Doug Jones won his election with a two-prong strategy.
First, he spoke to people of color in the large cities and the Black Belt. In particular, black women pushed Jones over the hump. They won the election. This victory belongs to them.
Second, he spoke to Alabama’s evidently infinite renewable resource of white suburbanites, appealing to their disgust with Moore. He won over just enough of them to keep it close so those women could push it over the top. He prevented the gains among people of color from being drowned in an ocean of white reflexively Republican votes.
How’d he do that? He was respectful and not condescending.
I didn’t hear a lot of that here on Kos.
Gratuitous "well, that's white people" or "well, that’s white men" eyeroll barbs punctuate a huge number of posts on Kos and every liberal or center-left forum or Comment section. This has always struck me as stupid college sophomore crap and very counter-productive once we get outside this very small circle of cognoscenti. Most people really don’t like implicit (or explicit) attacks on their identity, even when there’s a backstory.
Yes, I know exactly what the people who add those hamfisted slams are getting at. Yes, there is both a history and a still breathing reality of privilege which overdetermines our social relations and our laws and which has centered whiteness and maleness as the “normal” origin from which all other identities are measured as deviance. It is deeply sexist and racist. Yes, of course, all true and important. And when we are talking about the sociology of identity that is vital to acknowledge and build out from. It should inform our strategies.
But should it be our strategy? 50% of whites just fell off the turnip truck. They REALLY think that when you say "Black Lives Matter" you're misspelling "kill whitey." The left, particularly the young, loves to talk its own shorthand and slang and fuck the public if they don't get it. Every klatsch has in-group passwords. Which would be fun except the public votes, and an unwitting vote cancels your witting one.
And even if, say, you sincerely can't stand an identity, you can still be circumspect. I am a liberal atheist unicorn in a conservative fundy workplace. But when I discuss or debate with Thumpers I'm not actually addressing them as "Thumpers." Are they? You bet they are. But would addressing them as such assist me in changing their minds?
Reagan always closed the door before he laughed at the fundies who came calling on him. Scratching an itch is satisfying, but winning is really satisfying.
I know this is a very difficult thing to hear, particularly if you are a white liberal who has just recently dropped off the university conveyor belt and has been incentified all your life to drop such bon mots in order to demonstrate an appropriate level of self-deprecation and sustain group membership as One of the Good Ones. Such things are important in the sociology of small groups — they help make the wheels run smooth.
But I’m begging: not in public; not with a loudspeaker. It’s not only juvenile; it works against us. The work is all that matters in the end.
