Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Notes from Far Muscovy

I dreamt last night that I was sharing a taxi with Putin from Moscow to Sheremetyevo airport. He was being very friendly and I could tell he liked me. I felt like a coward and a moral cretin for not saying anything critical that would cause him to not like me, and at the same time I kept trying to convince myself that there were strong pragmatic reasons for maintaining good relations, at least for now, as this would enable me to eventually write more revealingly about him. I knew this was bullshit, however, and that I was really just a grovelling sycophantic underling who craved the approval of people in power. Then we got into a massive traffic jam, and I was so filled with self-hatred and dread that I woke up. 

In real life I had shared a taxi from Moscow to Sheremetyevo, earlier that same day, with a kind, gentle, architect from Berlin. By 'architect' I mean one of those people from Berlin who talks about 'space' a lot and who participates in panels with philosophers. He has probably never built any buildings, but nor has he blown any up, which is why I am wondering why he got replaced by Putin in my dream.

We had been, earlier in the day, on a panel in front of a few hundred people and a number of angry journalists. We were a motley crew of philosophers and political activists, and to be perfectly honest my reason for accepting the invitation was somewhat disingenuous: it meant an opportunity to go back to Russia after what seems like a lifetime away.

Anyhow there were seething antagonistic dynamics between different parties in the room that I could not even begin to decipher. There was a guy on the panel who looked like a skateboarder but announced himself as a psychoanalyst. There were plenty of the sort of bearded, long-haired Russian men who could be either dissident leftists or ultranationalist Orthodox spiritualists. Many of the people in the room clearly had cults of personality attached to them, but I did not know who they were or in virtue of what the cults had congealed.

There was much talk, more than any westerner could possibly anticipate, of Ukraine, and of popular will, and revolution.

When it came time for questions a man in the audience stood up and said, "I am a doctor of philosophy. First of all, I would like to begin by asking you all to express solidarity with the protesters in Kiev. Long live the Ukrainian Revolution! Long live Maidan!" He held up his fist and yelled "Long live Maidan!" again, and then I and maybe a dozen other people did the same. (Why not? I thought. I too support Maidan.) Then there was an awkward silence, and the journalists were all glancing around to see who expressed solidarity and who kept silent. Would there be repercussions? I wondered.

And then the 'doctor of philosophy' said (to paraphrase): "All you so-called philosophers ought to be ashamed of yourselves. You haven't even mentioned morality once. And that's what philosophers need to be talking about: morality. Here we are in a world where all sorts of unnatural things are happening: capitalism, genetic engineering, same-sex marriage, drugs, and so on. How are we going to put a stop to these things if we don't start taking morality seriously?" 

For some reason they decided to pass the microphone to me. My Russian skills, often inaccessible during this short visit, snapped to attention, and I said: "As far as I am concerned it is the sole duty of a philosopher to compare different systems of morality, to attempt to find their weaknesses and inconsistencies, but by no means to defend the one or the other." There was much muttering and nonplussedness. 

What are the lessons I am drawing? For one thing, I return convinced more than ever that Russia is far more foreign than westerners are willing to recognize. On this visit I heard, on multiple occasions and from people of all political orientations, the expression of a contrast between 'us' and 'Europe'. In the Soviet period and much earlier, the eternal question was whether 'we' are European or Asian, whereas now there seems to be a resolute and unconflicted commitment to the role of a tertium quid. At the same time, Moscow is indeed clearly more 'Asiatic' than it was 20 years ago, as a result of migration patterns from Central Asia. Restaurant wait-staff, construction workers, and others closer to the bottom of the social ladder are, it seems, far more likely to be named Chingiz than Sergei. One is reminded of how much of the current territory of Russia --not the former USSR, but Russia-- was once covered by khanates.

But the lessons, the lessons. There is a place in the world where same-sex marriage can be plausibly lumped together with GMO's as a sign of a world gone wrong, and indeed as a sign of excessive American power. One disagrees, but still wishes to rub one's western liberal academic friends' faces in it a bit: try to fit this into your pat schemes, into your Facebook echo chambers of mutually assured agreement. 

