Less Morals and More Matter: America’s Race Problems are Structural, Not Attitudinal, and Call for Politics, Not Policing

Comment published on New York Times on-line blog in response to Times columnist Charles Blow, “On Race: The Moral High Ground,” May 31, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/opinion/roseanne-valerie-jarrett-race-trump.html?comments#commentsContainer

"But this moral rage is separate and apart from emotional distress, the former being active and energetic while the latter is passive and plaintive."

Yes! Nietzsche scarcely said it better. Oppressed, one learns managing anger, which can be disabling impotent resentment or joyful moral and political empowerment. 

Though acknowledging this doesn't get Blow and most black intellectuals out of neoliberalism. It considers racism an attitude calling for the policing of social norms. 

Roseanne's show should be barred not because she is racist, but because it is. 

Smart radicals do not repay resentment measure for measure, not to turn the other cheek but to live the life of a citizen effectively. 

But of course racism lives far less in easily sanctioned attitudes (to welcome every stranger in the corporate body?) than the structure and form of our society, including its economics and its prevailing styles of authority. 

America would be a happier and less anxious and brutal country for most of its residents were it not for the legacy of slavery and the continuing criminalization of Blackness. 

Where are the efforts to change this? Scarcely anyone wants to try: it is easier to punish bad men than raise good ones. Why care for human flourishing when it is cheaper to police its failures? 

(Policy suggestion: Equal funding for every public school student in the country based on entirely federal financing and with solid literature and writing based curricula.)