Shame in writing

While I doubt there’s any record of my college admissions essays, I remember one of them vividly. The title was overlong and overcomplicated, something like “Practical Idealism is Practically Ideal, Practically Speaking.” The comma was added by Ms. Singer, a social studies teacher I never had but who graciously read the essay.

More or less how excited she was to read it.

The content of the piece, whose title was taken from a campaign pitch by Al Gore, praised the Third Way, more or less using “conservative” means to achieve “liberal” ends in policy. Practically (sorry) what this means is that you rely on market mechanisms instead of regulation or direct provision of goods and services to solve social problems.

If this sounds like a rebranding of “neoliberalism,” that’s because it is.

I like ’em minimally regulated.

If this sounds like an ingenious way to justify grift, inefficiency, and dismiss all talk of “rights” in policymaking, that’s because it is.

She makes some good points.

To make matters worse, the essay was a paean not just to this terrible idea from the 1990s. It described my home state, Maryland, as the most “middle” of states: combining the “pointy-headed intellectualism” of the North with the “common sense” practicality (sorry) of the South. It’s embarrassing to recall that I wrote this with some degree of sincerity, and it’s even more troubling that it would likely be a hit in front of major audiences today.

My first presidential vote.

Not only did my “compliment” of the “North” rely on contemptible and illogical stereotypes, my praise of the “South” elided its defining characteristic: the preservation and extension of white supremacy.

Without it, there is no “South.”

Indeed, hacks like Kid Rock or Cliven Bundy are geographically far from the southeastern United States, but they identify with the “rebel” cause, which was, lest we forget, the preservation and extension of white supremacy, particularly in the enslavement of Black people.

KU TO THE KLUX TO THE KLAN TO THE -

The 1990s were, paradoxically, an era of “can’t-we-all-just-get-along”-ism that ignored that the side of the neo-Confederates and their plutocratic allies was at permanent war with the rest of the country.

No, we can’t all get along when one of the parties is defined in opposition to the other: even if its membership becomes more inclusive over time, it requires anti-Blackness as a core principle, adding in Christian fascism as a backstop when out-and-out racism becomes untenable in mainstream company.

It was really a “suburban” strategy but y’all ain’t ready to have that conversation.

Did that essay help me get into college? Yes. But it took many, many years of education to disabuse me of that harmfully naive mindset.