One of the most intense preoccupations of western social media over the past few months is the question how, in spite of the fact that Russia is so terribly homophobic, nonetheless Russian men, and particularly Putin, look so hopelessly gay. The country's leader goes horseback riding with his shirt off, and does so in defense of a purportedly rigorously heteronormative conception of masculinity. What on earth is going on here? It seems to me that there is something even far deeper than homophobia that marks the distance between Russia and the west in these matters, and that is a different relationship to irony, of which, I take it, the 'camp' so lucidly analyzed by Susan Sontag is but a subspecies. In the west it is impossible to simply be a man in the way Russians such as Putin take for granted, since the gestures or styles in which this would consist are continually being taken up by people who would like to subvert, invert, or at least question the process by which something so minor as gestures or styles could ever constitute something so fundamental as identity. 

Putin is purportedly a hardbody (if by now tending toward gynecomastia, and really more thick than hard), but his authoritarianism is soft. For comparison, a fascinating list has been circulating of western bands prohibited by Soviet authorities in 1984. Number 1 is 'German-Polish Aggression', which is almost certainly made up. Number 2 is 'German-American Friendship', by which I assume they mean Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft or DAF, which really existed but had nothing to do with the Marshall Plan or geopolitics. Numbers 3-14 are Soviet 'Red Wave' bands (except for one Czech group), and it's not at all surprising to see them on a government blacklist. Then, suddenly, at 15 we get Blue Öyster Cult followed by a number of well-known western groups. The list is fairly clearly composed by clueless government agents, filled with misspellings and misgroupings, e.g., number 44: 'Blondi and Debbia Kharri'. 'Dzhutas Prist', 'Depesh Med', 'Kalche Klub', 'Tokan Khedz' (i.e., Talking Heads), follow no known transliteration scheme. Julio Iglesias comes in at 45, two spots ahead of Black Sabbath, which strongly suggests the numbers are not ordinal. This list is really a nice measure of how much has changed: 'soft' authoritarianism of the sort Putin has perfected doesn't waste time with stuff like this.

And then comes glasnost: I remember, in 1991, seeing a USSR state-run Melodiya vinyl recording of Pearl Jam, released not under the name Пэрл Джем, but rather Жемчужное Варенье, literally, "Pearl Jam," i.e., fruit spread that is made out of pearls. So even with the official policy of openness the state proved as clueless as ever.

Lenin's name is now fading in the marble atop his mausoleum on Red Square. The opening hours have been reduced to 10h-13h weekdays, and apparently for Russian citizens only [Вход для граждан]. Of all former leaders, Lenin seems the hardest to fit into current narratives of national identity. Stalin fits very well, without having to be mentioned by name. The precise species of dictatorship Putin is crafting is definitely not a revolutionary one, of the proletariat, and it's not an omnipresent heavy-handed one either. The propaganda is unrelenting, but as long as you are a powerless nobody you're free to express dissenting opinions as much as you like. I held my fist up in support of the Maidan protestors, one of whose leaders, evidently, Putin recently caused to be tortured. This happened in front of TV cameras. Why didn't more people hold their fists up? Again, I don't know.

I did get 'controlled' for eating an apple while waiting on the metro platform at Revolution Square (a transgression of which I'm guilty in multiple jurisdictions), but when the police saw my American passport they congratulated me for the glorious victory of the US hockey team earlier that day (which was the first I'd heard of it). Instinctively, though, here more than anywhere else I've been, one perceives the police and other officials warily, sensing that protection and service are the furthest thing from their minds. Life as a visible ethnic or sexual minority here would be a life of constant fear.

Nadia and Masha, formerly of Pussy Riot, are out of their Siberian labor camps now, making the rounds of the Colbert Report, Brooklyn, destinations they are surely being drilled to understand. The Guardian recently published an anonymous missive from remaining members of the Pussy Riot collective, disavowing these two for their association with the establishment, and in particular for speaking out in favor of mainstream prisoners' rights groups. One somewhat hopes to see next a super-hardcore faction denouncing these anonymous posers for publishing in the Guardian. I don't care what anyone says. Nadia Tolokonnikova is our era's Aleksandr Radishchev. 

