CW: mention of the n-word slur in today’s essay
I don’t have a ton of sympathy for Albert, the old guy from last week’s newsletter. Here’s what erased any lingering tenderness I might have experienced for the man: he called the teenage girl who couldn’t understand my order at McDonald’s a “n****r”. He whispered it under his breath from my backseat. She was stupid, you see, because she couldn’t hear me. And what moron can’t take an order down? Had to be a n****r.
“We don’t say that word,” my friend told Albert, sternly; almost despairingly. “We do not say that word. You never say that word.”
I could tell it was a conversation they had had many times before; I could tell that this was the compromise my friend had tried to strike with Albert — if you cannot stay away from subliminally racist thoughts, at least don’t come out the gate with overt bigotry.
“It makes sense in context,” Albert insisted.
I rolled up my window really fast, hoping the kid never heard what was muttered about her. She showed no sign, when we rolled up to her window, of having heard what Albert said, and I was in no mood to enlighten her. We paid, and left, with our (incorrect) orders.
So what do we do? Do we get Albert fired from his job?
I wouldn’t cry very many tears for Albert if his identity was to become public and he was to lose his job. Honestly. The guy is kind of a stupid asshole.
The problem is — and I honestly don’t get anyone who doesn’t see this as a problem — is that Albert is a worker. Yes, he’s the stereotypical masculine, traditional conception of a worker, complete with hardhat and union card and white skin — he’s who Trump thinks of when Trump praises ordinary people. Yes, someone with as much privilege as Albert is statistically in the minority of “workers” — he’s not a woman of color, working a service job — but he’s still a worker. He produces, with his labor, wealth for his employers, for which he receives but a fraction.
We have to be there for workers, as everyone keeps telling us. Workers are who will save us. But we also have to be against racism, we have to be against homophobia and transphobia and misogyny and all the bad stuff. What do we do if the workers are racist? What do we do if the workers themselves are bad?
Well, think of the other workers, you say, the workers of color, the gay and trans workers, who have to work with the white privileged workers, who keep spewing bigoted shit, who harass them, who make it hard for the actually-marginalized workers to do their damned jobs. The real workers are the ones that need to be looked after, not the racist workers, whom, if we squint at them in a certain way, might not even be workers at all.
We only have so much energy; let’s organize the workers for whom hope still remains.
Only problem, of course, is that racist workers like Albert exist. The only problem is that they fail to go away, once you’ve mathematically eliminated them from the equation, and the white remainder stock will fill the ranks of reaction. They, shut out of respectable society, will fuel the fascist takeover of every liberal institution that we still need for a functioning society.
This is a white supremacist country. It’s not just white supremacist in its institutions and financial relations — although it is plenty that. Its people are also fundamentally, indelibly racist. The core of us — our people — are infected with the worst kind of bigotry.
I’ve argued that racism is a structural problem before. And it is. But it’s also a deeply inter-personal problem. For every large company that systematically underpays and under-employs Black and brown labor, there are many more Alberts, rolling up to a McDonalds’ window, calling teenage Black girls the n-word.
Especially when we’re doing the hard work of imagining a better world, we don’t get to lean hard on the excuse that we have a limited amount of energy with which to organize with. Our imaginations are where we get to play a little; where we get to wonder how things might be, if we had our way.
(Albert kind of reminds me of Archie Bunker, so here’s a picture of Archie Bunker.)
If we could organize Albert, how would we go about doing that? If we could make Albert into an intersectional comrade, how do we do that?
We don’t. We won’t be successful; even when exercising our imaginations to the fullest, I don’t see a future in which Albert becomes woke. We can try, but we won’t change Albert’s mind about anything.
Look, there’s no struggle session that can be had with Albert that will produce anything but increased defiance. Almost no oppositional approach can be taken with Albert; he is a highly sensitive, arrogant, hyper-reactive old man who is firmly set in his ways. My friend has done his best to set Albert straight, and all it resulted in was increased grumbling.
Do we get Albert fired?
I don’t think so. If Albert had made a scene, if he had made sure the girl had heard him call her the n-word, if he had gone out of his way to make her have a lousy night, and it had gotten back to his employer, and his employer had decided to terminate him — I wouldn’t be too upset. I disagreed with this Jacobin article that argued that workers shouldn’t face dire consequences for their bigoted actions, up to and including termination. Albert should have to take responsibility for his actions.
But it is significant to me that Albert muttered his slurs under his breath. It’s significant to me that the girl (hopefully) never heard him. Albert knew better than to openly call the little girl at the counter something terrible. Thirty years ago, he might have acted worse, but the fact that he didn’t, is a testament to changing norms around acting racist, openly. (While overtly racist acts in public might seem as if they’re on the rise in recent years, I’d wager that they’re actually probably not — it just seems that way due to the proliferation of smartphones and social media.)
To me, that means our efforts to change standards around how to act are working. We’re fixing behavior, even if we’re not changing hearts and minds.
And that’s really all we can do, in Albert’s case. Fix his behavior. That’s the extent of the organizing you can do. Roll up your window so the girl doesn’t hear the terrible things he has to say under his breath, preserve her blessed ignorance for a little bit more.
And in the meantime — we fight for workers. Not just the workers for whom the fight is more palatable, like the girl at the McDonald’s counter, who makes a fraction of what Albert makes, who, unlike Albert, is without a union, who almost definitely needs the help more. We, for better or worse, include Albert in our efforts. Because though he might harbor evil beliefs, because even if he has been hoodwinked by Trumpism and has been red-scared into rejecting anything that has even a whiff of socialism about it, the consequences of ignoring him are dire.
We know they’re dire, because they’re playing out, right now. Capitalism has ignored Albert’s needs, has cut his standard of living precipitously. And the Democratic Party — the party that was supposed to stand for working people like Albert — have instead offered neoliberal solutions that are supposed to work better than government largesse. Their real effect has been to siphon off the people’s wealth to the top 1%, the ultra-wealthy, and the corporations they run.
What about Bernie Sanders? Bernie was supposed to be able to reach not just the girl at the McDonald’s counter, but Albert himself. Right? He was supposed to reach the disaffected “white working class,” who are struggling to earn anything after decades of neoliberal misrule. Well, he’s certainly reached some of them. Our rust belt county reliably goes to Bernie Sanders every presidential primary he’s stood in. But he hasn’t reached Albert yet. Maybe if Sanders had achieved the White House, had received the ultimate bully pulpit that he had been demanding; maybe Albert would have listened then.
But who knows.
The point is that you don’t toss out the potential contributions a person like Albert could give to a vibrant, diverse, left. You do your best to ignore the long-standing beliefs he has — you pay attention to what he can do, rather than what he is. And you incentivize correct, non-bigoted action that advances the cause of the working class and of the left. Maybe Albert, as a life-long union member, knows the meaning of a strike, understands what a picket line means — maybe that’s something he can teach a young left, which has been divorced from organized labor for a long time. Maybe Albert, with his instinctive knowledge of his own self-worth, can teach us what it means to want more for ourselves.
Do I believe Albert himself will ever switch sides? I don’t. The man is probably too far gone down the path of reaction. We’ve probably lost him to Trumpism forever.
But there are others like him. Younger than him, probably. Others who feel like he does, others who are a tad more flexible, others who can be reliably incentivized to work for a renewed left movement.
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Now I stick to pretty much one topic per issue.
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