Narrative Warfare: Black Americans in the Crossfire

An example of what I call high-intensity narrative warfare is when states such as Russia interfere with American elections by ginning up conflict through bots and state-sanctioned campaigns, using American social media as a weapon to sow dissension and chaos. The propaganda that Putin is currently spreading to the Russian people about the unjust war against Ukraine through state-sponsored media—after gutting any and all remaining independent media inside Russia and cutting off the spigots of media coverage coming from outside that nation—is another example of such narrative warfare. 

Within the culture wars in the United States, with so-called liberals and so-called conservatives perpetually vying for political power through ideological combat, the narrative warfare is relatively low-intensity. 

Nonetheless, the image and reputation of Black Americans are much too often caught in the crossfire of such narrative conflict. By “Black American,” I mean persons of African descent indigenous to the United States who share ancestry, nationality, ethnic bonds, and cultural history. I am not referring to a racial categorization; this distinction is important, as you will see.  

Black Americans as Ideological Pawns

As a radical moderate, I neither identify as liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican. I’m an independent suspicious of both sides of the political aisle, especially at the extremes. So, I smh (shake my head) as partisan ideologues and opportunists on both sides use race as political footballs, trampling over the dignity of Black Americans to score touchdowns at the ballot box and win arguments on social and cable media. 

On the left, especially among postmodern progressives, the narrative has come to center on racism as ubiquitous, with white supremacy run amok not only historically, but as prominent today as ever, evidenced by social and economic disparities and police brutality against unarmed Black folk. On the right, racism is often perceived as overblown, an excuse for race hustlers to shake down institutions through cancel culture, Critical Race Theory, Black Lives Matter, and anti-racist JEDI workshops. Conservatives, for instance, will accurately point out that leftists highlight police brutality while eliding the horrific rates of gun violence in certain inner-city neighborhoods, which kills far more people annually than killings by cops. I just wonder if they’d give a fig if that point wasn’t a battering ram in their ideological warfare against progressives.  

I tire of my ethnic and cultural tribe being used like ping pong balls in the culture wars. And even sincere, well-meaning political observers who stand up for classically liberal values, and against illiberalism on both sides, play into narratives that place Black Americans at the short end of the stick of analysis. 

Case in Point: An Essay published by FAIR

For instance, take an opinion piece titled “Despair Over disparities: systemic racism or systemic dysfunction” by columnist and senior policy analyst Carrie Sheffield published on the FAIR (Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism) Substack just last week. Mind you, I support the mission and vision of FAIR, described by its founder Bion Bartning as advocating “for a philosophy and set of positive values that are shared by the vast majority of Americans and people of goodwill around the world. Our philosophy advocates for civil rights and liberties, and compassionate opposition to racism and intolerance rooted in dignity and our common humanity” while being against:  

. . . a new philosophical orthodoxy that has taken root in our culture, and is causing us to regress around issues of race, racism, and tolerance for diverse perspectives. Instead of gratitude, this philosophy centers grievance. Instead of inspiring optimism, it invokes learned helplessness. Instead of forgiveness, it encourages us to drink the poison of resentment. Instead of teaching our children that they are unique individuals united by our shared humanity, it insists that they identify as members of racialized identity groups locked in a zero sum battle for power.

I agree with Bartning, which is why I and my partners in the “Shaping an Omni-American Future” movement welcomed their support when we launched last October. So my constructive critique should not be read as a negative assessment of FAIR, tout court.

Carrie Sheffield

Carrie Sheffield’s personal story is inspiring. She survived a deeply unstable and neglectful upbringing and witnessed firsthand the horrible public schooling that too many students racialized as black suffer. She speaks about the need for a social safety net from having experienced being on Welfare, using Medicaid, and living in housing after college with government income restrictions. 

I’m not saying there’s no place for a social safety net—I’ve benefited from that safety net myself, and have gone on to pay much more back into the system. After graduating with a bachelor’s and master’s degree, I worked in finance at Goldman Sachs and Moody’s Investors Service, and for influential policy think tanks like The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and for a scholar at The American Enterprise Institute.