I have no patience for westerners who say it is not our place to criticize the Russian regime. I suppose it depends on what you mean by 'we'. I certainly don't see myself in that deployment of the first-person plural pronoun.

I had a friend who spent much of the 1980s in Soviet jails for the crime of circulating bootleg Beatles tapes. He fell off a building and died, drunk, during the 1991 Generals' Putch. His name was Vitaliy Dergachev. I'm on his side.

Western pseudo-left collusionism reached a fever pitch during the Olympics, which just happened to coincide with my recent return to Russia. The respected Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen, whom I heard speak in the 1990s and I admired very much, wrote recently in The Nation that we are all, essentially, being duped by a lazy western media that is prepared to say more or less anything to make Putin look bad. But if it is true, as Cohen insists, that coverage of Russia is even less subtle than in the Soviet days, this surely follows from the far more general fact of the media's overall decline in the past quarter century, and not from any deepening of the western media's Cold War parti pris. 

Cohen maintains that we are naive for going along with the official western line that the Ukrainians 'yearn to be free' and that this automatically means geopolitical alliance with the EU rather than with Russia. He evokes ancestrality: the bloody argument that Rus' was once Kievan, and --therefore?-- that Kiev must remain, if not Russian, then at least Russia-oriented. But this entirely overlooks the fact that the Maidan protesters do not think of themselves as dupes of the CIA or of western propaganda. They are disgusted by corruption and behind-the-scenes manipulation, mostly guided by Russia, and they want to be free of it. What is even more important, this overlooks the fact that almost all dissident Russian progressives (and not just the category-defying fish-fowl who simultaneously oppose gay marriage and GMO's) are in strong solidarity with the Ukrainian protesters: not because they are западник suckers, not because they are pro-western, but because they want Ukraine to realize its right to autonomy and self-determination. As my friend Kirill Medvedev, a prominent figure in the Russian New Left, writes:

Извините, если что, но я совершенно серьезно думаю, что все прогрессивное человечество должно требовать сейчас двух вещей а)официально двуязычная, двуэтничная, мультикультурная Украина б)полное прекращение вмешательства России в дела этой страны. 

Sorry, but I completely seriously think that all progressive humanity should now demand two things: (a) an officially bilingual, bi-ethnic, multicultural Ukraine; (b) the total cessation of interference on the part of Russia in the affairs of that country. 

I'm on Kirill's side.

What now about the Olympics? I agree that much of the western snickering and bickering about Sochi has been petty and embarrassing. I have been many places in Eastern Europe where a sign requested that I throw my toilet paper into the waste-paper receptacle, and not, as one might expect, into the toilet. When you travel, you see new things, and you marvel at the variety of the world. When you see them circulating on Tumblr, they're easier to ridicule.

But let us make no mistake: Sochi was an ugly travesty, and it was made possible only by tremendous suffering. Forget about the repression of gays and lesbians, for a moment. In Moscow in the Winter of 2014, two sights are ubiquitous: the Olympic games on giant screens lining public thoroughfares; and migrant laborers from the Caucasus being treated like dirt. A racial hierarchy has emerged over the past two decades in the capital city, where Central Asians are now the tolerated, unthreatening, hard-working minority, while Caucasians occupy the very bottom rung of the social ladder, and are by definition targets of suspicion and exclusion.

Who are the Caucasians, and what is the historical cause of their place in the ethnic hierarchy of Russia? One thing you might notice is that Sochi is located in a region called 'Krasnodar'. It is surrounded by many other administrative divisions that end in -stan, suggesting a Tataro-Turkic influence, and many other divisions that bear some sort of local ethnonym: Ingushetia, Ossetia, etc. Why is Krasnodar not a -stan? Why is Krasnodar not called Adyghia? The answer has in part to do with the fact that it was Russified in the mid-19th century through a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The Circassians were exterminated, or relocated to Turkey. There is still today an active political lobby, based in Turkey, pushing for greater recognition of the Circassian genocide, but its voice is of course muffled by the Olympic juggernaut. In the lead-up to the games, Russian security forces were blowing up family homes around the Krasnodar region, hoping to weed out terrorists who had threatened to make the olympic spectacle their own.

