When Forster officially announced Seven Shoulders and its premise on Twitter/X, he was skewered on all sides. White people disguising themselves as black is passé and will provoke offence and indignation whatever the reason may be. Many black people, in particular, responded negatively because they felt that they were the best qualified to discuss the reality of being black. They also felt that they didn’t need a white Canadian man to don a synthetic afro wig, wear coloured contact lenses, and put on brown-coloured Maybelline foundation (specifically, mocha shade—because ‘I figured it was best not to get too ambitious’) to find out whether racism still exists in America. 

Forster follows in the footsteps of other ‘journalistic blackface’ practitioners, on whose example he rests very heavily: he cites Ray Sprigle, John Howard Griffin, author of 1967’s Black Like Me (which he particularly admires), and Grace Halsell, author of 1969’s Soul Sister. All of them went incognito as ‘black’ to try to enlighten a largely ignorant and indifferent white America on the reality of the pervasive racism faced by black Americans, whether under the oppressive Jim Crow apartheid regime of the South in the 20^th century or the unofficial but ubiquitous racism that black communities endured across Northern cities during the same period.

Even though journalistic blackface has already been done three times, Forster ‘felt [he] had no choice’ but to anoint himself as the heir to this tradition. Moreover, he proclaims that he is sui generis because he is ‘the first person to earnestly cross the color barrier in over half a century’—and he is especially unique because he is the first person to do so in a post-Rodney King, post-Barack Obama, and post-George Floyd America. This claim isn’t strictly true, as there have been reality TV shows from this century setting up social experiments where whites have been disguised as blacks and vice versa to see what life is like ‘on the other side’ of the racial divide. 

Nevertheless, Forster doesn’t advertise Seven Shoulders as a moralistic screed. Instead, it’s a book that ‘prioritises methodical language and comprehensive analysis over emotional fervour and moral condemnation’ and he is the right person for this task because he is ‘inclined to describe rather than admonish.’

Unlike Ray Sprigle, who ‘ate, slept, traveled, lived Black’ (‘I lodged in Negro households. I ate in Negro restaurants. I slept in Negro hotels and lodging houses. I crept through the back and side doors of railroad stations’), Forster doesn’t embed himself within predominantly black communities. He doesn’t attempt to live a social life as a black man. No, the way Forster seeks to ‘taxonomize’ American racism (which, he says, can be divided into various categories, including two oft-conflated ones: ‘macro-level racial disparities’ and ‘institutional injustice’) is to pose as a hitchhiker on the sides, or shoulders, of seven different roads across the US, ‘first as a White man, and then again as a Black man on the following day.’

He claims this hitchhiking experiment is an accurate way to ‘taxonomize’ contemporary racism in America because it ‘exposes real sentiments that might otherwise be concealed… It reveals how [Americans] act when nobody is telling them how to act.’ It reveals another category of racism: the ‘interpersonal’ type.

The problem with this is that this isn’t the America of the Beatniks, where hitchhiking culture was a lot more prominent than it is today. And it is rather shallow to make sweeping judgements on a topic as broad and intricate as race in America on the sole basis of a limited hitchhiking experiment—which is why the pompous statements peppered throughout the book are so jarring. For instance:

[N]obody has an experiential barometer with respect to race… nobody except for me… [You] may say that I haven’t lived enough Black life for my barometer to be useful. Say what you will. My barometer is better than anyone else’s. 

Or: 

I am a visionary writer who wants to demystify race in a way that is creative, compelling, and beautiful.

For all the vim and haughty rhetoric Forster deploys, Seven Shoulders is as underwhelming as it is superficial. This is disappointing in its own way, as I was slightly intrigued by the premise. Instead, I encountered a book that was confused and incoherently written. Publishing a chapter that actually contains the line ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to say in this chapter’ doesn’t exactly instil confidence in you as a writer, ‘visionary’ or otherwise.

Though the journalistic blackface was unnecessary, not to mention silly, there might perhaps have been an interesting, if provocative, book investigating the textures and dynamics of race in America in the 21^st century from a considered first-person view. Ray Sprigle and John Howard Griffin in their ethnographical studies at least spoke to black Americans and collected testimonies of their experiences of racism. The closest Forster comes to anything like this is a pedestrian interview with two unnamed black politicians (whom he interviewed as a white man) who were clearly unaware of what project their remarks were lent to. 

