Whiteness, NSA Spying and the Irony of Racial Privilege

[Solly Mack]

21. K&R

Let’s be clear, it’s not that the NSA misdeeds, carried out by the last two administrations, are no big deal. They’re completely indefensible, no matter the efforts of the apologists for empire — from the corporate media to President Obama to Dick Cheney — to legitimize them. A free people should not stand for it.

Problem is, we are not a free people and never have been, and therein lies the rub.

The idea that with this NSA program there has been some unique blow struck against democracy, and that now our liberties are in jeopardy is the kind of thing one can only believe if one has had the luxury of thinking they were living in such a place, and were in possession of such shiny baubles to begin with. And this is, to be sure, a luxury enjoyed by painfully few folks of color, Muslims in a post-9/11 America, or poor people of any color. For the first, they have long known that their freedom was directly constrained by racial discrimination, in housing, the justice system and the job market; for the second, profiling and suspicion have circumscribed the boundaries of their liberties unceasingly for the past twelve years; and for the latter, freedom and democracy have been mostly an illusion, limited by economic privation in a class system that affords less opportunity for mobility than fifty years ago, and less than most other nations with which we like to compare ourselves.

In short, when people proclaim a desire to “take back our democracy” from the national security apparatus, or for that matter the plutocrats who have ostensibly hijacked it, they begin from a premise that is entirely untenable; namely, that there was ever a democracy to take back, and that the hijacking of said utopia has been a recent phenomenon. But there wasn’t and it hasn’t been.


Reaction to the most recent confirmation of this truth ranks right along with the way so many were stunned by the September 11 attacks. The shock in that instance also came from a place of naiveté, wrought by the luxury of believing that the rest of the world viewed us as we did: as a paragon of virtue, which had brought only light and happiness to the world, rather than military occupations, hellfire missiles, brutal and crippling economic sanctions, and support for dictators so long as they were serving our presumed interests. But some people — and again, they were mostly black and brown — were not stunned at all.
Having long had no choice but to see the nation’s warts for what they were, and having never possessed the benefit of viewing America as most whites had, peoples of color, while horrified by that day’s events, were hardly likely to be knocked off stride by them. They had always known what it was like to be hated. And hunted. And solely because of who they were.