identity politics

June 5, 2020

3 June 2020

Identity politics is advocacy by those with a particular racial, sexual, or cultural identity for policies that benefit that particular group, as opposed to the populace at large. The term arose in the 1960s and 70s among minorities in the United States, particular among black political activists, who advocated for an end to discriminatory policies and for policies that promoted equality. But identity politics is not, by definition, limited to minorities. The dominant racial or cultural group in any given polity can also be an identity, and policies and institutions that discriminate against other groups or maintain conditions of inequality are also a form of identity politics.

The earliest use of the phrase identity politics that I have found is in the Atlanta Daily World of 16 July 1970 in an article about the politics of the Alabama governor George Wallace and how he weaponized black identity politics to give coherence and motivation to his racist supporters who were engaged in white identity politics:

Shrewdly, Mr. Wallace made capital of what could be called identity politics in which the “strange bedfellows,” the “black bloc vote” and those “big city newspapers” were made villains and targets. Such hate symbolism found easy believers among the gullible, the bigoted, the unthinking, and the odd bloc.

The Atlanta Daily World is a newspaper serving the black community of Georgia. The “what could be called” makes it clear that the term, if it were already in circulation in the black community, wasn’t instantly familiar to many of the paper’s readers.

In 1973, sociologist and political activist Todd Gitlin used identity politics to retroactively describe the radical political movements of the late 1960s, in particular the group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). He viewed identity politics negatively, believing that its, perhaps inevitable, growth stifled any hope of a truly revolutionary movement taking shape. The quotation here is long, but I believe the length is necessary to understand the context in which Gitlin uses the term:

In the absence of radical movement elsewhere in the society, [the radical student movement] could even claim that it was the embryo of revolutionary agency itself (“we are the people”)—a movement for itself. In other moments (community and factory organizing), it tried to repudiate its social reality by claiming to be the instrument, or the vanguard, or the catalyst, of social forces that really were oppressed (the poor, blacks, industrial workers, the Third World) and capable of taking power—a movement for others. Throughout the sixties the movement oscillated between these poles, searching more for identity than for strategy.
Unable to carry the burden of historical novelty, sects within SDS (Progressive Labor, Weatherman, Revolutionary Youth Movement) took on pseudo-identities as self-appointed vanguards and fifth columns of other forces. Thus they could hold onto their elitist belief in their right to rule, while claiming to have entered the revolutionary lists in the name of their chosen constituencies. They split and devoured SDS so easily because they capitalized on a widespread self-doubt: with a rush they occupied a vacuum of identity and strategy, virtually without opposition. Identity politics swallowed itself. The alternative, a conscious, programmatic radicalism, has not yet formed.

Many credit the Combahee River Collective, a black, feminist movement of the 1970s, with coining the term identity politics. While they did not, as we have seen from the earlier uses, invent the term, they did embrace it. Unlike Gitlin, they did not view an overarching revolutionary movement as a good thing for them. From their perspective, no movement led by men was ever going to truly advocate for equality for black women, and it would be up to themselves to fight for it. From the collective’s 1977 statement:

This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially the most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression. In the case of black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.

Since the early 1970s, the term has been used both positively and negatively.

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Sources:

The Combahee River Collective. “A Black Feminist Statement” (1977). In Zillah R. Eisenstein. Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979, 365. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Gitlin, Todd. “The Future of an Effusion: How Young Activists Will Get to 1984.” In 1984 Revisited. Robert Paul Wolff, ed. New York: Knopf, 1973, 27. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, November 2010, s.v. identity, n.

“A Spokesman for Racism.” Atlanta Daily World. 16 July 1970, 6. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

stop and frisk

June 3, 2020

3 June 2020

The police tactic of stop and frisk is most closely associated with New York City in the 1990s and early 2000s under Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg, but it is decades older and from its inception has been used a means to target and harass people of color. A Harvard Law Review article from December 1964 describes the tactic:

The New York "stop-and-frisk" law clarifies and significantly broadens statutory police powers to stop and search suspects, although present police practices may well exceed the new law's limits. Under the law, effective July 1, I964, a police officer may "stop" any person abroad in a public place who he "reasonably suspects" is committing, has committed, or is about to commit a felony or serious misdemeanor, and may demand his name, address, and an explanation of his actions. In addition, a policeman who "reasonably suspects" that he is in "danger of life or limb" may search the suspect for a dangerous weapon.