The Americans were worried they'd need to be evacuated in the event of a terrorist attack, but the event of a non-event is, on reflection, no less troubling: a flawless Olympics means, for Putin, the consolidation of symbolic power in a contested part of the Caucasus, power that has seemed perpetually out of reach since at least the early 19th century. The westerners go and have a good time, tell themselves Putin's not so bad after all even if they were made to shit in adjoining toilets at the Black Sea base camp. And brute power wins with the complicity of tacky pageant, and of a grovelling and sycophantic western left, whose best arguments for Putin never amount to anything more than a simple change of subject: Well, they say, it's no worse than what we do. 

Being a White Person Who Talks about Race

As many readers will know, I am currently finishing a book about the concept of race in early modern philosophy. I have been working on it for some years, and it occupies much of my thought and energy. At least as many readers will know that I am white. This combination frequently has people trying to figure out --to put it both vaguely and pointedly at once-- what my deal is. 

I have heard much discussion over the few days following the awful verdict in the George Zimmerman trial, most of it well-intentioned, about how white people should and should not talk about race. Naturally my ears perk up like a dog's at passing sirens, since I am nearly always thinking about how to hit just the right tone in my book, the tone that engages a maximum number of readers and that encourages all of them to stray a bit outside of the usual range of names, keywords, and problems they associate with race. 

Most of the suggestions I've been hearing over the past few days would require me to leave off with my work all together, and go do something race-appropriate. I find this extremely troubling. There is a deeply ingrained idea coming from what passes for the Left, and distracting the younger and more naive members of the Left, to their own detriment, according to which we can each only speak for our own group, and in relation to other groups the most we can hope to be is 'allies'.

A good example of this was in the reaction to the phrase that sprang up spontaneously as a call to rally against the verdict: I am Trayvon Martin. This was of course not new, but a recycling of a common reaction to galvanizing events, e.g., the banners around Paris that declared Nous sommes tous américains on September 12, 2001. (I say, with Whitman: I am everyone, I am each of you, at every moment.) By the next morning some bold white internauts had posted video clips of themselves declaring emphatically that they are not Trayvon Martin, that they could not possibly be Trayvon Martin, in view of the many privileges they have that keep them safe from Martin's fate. By nightfall of the same day white people were abuzz in social media about how other white people needed to stop trying to get attention by announcing how not-Trayvon Martin they were, that this was not about what they either were or were not. 

Clearly, the white kids just don't know what to do with themselves. 

A white South African friend of mine in social-media land, a journalist I admire very much who is also a former ANC activist, wrote recently about a limousine ride he took in New York with an unnamed American hip-hop star. The driver was a Palestinian socialist. All three got to talking about the fall of Apartheid, and apparently the American simply could not get it through his head that there were white, Jewish ANC members fighting against Apartheid right alongside Mandela. The Jewish South African and the Palestinian driver in turn were alarmed at the American rapper's black-and-white thinking (as it were): the ANC wasn't made up of black people plus their white 'allies'; it was made up of South Africans who hated Apartheid. Listen to the way Mandela talks about Joe Slovo, for example. Is there any hint that Mandela thinks the Lithuanian Jewish immigrant doesn't get, can't get, what's at stake in bringing down a racist totalitarian system? Of course not. That's not the way racism is defeated. And the distraction of identity politics, perpetuated by well-intentioned young people who take themselves to be on the Left, is, I'm sorry to say, helping to abet and sustain the racist system in the United States.

So what is my deal? Why did I decide to write about race?

I grew up in the United States in a heavily racialized environment, by which I mean that it was taken as a fundamental and essential fact about the people around me that they were, variously, 'black' or 'white'. In my high school there were race-based gangs, and these were affiliated to the race-based gangs that entirely define the existence of millions of incarcerated Americans. Unlike most of the white Americans I know today, who went to high schools that fed into the Ivy League, I went to a high school that was more a sort of prison prep program. We were being trained how to be subjects of the carceral system, which meant first and foremost that we were being trained to think of ourselves in racial terms. There were boys with ties to the Klan, and older brothers in prison who were big-wigs in the Aryan Brotherhood. On the other side, Bloods. I did my best to pass silently under the radar, and I dropped out after a year-and-a-half.