Most of the commentary surrounding Seven Shoulders has focused on Forster’s use of blackface and thus the gravamen has been missed. He claims that in America today, instances of institutional racism are ‘extremely [he repeats this word over several pages in case you didn’t get it the first time—yes, really]…difficult to identify, and outward demonstrations of interpersonal racism are also a vanishing phenomenon.’ 

This thesis very much rhymes with that of Dinesh D’Souza’s 1995 book The End of Racism and other arguments from American conservatives. In other words, Forster isn’t as original and avant-garde as his bumptious pronouncements would have us believe. Forster concedes that what he calls ‘shoulder racism’, based on what we might call unconscious bias, might occur in certain circumstances—but says that it is not a pressing social problem.

He also notes that he was perceived differently by the homeless when he was white compared to when he was black: he was constantly asked for money by homeless people (of whatever colour) as a white man, yet he wasn’t pestered by anyone for money as a black man, which I find believable. But that is the extent of the depth he arrives at when contemplating how whites and blacks may be perceived differently within society. 

Whatever your opinion on whether Ray Sprigle, John Howard Griffin, and Grace Halsell were ever justified in engaging in journalistic blackface, one cannot deny that, in service of the cause of racial equality, they made sincere efforts to understand the reality of the racism that plagued their time. In contrast, Forster’s efforts in Seven Shoulders are an unserious and not even entertaining attempt at gonzo journalism. It feels like it was written in an unhinged frenzy, without any serious understanding of the complicated subject it broaches, and it makes bold claims and states tendentious conclusions based on a flimsy ‘experiment’ that a bad YouTuber could conduct.

As a black man—technically mixed race—I’m not even offended. I have thick skin and a broad back, so it takes a lot to make me cry. Besides, to be offended or hurt by Sam Forster’s gimmick I would have had to have taken it seriously. I do agree with Forster that most of the books currently written about race, whether by blacks or whites, are ‘tremendously boring.’ Alas, his is the latest addition to that pile. 

Related reading

Race: the most difficult subject of all? Interview with Inaya Folarin Iman by Emma Park

Two types of ‘assimilation’: the US and China, by Grayson Slover

The Enlightenment and the making of modernity, by Piers Benn

Linnaeus, Buffon, and the battle for biology, by Charles Foster

‘The best way to combat bad speech is with good speech’ – interview with Maryam Namazie, by Emma Park

Young, radical and morally confused, by Gerfried Ambrosch

Can sentientism save the world? Interview with Jamie Woodhouse, by Emma Park

David Tennant, Kemi Badenoch, and the ugly sin of identity politics: a view from the right, by Frank Haviland

The post Gimmick journalism and race in America: review of ‘Seven Shoulders’ by Sam Forster appeared first on The Freethinker.

More than three years have elapsed since former President Donald Trump nearly got former Vice President Mike Pence killed, if not by executive order (pun intended), then by sheer narcissistic disregard for Pence’s life. Pence had rebuffed the former president’s badgering demands that he violate his oath to honour the U.S. Constitution by decertifying state electors, duly chosen by American voters, during the U.S. Congressional proceeding on January 6 2021 to officially count the electoral votes of the 2020 presidential election. As the law clearly states, ‘the role of the President of the Senate [that is, the Vice President] while presiding over the joint session shall be limited to performing solely ministerial duties.’ The Vice President ‘shall have no power to solely determine, accept, reject, or otherwise adjudicate or resolve disputes over the proper certificate of ascertainment of appointment of electors, the validity of electors, or the votes of electors.’

At the Ellipse south of the White House on the morning of January 6, after months of relentless litigation in which he lost 61 of 62 court cases challenging the 2020 presidential election results (with 22 Republican judges and 10 Trump-appointed judges presiding, and the sole victory not altering the election results), Trump misled the crowd into believing that Pence could ensure a Trump re-election by ‘doing the right thing’, knowing full well that he could not. Moreover, as former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified to the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6^th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, Trump said of his audience: ‘I don’t [f—ing] care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me… They can march to the Capitol from here.’ Hours later, of course, after Trump told them to ‘fight like hell’, January 6 rioters marched to the U.S. Capitol and stormed through the doors, many of them chanting ‘Hang Mike Pence!’, as U.S. Congressmen barely escaped with their lives.