Such searches are also known as Terry stops, after the U.S. Supreme Court case Terry v. Ohio (1968) that found the tactic to be constitutional.

In New York City, the stop and frisk tactic was used more aggressively in the 1990s under the leadership of then Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Police Commissioner William Bratton, and it was taken to new heights under Giuliani’s successor, Michael Bloomberg. It was used alongside the longer-term strategy of broken windows policing, the idea that fixing broken windows, erasing graffiti, and cracking down on misdemeanors would deter felonies. But the tactic was harshly criticized for disproportionately targeting people of color, as a tactic for oppressing minorities, and for disrupting minority communities by imprisoning large numbers of young men. Since the 1990s, the strategy of broken windows policing has also been shown to be ineffective at reducing serious crime.

While stop and frisk came to the fore in the 1990s, the date of the Harvard Law Review article quoted above shows the tactic is much older. It came into being during the Civil Rights era, and while such searches were ostensibly intended to protect police officers, they were often used as a means to shut down dissent by giving the police a pretext for arresting demonstrators.

The earliest use of the co-location of the words stop and frisk that I have found is from the New York Times of 15 January 1964:

Rodriguez and Solero were arrested for disorderly conduct on West End Avenue near 93d Street and were being driven to the 100th Street Station when, according to the police, Rodriguez began moving around in the back seat. The police said the patrolmen decided to stop and frisk Rodriguez.
As the car halted under an overpass at Riverside Drive and 96th Street, the police said, Rodriguez pulled a revolver and fired a shot that hit the dashboard. After a brief struggle, the police said, Patrolman Edmondson fired four times, killing both prisoners.

Note this is not a use of the phrase as we know it today. The suspect was already detained when the police stopped their police cruiser to frisk the suspect. But it is significant in that incidents like this one would create the political will to implement the stop and frisk law, as prior to that the police did not have authority to search a suspect until they had been formally arrested. Also of note is that the suspect was Puerto Rican, and the shooting was considered unjustified by the LatinX community.

And two weeks later stop and frisk, in the form and sense we know today, appears in the New York Daily News of 4 February 1964:

Police Commissioner Michael J. Murphy yesterday urged support of the “stop and frisk bill” and the “knock-knock [sic] bill” now before the Legislature. The measures would allow cops to search persons suspected of criminal activity and permit police with search warrants to enter a home without knocking.

Those laws would be passed and signed by the governor the following month. And at the time the stop and frisk law was widely criticized by minority communities for being a tool of racist oppression. Here is an example from the Nation of Islam’s newspaper Muhammad Speaks of 27 March 1964. The rhetoric is over the top, but the underlying sentiment was widely shared:

Two notorious so-called anti-crime bills were signed into law by Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, setting up a “police state” atmosphere, with Negroes and Puerto Ricans—traditional targets of harassment by law-enforcement agents in America undoubtedly scheduled to be the chief victims
The iniquitous bills, commonly referred to as “stop-and-frisk” and “no-knock” laws, are thought by many authorities to set up the machinery to rival Torquemada and his Star Chambers Proceedings and Hitlers Gestapo.

The tactic of stop and frisk may date to 1964, but the individual words that constitute the phrase are, of course, much older.

Stop is a curious word because it appears much later than we might expect. One would think that such a basic verb would go back to Old English, but that language only has the verb forstoppian, meaning to block or obstruct, which only appears once in the extant literature in the context of a medical text as part of a cure for an earache (don’t try this at home):

eft wið þon ilcan genim grenne æscenne stæf, lege on fyr, genim þonne þæt seaw þe him of gæþ, do on þa ilcan wulle, wring on eare & mid þære ilcan wulle forstoppa þæt eare
(again for the same, take a green ash staff, lay it on a fire, then take the sap that comes from it, put it on the same wool, wring it into the ear, and stop up the ear with the same wool)

The form *stoppian may have existed, but if so, it does not survive in any text we know today. Instead, it appears during the Middle English period, coming from either the unattested *stoppian or as a borrowing from another Germanic language. The relevant sense of stop appears c.1440 in the English-Latin dictionary Promptorium parvulorum sive clericorum:

Stoppyn’, or wythe stondynge a beest of goynge or rennyge. Sisto, Cath. obsto, Ug. (obsisto, P.)
(Stopping, or preventing an animal from going or running. Sisto, Cath. obsto, Ug. (obsisto, P.))