Much of my later life has been spent trying to come to terms with how I, during that period of my life, could have bought into the social ontology of the people around me. I heard a certain highly charged word, not just from teens but also from adults, enough times to inure me to whatever dialogue Tarantino might contrive. It seemed, if I may put it this way, to denote a natural kind. I never had any feeling for racism, in the sense that I never saw any reason to hate the kids who were on the other side of the racial divide, and in terms of my own survival strategies I was certainly no more afraid of them than I was of the Skoal-chewing, pick-up-driving white boys. But I was a racial realist, in the sense that I simply went along with everyone around me in the presumption that these social divisions marked out something true, that they were an adequate world-carving. An interracial couple, on the rare occasions that I saw one, struck me as a highly noteworthy thing.

What strikes me so much now is that the white boys I've briefly described were, mostly, Okies and Arkies, that is, the descendants of Dustbowl migrants to the Central Valley of California, whose grandparents, and possibly also parents, did the sort of low-status, migratory agricultural work for which John Steinbeck labelled them 'Harvest Gypsies'. Now the Dustbowl was not the Middle Passage, but this is not a suffering competition, and the historical fact remains that the Harvest Gypsies and their descendants have been given the shaft by the rich and the powerful throughout American history. Convincing them that they are 'white', and therefore, though poor and without hope, at least better than the blacks, has been one of the most effective tools for distracting this group of people from any awakening of what might be called radical class consciousness (though I'm hesitant to call it that, and wish I could find an equally pointed but less Marxian phrase to do the trick). Convincing the descendants of Dustbowl migrants they are white, I mean, is what has kept them from recognizing common cause with the descendants of African slaves. 

Culturally speaking, too, what looked at the time like an unbridgeable divide now appears like a classic instance of the narcissism of minor differences. My grandmother was a gentle, hardworking woman from Arkansas. Not long ago I was on the 7 train in Queens. Across from me sat an elderly African American woman. I cannot fully explain the feeling I had, and the microsecond in which I had it did not leave me any time for examination or second-guessing, but when I looked up and saw her, something about the way she held her head, or her smile, or I don't know what, made me think: Grandma! Now of course I, like everyone, have had two grandmothers, but that this woman on the train stood for the one from Arkansas, and not the one of Swedish ancestry, was as certain as the sympathy I felt, and the sense of timeless familiarity.*

And is this not also the history of American popular music in nuce: black music, which is in fact just American music simpliciter, inspires white Americans to make music too; yet time and time again we are expected to react as if some uncrossable divide were magically leapt across whenever a white person raps, or swings his pelvis a certain way. We see this over and over again at the lower socioeconomic strata of popular culture in America, where racially coded forms jump the line, and come to seem wholly native within a racially defined scene: think of Old English script in tattoo and poster art, for example. (I would imagine that today Rio Linda High School is overrun with Juggalos, the most perfect expression yet of the instability of racial coding.) The white people I've known who inhabit these strata --and I've known many; if you are from the Northeast and have a Ph.D. in the humanities, I've probably known more such people than you have-- typically carry on about the virtue of white pride, and do so while sporting abundant cultural signifiers that higher status whites would surely associate with African American culture. Things are messy down at the bottom, I mean to say.

Anyhow, these days I am an expat, and the longer I'm away the more implausible the idea of ever living in the US again seems. I try to make intellectual sense out of the forces that initially shaped me, mostly by reading books, and also by talking to people. In Paris I see girls from Françafrique coming out of the écoles, holding hands with white boys, and I have to remember to notice; I mean, I don't notice, until I notice that I'm not noticing. 

To have the opportunity to move from Rio Linda to Paris means among other things to be able to learn that 'race' doesn't always mean the same thing. In the American context, when we say 'race' what we mean is the un-dealt-with legacy of slavery. But it is a gross mistake, and a triumph of the racist system we are supposed to be seeking to overcome, to suppose that this legacy is about phenotypes or skin color. The contingent fact that the slave system in the US was based on the exploitation of the labor of a group of people that tended to be phenotypically different from their captors has created the illusion in the United States that it is the color difference that caused the inequality in the first place. But this is getting it precisely backwards.

