues to inform popular “common sense.” Mills argues that we see only one side of the coin when philosophers, political thinkers, activists, and others point to the idea of a social contract in order to justify their political demands. The social contract has always been integrally related to an equally deeply rooted “Racial Contract”—the other side of the coin. The racial contract is a set of assumptions that affirm the fundamental legitimacy of the racially hierarchical status quo in which whites have disproportionate power nationally and globally over nonwhites.4 It is usually unacknowledged and often disingenuously or delusionally disavowed.

According to Mills, the social contract tradition that animates the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of the Man and of the Citizen, and is echoed when people today “insist on their rights and freedoms and express their outrage at not being treated equally,” was and remains presumptively for white men, by white men.5 On this view, wherever the ideal social contract has threatened genuinely to overturn the racial contract it is the social contract that has relented. As long as the racial contract is upheld, the moral power of the social contract tradition will be constrained to benefit the racially hierarchical status quo—that is, to benefit white supremacy.

Mills argues, further, that white supremacy is significantly perpetuated by the fact that white people, who generally lack self-critical awareness of the racial contract, are apt to live in “an invented delusional world, a racial fantasyland.”6 This is very important because it impacts how we see each other. James Baldwin captured powerfully the dissonance between what white people in America tell themselves and what black people have witnessed in his 1962 essay, “Down at the Cross.” “The American Negro,” he wrote,

has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world’s most direct and virile, that American women are pure. Negros know far more about white Americans than that.7

Mills has analyzed at length the social epistemology of “white ignorance”: the cognitive blinders that allow white Americans to see their world, which is characterized by white dominance and nonwhite disadvantage, as a good and natural world where America is unproblematically worthy of admiration as a historical beacon of liberty.8 In the “racial fantasylands” where white people imagine they live, Mills explains,

there will be white mythologies, invented Orients, invented Africas, invented Americas, with a correspondingly fabricated population, countries that never were, inhabited by people who never were—Calibans and Tontos, Man Fridays and Sambos—but who attain a virtual reality through their existence in travelers’ tales, folk myth, popular and highbrow fiction, colonial reports, scholarly theory, Hollywood cinema, living in the white imagination and determinedly imposed on their alarmed real-life counterparts.9

Mills decries...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Loving and Hating America Since the 1990s
• 1. Jewishness, Race, and Political Emotions
• 2. The Fact of Fraught Societies I: The Problem of Remainders
• 3. The Fact of Fraught Societies II: The Problem of Reproduction and the Missing Link Problem
• 4. The Capability of Play
• 5. Playing in Fraught Societies
• 6. Lenny Bruce and the Intimacy of Play
• 7. Philip Roth Tells the Greatest Jewish Joke Ever Told
• 8. All in the Family in the Moral History of America
• Epilogue: Losing Our “Religion” in the Domain of Play
• Notes
• Index