The Latin verbs being glossed mean to stop, oppose, resist, and stand in the way,

Frisk, on the other hand, is an early modern borrowing from French, originally meaning to move briskly, to frolic. It appears in John Rastell’s 1520 A New Iuterlude [sic], in a song about dancing:

So merely let vs daunce ey
And I can daunce it gyngerly
And I can fote it by & by
And I can pranke it [pro]pperly
And I can countenaunse comely
And I can kroke it curtesly
And I can lepe it lustly
And I can torn it trymly
And I can fryske it freshly
And I can loke it lordly
I can the thanke sensuall apetyte
That is þ[e] best daunce with out a pype

The connection to the adjective frisky can be seen in the above quotation.

The sense of searching a body arises out of the brisk movement of the searcher’s hands during a quick search. It appears in the c.1789 work Life’s Painter by George Parker:

Frisk’d. A knowing term used among traps, scouts and runners, when they take a person up on suspicion. They frisk him, that is, search him to find pawn-brokers, duplicates, writings, or property, that may tend to discovery.

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[I’ve edited the original post to reflect the fact that stop and frisk in New York City reached its height under the leadership of Mayor Bloomberg, not Giuliani.]

Sources:

Cockayne, Oswald. Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England (1864–66), vol. 2 of 2. Wiesbaden: Kraus Reprint, 1965, 42–43. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Kaplan, Samuel. “Police Move to Win Puerto Rican Amity.” New York Times, 15 January 1964, 1, 21. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Leaks, Sylvester. “N.Y.s’ New No Knock Law.” Muhammad Speaks., 27 March 1964, 22. JSTOR.

“Murf Backs Bills For Quick Search.” Daily News (New York), 4 February 1964, 37. ProQuest.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. stop, v., frisk, v., frisk, adj.

Galfridus, Anglicus. Promptorium parvulorum sive clericorum, vol 3 of 3. Albert Way, ed. London: Camden Society, 1865, 477. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Parker, George. Life’s Painter of Variegated Characters in Public and Private Life. Dublin[?]: c. 1790, 136. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Rastell, John. A New Iuterlude. London: J. Rastell, 1520. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

“Recent Statute: Criminal Law—New York Authorizes Police To “Stop-And-Frisk” on Reasonable Suspicion.” Harvard Law Review, 78.2, December 1964, 473. JSTOR.

blurb

June 2, 2020

2 June 2020

Must of us know that a blurb is a short testimonial printed on a book jacket that touts and extols the book’s virtue, encouraging prospective readers to buy it. The word is a weird one, with comic overtones, and unusually it is one word for which we know the precise origin.

The year is 1907 and humorist Gelett Burgess’s new book, Are You a Bromide?, is selling well and Burgess is one of the honorees at the annual dinner of the American Bookseller’s Convention. It’s the custom for authors to bring presentation copies of their books to the convention, and Burgess has a special book jacket prepared for 500 copies of his book featuring the picture of a woman, lifted from a dental advertisement, named Miss Belinda Blurb, “in the act of blurbing.” The picture is captioned, “YES, this is a ‘BLURB’! All the Other Publishers commit them. Why Shouldn’t We?”

The blurb goes on to say:

Say! Ain’t this book a 90-H. P., six-cylinder Seller? If We do say it as shouldn’t, WE consider that this man Burgess has got Henry James locked into the coal-bin, telephoning for “Information”
WE expect to sell 350 copies of this great, grand book. It has gush and go to it, it has that Certain Something which makes you want to crawl through thirty miles of dense tropical jungle and bite somebody on the neck. No hero no heroine, nothing like that for OURS, but when you’ve READ this masterpiece, you’ll know what a BOOK is.

Seven years later, Burgess “defined” the word in his Burgess Unabridged:

Blurb, n. 1. A flamboyant advertisement; an inspired testimonial. 2. Fulsome praise; a sound like a publisher.
Blurb, v. 1. To flatter from interested motives; to compliment oneself.
On the “jacket” of the “latest” fiction, we find the blurb; abounding in agile adjectives and adverbs, attesting that this book is the “sensation of the year;” the blurb tells of “thrills” and “heart-throbs,” of “vital importance” and “soul satisfying revelation.” The blurb speaks of the novel's “grip” and “excitement.” (See Alibosh.)
The circus advertiser started the blurb, but the book publisher discovered a more poignant charm than alliterative polysyllables. “It holds you from the first page—”
Now, you take this “Burgess Unabridged”— it's got a jump and a go to it—it's got a hang and a dash and a swing to it that pulls you right out of the chair, dazzles your eyes, and sets your hair to curling. It's an epoch-making, hearttickling, gorglorious tome of joy!
So, were not my publishers old-fashioned, would this my book be blurbed.

