Why GOP Right Is Beating Up on the Poor


Heart of Darkness

Paul Ryan is at it again. Last week I discussed his attack on free school lunches for the poor (“What the left is offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul”), and now he’s stigmatizing inner city young black men.  In the past I’ve talked about how we project our fears onto the Other (for instance, here) and it appears time for me to do it again. For help, I’ve turned this time to Nobel laureate Chinua Achebe’s famous critique of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Ryan’s recent interview, in case you haven’t heard, included the following:

We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.

Let’s pause a moment to note the factual inaccuracy of the statement before looking at why someone would make it. First of all, to use young black men as the face of cultural tailspin plugs into various racist stereotypes which have gripped our country for decades and which have led to higher incarceration rates for Blacks than for whites committing similar crimes and to Stand Your Ground laws. No matter that most of the poor in this country are white rather than of color (43%); that poverty is more endemic in rural areas than in the cities; that there are plenty of people in the cities who are desperate for work (note the long lines that form when a new hotel or other large business opens); that most poor people work constantly to make ends meet even as people like Ryan oppose spending more on infrastructure projects and raising the minimum wage; and that, most significantly, rising poverty in the inner city has one major cause that swamps all other explanations: not laziness, not drugs, not hip-hop, but the steady exodus, beginning in the 1970’s, of manufacturing.

But it’s much easier and more politically advantageous to beat up on a caricature. Achebe’s takedown of Conrad reveals how projecting upon the poor and oppressed works.

Conrad, Achebe notes, is concerned about a certain corruption of spirit—a heart of darkness—within Western civilization and the white psyche. In that Conrad is on solid ground. [Note: Achebe doesn’t distinguish between Conrad and his narrator Marlow and, on the subject of race, I think that’s justified.] Unfortunately, Conrad chose to use Africans to stand in for the darkness. The problem with Kurtz, Conrad’s exemplar of European civilization is that he has an African side.

The life that attracts Kurtz has little to do with real Africans. Achebe shows the stereotypes at work in the following Marlow passage:

We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil. But suddenly as we struggled round a bend there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy… 

Then we see Marlow all but acknowledge that he is projecting his own fears upon the Africans—although despite his flash of self awareness, he still thinks he is describing the Africans as they actually are:

The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there — there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly and the men were …. No they were not inhuman. Well, you know that was the worst of it — this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped and spun and made horrid faces, but what thrilled you, was just the thought of their humanity — like yours — the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough, but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you — you so remote from the night of first ages — could comprehend.

When I teach Heart of Darkness, I follow it up with Achebe’s Things Fall Apart so that my students will move beyond stereotypes and see Africans—Ibo-Nigerians in this case—with names, personalities, virtues and vices, individual dreams, and all the rest. Conrad, by contrast, is not interested in Africans except to the extent that he doesn’t like King Leopold’s treatment of the Congolese.

But the problem was not only with Leopold, although his Belgian colonialism was the worst. The British, while more humane, were also grabbing land and resources. To justify their rapaciousness, they told themselves they were bringing Christianity and enlightenment to the heathen. The contrast between ideals and actual practice, which even the English were beginning to acknowledge at the time Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness (thus public ambivalence toward the Boer War), led to Conrad’s crisis of faith.

Marlow lies to Kurtz’s Intended upon returning to Europe, even though he loathes falsehoods, because he depends on her faith in colonialism’s stated ideals. Without her belief, however ill-founded, that Europe is engaged in more than a greedy plunder mission, he himself would sink into abject despair.

Allow me a digression here about a family connection with British colonialism. My grandmother’s father, Edwin Fulcher, was in South Africa in the late 19th century as an accountant for a diamond operation and knew Cecil Rhodes personally. (To his credit, he couldn’t stand Rhodes, although the reason was not because the “great imperialist” was envisioning a British African empire stretching “from Capetown to Cairo” but because he was a jerk.) Cheated by his partner, Fulcher immigrated to the United States and gave lectures designed to sway American sympathies from the Boers to the British. Sounding a bit like the idealistic women in Conrad’s novel, Fulcher argued that the Brits would be more humane to the Blacks. Come of think it, my grandmother (“Granny” we called her) was a dead ringer for the Intended. Born in 1889, she was very sweet and very innocent, a veritable Victorian angel on the hearth.

Back to Heart of Darkness and how it applies to Paul Ryan. If Great Britain had a spiritual crisis because its civilized ideals clashed with its colonial practices, then America has a spiritual crisis because its dream of itself as an equal opportunity society clashes with the growing reality that the privileged keep getting wealthier while everyone else stagnates. As Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine noted recently, Ryan is a deficit hawk who is

committed to balancing the budget within the next decade. But he wants to prop up defense spending, refuses to increase tax revenue, and has promised to maintain Social Security and Medicare benefits for all current retirees. He recently cut a deal with Democrats to ease cuts in the main domestic spending programs. Having taken everything else off the table, the only place left for his cuts is programs that benefit the poor.

Ryan tries to argue that genuine concern for their welfare drives his cuts, just as the Brits expressed concern for the souls of the Africans whose resources they were taking. I don’t think that even the Intended, however, would fall for Ryan’s line of reasoning. (Last week I imagined how John Milton and Jane Eyre would respond.)

At a time when the stock market is soaring and income disparities are reaching Gilded Age levels, expect to see a lot more attacks on America’s poor. It’s easier than facing up to what’s really causing our “tailspin of culture.”

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