What lesson can we assume Trump learned from this? Never mind the constant stream of reports that Trump entertains the prospect of weaponising the U.S. Department of Justice in a vindictive campaign to persecute political opponents—or in Trump’s terms, his enemies—who have tried to hold him and his co-conspirators accountable. We got our answer when he selected Ohio Senator J. D. Vance as his running mate. Vance has declared that he would not have certified the 2020 election results and that Trump should ignore ‘illegitimate’ Supreme Court rulings. Vance has also embraced the views of an influential far-right blogger who does not believe in democracy and argues that the country requires an absolute monarch, even a tyrant, to purge a purported oligarchy of progressive automatons who populate and rule a ‘cathedral’ of mainstream American institutions where insidious left-wing ideology is ubiquitous. Vance, it can be safely assumed, was chosen as a ‘yes man’ for a presidential nominee who exercises complete control over a Republican party that, in the words of Senator Mitt Romney, ‘really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.’

In the wake of the unforgivable attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania, House Speaker Mike Johnson has implored America’s two political parties to tone down the rhetoric, as if the delusions of a lunatic assassin, whose motives remain an enigma, can be traced directly to the overheated rhetoric of a political environment which Trump himself has supercharged with his own long history of apocalyptic demonisation of immigrant ‘invaders’, blistering rants against political opponents, and proto-fascist MAGA harangues.

It was almost a year ago that Trump mocked and joked about former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband after an assailant fractured the latter’s skull with a hammer. In 2020, ABC News identified 54 criminal cases of violence, threats, and assaults in which the evidentiary record indicated that Trump had been invoked by an assailant (e.g., ‘This is for Trump’). In 2016, Trump callously mocked a handicapped reporter. In 2015, Trump, who avoided the draft, denied that the late Senator John McCain was a war hero because ‘I like people who weren’t captured.’ The Bulwark’s Cathy Young recently provided a catalogue of instances in which Trump has encouraged or stoked violence. Finally, Trump resurrected the Dark Side of American politics by claiming that Mexico sends drug lords and rapists over the border, conceding only as an afterthought that ‘some, I assume, are good people.’

The January 6 insurrection was perhaps the most dramatic spectacle of Trump’s anti-democratic, authoritarian rhetoric and behaviour. But it was far from being a singular case. Trump has since claimed that he would like to be dictator for a day (wink, wink). He has claimed that presidential immunity for official acts means that his 34-count felony conviction in the recent New York ‘hush money’ case should be overturned, even though he paid money to pornographic actress Stormy Daniels to bury the story of their affair before he was elected president in 2016. This case, by the way, exposed sordid details about his possible rape (on my reading) of Daniels while his wife was at home with their newborn son. In short, Trump is a man accustomed to possessing the kind of invincible and audacious power of men whose complicity in rape culture was epitomised by Trump’s remark that he can ‘grab [women] by the pussy’ without repercussion.

America is in imminent danger of succumbing to a proto-fascist movement reminiscent of the antidemocratic rumblings that shook the world in the interwar period of the first half of the 20^th century. The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision granting partial immunity to the former president, in a ruling that defers to lower courts to ascertain whether Trump’s plot to overturn election results in 2020 constituted an ‘official act’, has set a precedent whereby a lame-duck president unhappy with his election defeat can devise a plot to alter the results of the election and thereby disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, all the while taking comfort in the non-negligible probability that he will not be held accountable. (Trump certainly has not been held accountable by his legions of supporters who would not only hold fast in their blind allegiance even if the former president shot someone on Fifth Avenue but also deride any attempts to hold him accountable in a court of law before an independent jury as ‘show trials.’)

As much as President Joe Biden may deserve his historically low job approval ratings, it nevertheless has been a relief that, in the months and years after he was inaugurated, he restored a refreshing normalcy to the executive office after the insurrectionary crimes of former President Trump. In my lifetime, I have watched several former presidents—Clinton, Bush, Obama—face severe rebuke and censure for allegedly abusing the office of the presidency. Not once did it occur to me, however, that any of these presidents ever had even the faintest intention of being crowned an American Caesar. To say that Trump is an existential threat to American democracy is not rhetorical excess. It is an incontrovertible fact.

Related reading

Donald Trump, political violence, and the future of America, by Daniel James Sharp

What has Christianity to do with Western values? by Nick Cohen

Can Religion Save Humanity? Part One, by Brian Victoria

White Christian Nationalism is rising in America. Separation of church and state is the antidote. By Rachel Laser

Can the ‘New Theists’ save the West? by Matt Johnson

Against the ‘New Theism’, by Daniel James Sharp

The post Donald Trump is an existential threat to American democracy appeared first on The Freethinker.