And Burgess defines alibosh as:

Al’i-bosh, n. A glaringly obvious falsehood; something not meant to be actually believed; a picturesque overstatement.
A circus poster is an alibosh; so is a seed catalogue, a woman’s age and an actress’s salary. (See Blurb.)

The word quickly caught on in the publishing industry, and the rest is history.

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Sources:

Burgess, Gelett. Burgess Unabridged: A New Dictionary of Words You Have Always Needed.” New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1914, 4, 7.

Mencken, H.L. The American Language, Supplement 1. New York: Knopf, 1945, 329n–30n.

“The Must-Read, Smash Hit Story of ‘Blurb.’” Merriam-Webster.com, n.d.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. blurb, n.

Image credit: Library of Congress.

no quarter

June 1, 2020

1 June 2020

On 1 June 2020, U.S. Senator Tom Cotton, Republican from Arkansas, recommended sending in the U.S. military to quell the riots that had erupted across the nation as a result of the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police. He tweeted that the troops should do:

whatever it takes to restore order. No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters.

When it was pointed out to him that no quarter meant the summary execution of prisoners, Cotton tweeted links to Merriam-Webster and Collins dictionaries. Merriam-Webster defines no quarter as:

No pity or mercy —used to say that an enemy, opponent, etc., is treated in a very harsh way

And Collins defines it thusly:

If you say that someone was given no quarter, you mean that they were not treated kindly by someone who had power or control over them.

And the American Heritage Dictionary, which Cotton did not cite, defines it as:

Mercy or clemency, especially when displayed or given to an enemy

1 June 2020 tweet by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) tweeting links to “no quarter” in dictionaries

But the situation is more nuanced. There are two operative definitions of quarter, one that is literal and regards the military, and one that is figurative. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the literal sense of quarter as:

Exemption from being immediately put to death granted to a vanquished opponent by the victor in a battle or fight; clemency or mercy shown in sparing the life of a person who surrenders.

Under this definition, an order of no quarter is indeed a horrific crime.

But the OED also outlines a separate, figurative sense. It is this figurative sense that Collins refers to. And Merriam-Webster and American Heritage pack both the literal and figurative senses into one definition.

Now, we can’t get inside Cotton’s head and know what he intended when he tweeted the phrase, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is how the phrase is understood, and it will be understood in the context of the long history of police brutality against people of color. Cotton, intentionally or not, is playing it both ways. He is sending out a dogwhistle of when the looting starts, the shooting starts that has a long, racist history, and then hiding behind the milder, “not treated kindly,” definition when others call him on it.

But this sense of quarter is, to our present-day ears, a rather strange usage. It doesn’t seem related to the sense of one fourth of something or an area or neighborhood. Most uses of quarter in English come from the Anglo-Norman quartier. The sense of military clemency also comes from this French word, but it is a later development, a re-borrowing of the French word during the early modern era. It comes out of the phrase quartier de sauveté, referring to a place of refuge allowed to retreating forces after a battle. So, to say no quarter is to deny the enemy a retreat or surrender and force them to fight to the death.

This military sense of quarter appears in Randle Cotgrave’s 1611 French-English dictionary, which defines the French quartier as

quarter, or faire war, wherein souldiers are taken prisoners and ransomed at a certaine rate.

An early use of no quarter is in a letter by James Howell to the Earl of Bristol, written after 1631 and published in 1645. Howell refers to the sack of the Protestant town of Magdeburg in 1631 during the Thirty Years War by Catholic forces of the Holy Roman Empire:

But passing neer Magdenburg, being diffident of his own strength he suffer’d Tilly to take that great town with so much effusion of bloud, because they wold receave no quarter.

Some 20,000 people died in the massacre.

Figurative use of no quarter is in place by the eighteenth century. Daniel Defoe uses it in his 1725 The Complete English Tradesman:

What shall we say to the peace and satisfaction of mind in breaking, which the tradesman will always have when he acts the honest part, and breaks betimes; compared to the guilt and chagrin of the mind, occasioned by a running on, as I said, to the last gasp, when they have little to pay? Then indeed the tradesman can expect no quarter from his creditors, and will have no quiet in himself.