But sadly, my success is becoming more the exception than the rule because of a growing culture that fetishizes victimization rather than triumph over adversity. Yes my skin is white, but I had substantial obstacles in my path—far more than the average American child of any skin color. This includes no consistent running water until I hit college, two abusive schizophrenic older brothers (including one who sexually assaulted me) along with PTSD, depression, and near-fatal hyponatremia.

Sheffield goes on to reject notions of legalized “white privilege” while acknowledging “interpersonal racism.” She cites the empirical research of economists Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams, and journalist Jason Riley, to counter the claim that even when taking into consideration centuries of systemic racism, that today’s racism is the primary causal basis for disparities between nominally white and black people. 

According to Sheffield, the fault lies not in systemic racism but in what she calls “systemic dysfunction,” caused largely by “New Deal welfare policies and the 1960s drug and sexual revolution [that] pushed fathers out of homes and children into drugs and gangs.”

Let’s say that this conservative critique is at least partly true. Liberals avoid accepting such arguments because of the possibility of “blaming the victim,” but I chafe at such a anti-heroic victim narrative. One can be victimized in the past without remaining a victim today. And, as the great artist, author, and philosopher Charles Johnson says, just because we aren’t blind to racial injustices in the past (and present) doesn’t mean we have to be bound by it either. Yet in her next rhetorical move, Sheffield steps into manure by comparing native-born Black Americans to black immigrants, referencing Pew Center research from 2013.

Rather than white supremacy, there must be a more complex set of answers (including policy, culture, family structure, and personal decisions) that can explain Pew's findings comparing black immigrants vs. native-born black Americans. Black immigrants have higher educational attainment, make more money, have a lower poverty rate, are more likely to be married (unmarried parenting is the crucial variable associated with poverty and criminality), and are much closer to parity with non-black Americans overall than with native-born black Americans.

I agree that "white supremacy" is a poor causal explanation. But why use Pew findings from 2013 when the current census provides updated statistics? According to Pew's 2013 stats, 28% of native-born Black Americans were living under the poverty line, whereas “black” immigrants from Africa and the West Indies were at 20%. 

Yet the 2020 census revealed that the poverty rate for native-born Black Americans dropped by nearly 10%, making it less than the black immigrant rate of 2013. My point is this: it's not necessary to pit so-called black immigrants against native-born so-called blacks to prove that white supremacy isn't a valid sole causal factor of disparities. As a multi-generation Black American citizen, I'm disturbed by the meme of pathology that too often accompanies criticism of anti-racist ideologues who over-emphasize white supremacy. 

Albert Murray viewed what he called "the fakelore of black pathology" as the corollary of "the folklore of white supremacy," often perpetuated by social scientists wielding statistics to demonstrate how screwed up and ill-fitting with “middle-class values” Black Americans supposedly are. Even if that wasn’t Sheffield’s intent, the meme and narrative itself is insidious, because it perpetuates an overt emphasis on RACE—which the people she and FAIR criticize do also. Furthermore, if we view people from across the African diaspora through the lens of race, rather than, say, culture and historical specificity, we end up comparing apples and oranges. Self-selected black immigrants to the United States over the past forty years are compared to indigenous Black Americans, who have contributed to American life and culture for hundreds of years, through the lens of race to score ideological points. But what if we compared the overall wealth of Black Americans to other blacks in various nations? Might not they have a lesser level of overall wealth because of their unique colonial and postcolonial history?

Racial Double Standards

And why aren’t immigrants and native-born persons racialized as "white" compared in such a manner? Why don't we see statistics comparing Europeans from different regions and nations to native-born "whites" in the United States? 

I’ll ask again: why is the analytical deck stacked to compare people from Africa and the West Indies to American-born blacks but not for "whites" from various parts of Europe and elsewhere? And even among the native-born people who are classified as white, why don’t we see statistical comparisons among, say, Anglo-Saxon Protestants and people of Irish, Italian, and Polish ancestry? 

In my next post, I’ll argue for an approach to our discourse involving race and disparities that begins by emphasizing assets over liabilities. “Liability framing” is unfortunately the default position of many academics, activists, and reporters who discuss Americans who self-identify as Black. By framing issues first in terms of the assets people have and bring, we can jump off the vicious wheel of racialization that put us in this mess in the first place.