There are other, similar forms of social inequality in the world that are not based on a color difference, indeed they are based on social divisions that do not seem from the outside to map onto any significant differences of physical appearance at all: think for example of the Roma of Southeastern Europe, who were sold at slave auctions in Romania until at least the 1860s, and who to this day are expected to avert their eyes when speaking to non-Roma. (They are still waiting for their Martin Luther King.) It took me many years of visiting Romania before I could even detect who was Roma and who was not; and yet for Romanians the difference is clear as day, and the discrimination the Roma face really is significantly and objectively analogous to that faced by African Americans. 

Anyhow, it's a platitude, but travel really does reveal the contingency of the local circumstances in the place from which one hails. And history is a sort of travel, too, so my idea with my research into the concept of race in the 17th century was to try to uncover a context in which the concepts and terms deployed to talk about human diversity had not yet taken the form they have for us today. I think this sort of work can potentially be helpful in moving us beyond certain fixed and sclerotic patterns in the way we think about social problems, regardless of the identity of the person who produces it. But if you wish to know why I began to care in the first place, I would say it's because I feel like 'ally' doesn't quite cut it. I'm an American, and that means that the world into which I was thrown, for better or worse, is one in which race is the defining fact about my existence as much as of all my concitoyens. And I can't help but feel compelled to think about that fact, to try to make sense of it, using the resources I have available to me, and to try, if I can, to overcome it, and to show others that it can be overcome, by laying bare its utter contingency.

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*Addendum. My father (from his own self-imposed exile in Mexico), writes in with this very infomative addendum about our family history (the picture shows my grandmother, his mother, circa 1938, at the age of 19):

As for having a flash of familiarity in seeing an African-American woman, that has happened to me also, seeing a black woman who reminded me of my mother. I don't have DNA proof, but there is a possibility that my mother had a near African ancestor. Of course, this is not something my Arkansas relatives wanted to discuss, but they were initially quite excited when I announced that I had found records showing my great-great-grandmother to be on the 1790 census as a Cherokee. What the relatives did not want to hear is that the history of South Carolina shows that Cherokees owned slaves and there were mixed-race babies. Cherokee-Africans were free, more or less, and were considered black Cherokees. To this day, there are lawsuits in Oklahoma regarding disputed rights to land and oil royalties by full-blood Cherokees and the black Cherokees.

As a young teen, I remember talking to my grandfather about blacks and whites. For a semi-literate white southerner, he held some unusual views. He told me that in 200 years everybody will be a light brown, a mix of all races. Grandpa Pharis said our ancestors were 'Black Irish' -- a term with various meanings, but which generally refers either to the Protestants from southern France or from northern Spain who migrated to what is now Northern Ireland. The term was also applied to whites in the Carolinas with mixed blood.

Your Grandmother Bertie was teased in high school for being a 'high yellow' and an 'octoroon'. It's a genetic lottery as to which traits are inherited, and Bertie was darker than her six older siblings. My grandmother would not allow my mother to go outside or to help work the fields unless she was fully covered, long skirt, big hat, long sleeves and gloves, because she tanned quickly and became even darker.

This is getting longer than I had intended, so I will skip to genealogy:

Richard Cruce, born 1770, Belfast, Ireland. Immigrated as a child to Spartanburg, South Carolina.

Hannah Stone, born 1775, listed on the 1790 census as 'Hannah Stone -- Indian'.

Richard and Hannah were married about 1790 in what is now Cherokee County, South Carolina. 

John Pharis Cruce, born 1807, in South Carolina, died in Beulah, Arkansas.

Pharis Calvin Cruce, born 1876 (when his father was 68!), Beulah, Arkansas.

Bertie Mae Cruce, born 1919, Beulah, Arkansas.

So, assuming the census records are correct, Bertie is one-eighth Cherokee. If Hannah Stone was a tribal cast-off of mixed race, then Bertie would be one-sixteenth African: one step removed from actually being an 'octoroon'.

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