No quarter can refer to either summary executions or to the lighter “not treated kindly,” which is intended depends on the context. And in the context of deploying troops, an order of no quarter should mean only one thing: a horrific crime.

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Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2020, s.v. quarter n.

Collins Dictionary, no date, s.v. no quarter.

Cotgrave, Randle. A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues. London: Adam Islip, 1611, s.v. quartier. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Defoe, Daniel. The Complete English Tradesman. London: Charles Rivington, 1725, 96. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Howell, James. “Letter to the Earle of Bristol.” Epistolæ Ho-Eleinanæ. Familiar Letters. London: Humphrey Moseley, 1645, 5.37.41. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, accessed 1 June 2020, s.v. no quarter.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2007, s.v. quarter, n.

when the looting starts, the shooting starts

June 1, 2020

1 June 2020

On 29 May, Donald Trump tweeted the following in reference to riots in Minneapolis following the killing of George Floyd by a police officer:

These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!

Twitter subsequently placed a warning label on the tweet, making it invisible unless the user clicked on it, saying it violated their rules against glorifying violence.

The phrase when the looting starts, the shooting starts has a long and racist history. And regardless of whether or not Trump was aware of the phrase’s history, it functions as a racist dogwhistle.

The phrase was first uttered by Miami Police Chief Walter Headley on 26 December 1967 at a news conference about a series of armed robberies in black neighborhoods of the city. The Miami News of 26 December 1967 reported Headley responding to a question about whether his tough-on-crime policies might spark civil unrest among the city’s black population:

“This is war,” he said as he issued a warning that anyone caught in the act of committing a crime stands a good chance of getting shot.
[...]
He said officers will “stop and frisk” any group of people milling around, regardless of age.
[...]
Asked if he thought this might cause riots such as have occurred elsewhere in the nation, Headley replied:
“When the looting starts, the shooting starts (meaning his men). These are my orders. Not three days after, but now.”

The Miami Herald reported Headley’s statement as:

We haven’t had any serious problems with civil uprisings and looting because I’ve let the word filter down that when the looting starts, the shooting starts.

The quote was widely reported in hundreds of newspaper articles across the United States in the following days. It was not a minor story.

Much of the 2020 reporting on the history of the phrase conflates the circumstances of Headley uttering the line with the riot that occurred in Miami in August of the following year and the riots across the United States following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in April 1968. Headley was speaking months earlier about what he would do if rioting broke out, which it did on 7 August 1968 in the black Liberty City neighborhood at a rally protesting the Republican National Convention that was being held in the city. An overly aggressive police response to some disorderly conduct led to widespread rioting and vandalism, and the failure of the governor and city officials to appear at a meeting with black community leaders the following day led to further rioting, which was suppressed by police and the National Guard, resulting in three deaths. So, Headley ended up fulfilling the threat he had uttered eight months earlier. Headley died in November 1968.

Some allege that segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace repeated Headley’s phrase during his 1968 presidential campaign. I have found no contemporary evidence that Wallace said the phrase—the closest I’ve found is a 2005 recollection of him saying it. But prior to Headley’s utterance, Wallace did say something worse. The Los Angeles Times of 10 September 1967 reports Wallace as saying:

Bam, shoot ‘em dead on the spot! Shoot to kill if anyone throws a rock at a policeman or throws a Molotov cocktail. Don’t shoot any children, just shoot that adult standing beside the kid that throws the rock. That may not prevent the burning and looting, but it sure will stop it after it starts.

Those who recall Wallace saying it would seem to be conflating two separate memories. And even if Wallace didn’t utter those exact words, the sentiment and message were the same, so connecting the two messages is not an error.

Headley was a racist and under his leadership the Miami police department engaged in aggressive and discriminatory tactics against the city’s black population. And the phrase when the looting starts, the shooting starts carries unmistakably racist implications.

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Sources:

Nelson, Jack. “Wallace Would End Rioting With Bullets.” Los Angeles Times, 10 September 1967, C48S. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Savage, Jim. “Miami Police Open Up ‘Get Tough Policy.’” Miami Herald, 27 December 1967, 1A. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Trump, Donald J, @realDonaldTrump, Twitter, 29 May 2020.

Wilcox, Bob. “‘I Have Leaders’ Support.’” Miami News, 26 December 1967, 1A. ProQuest.