Playing Neoliberal Politics: Post-Racial and Post-Racist Strategies in “Same Love”

ABSTRACT

This essay argues that marriage equality discourses have successfully been used not only to advance GLBTQ rights but as a vehicle for re-securing neoliberalism after the 2008 Great Recession. Specifically, this essay analyzes how Macklemore and Ryan Lewis's “Same Love” (featuring Mary Lambert) supports neoliberalism by forwarding antiblackness and circumscribed political subjectivities while urging support for marriage equality. Through appeals to minimization, multiracialism, and inverting oppression, “Same Love” demonstrates how avowedly progressive texts can simultaneously impede the freer and fairer world the text supposedly promotes.

KEYWORDS:

• Neoliberalism
• post-racism
• post-race
• marriage
• LGBT

Notes

1. Jamie Peck, Nik Theodore, and Neil Brenner, “Neoliberalism Resurgent? Market Rule after the Great Recession,” abstract, South Atlantic Quarterly 111, no. 2 (2012): 265–288, doi:10.1215/00382876-1548212.

2. See Naomi Klein, “Wall St. Crisis Should Be for Neoliberalism What Fall of Berlin Wall Was for Communism,” Democracy Now, October 6, 2008, http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/6/naomi_klein; Peck, Theodore, and Brenner, “Neoliberalism Resurgent,” 265–68.

3. Lisa Duggan, Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston, MA: Beacon, 2003), 3, 12.

4. For instance, see Jay Michaelson, “Ten Reasons Women Are Losing While Gays Keep Winning,” Daily Beast, July 6, 2014, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/06/ten-reason-women-are-losing-while-gays-keep-winning.html and Mark Joseph Stern, “Why Are Women Losing While Gays Win? It's All About Sex,” Slate, July 7, 2014, http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/07/07/feminism_loses_while_gay_equality_wins_and_it_s_all_about_sex.html

5. Lisa Duggan, “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism,” in Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, ed. Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 179.

6. While often lumped together, post-racism and post-racialism are, in fact, two distinct but related concepts. The former refers to a supposed moment beyond racist beliefs, practices, and systems while the latter refers to a supposed moment when the notion of race itself is no longer meaningful. The strategies and discourses I will examine in this essay often conflate and collapse post-racism and post-racialism; however, I will attempt to specify the invocation of each term when possible and identify their joint usage when those divisions cannot be easily made.

7. Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 6, 5.

8. Michael Calvin McGee, “Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54, no 3 (1990): 279, doi:10.1080/10570319009374343.

9. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2.

10. Angela Y. Davis, The Meaning of Freedom: And Other Difficult Dialogues (San Francisco: City Lights, 2012), 168.

11. Jodi Melamed, “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism,” Social Text 24, no 4 89 (2006): 14–16, doi:10.1215/01642472-2006-009.

12. Davis, Meaning of Freedom, 174.

13. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, June 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631; Sexton, Amalgamation, 3; Davis, Meaning of Freedom, 169.

14. Melamed, “Spirit of Neoliberalism,” 16.

15. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000), 18; Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–45, doi:10.2307/1229039.

16. For instance, see Angela McRobbie, “Post-Feminism and Popular Culture,” Feminist Media Studies 4, no. 3 (2004): 257, doi:10.1080/1468077042000309937.

17. Kent A. Ono, “Postracism: A Theory of the ‘Post'—as Political Strategy,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 34, no. 3 (2010): 227, doi:10.1177/0196859910371375.

18. Davi Johnson Thornton, “Pysch’s Comedic Tale of Black–White Friendship and the Lighthearted Affect of ‘Post-Race’ America,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 28, no. 5 (2011): 428, doi:10.1080/15295036.2010.518621.

19. Thornton, “Psych’s Comedic Tale,” 428; Ralina L. Joseph, “‘Tyra Banks is Fat’: Reading (Post-)Racism and (Post-)Feminism in the New Millennium,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 26, no. 3 (2009): 249, doi:10.1080/15295030903015096; Eric King Watts, “The (Nearly) Apocalyptic Politics of ‘Postracial’ America: Or ‘This is Now the United States of Zombieland,’” Journal of Communication Inquiry 34, no. 3 (2010): 216, doi:10.1177/0196859910371375; Naomi R. Rockler, “Friends, Judaism, and the Holiday Armadillo: Mapping a Rhetoric of Postidentity Politics,” Communication Theory 16, no. 4 (2006): 453, doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2006.00278.x; Tim Wise, Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2009), 9; Ono, “Postracism,” 228–229.

20. Ono, “Postracism,” 228.

21. Ibid., 228.

22. Ibid., 6.

23. Ibid., 3.

24. Ibid., 1.

25. Ibid., 80–81.

26. Ibid., 78.

27. Ibid., 80.

28. Ono, “Postracism,” 229.

29. Carlos A. Fernández, “La Raza and the Melting Pot: A Comparative Look at Multiethnicity,” in Racially Mixed People in America, ed. Maria P.P. Root (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992), 139.

30. Sexton, Amalgamation, 6.

31. Ibid., 7, 6, 51.

32. Ibid., 80.

33. McGee, “Text, Context,” 279.

34. Raymie E. McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Practice,” Communication Monographs 56, no. 2 (1989): 91, 100, doi:10.1080/03637758909390253.

35. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of a Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), xii; Sexton, Amalgamation, 1–2; Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 23; Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins,” 1241–45.

36. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), 187; Jasbir K. Puar, “Queer Times, Queer Assemblages,” Social Text 23 nos 3–4 84–85 (2005): 121, doi:10.1215/01642472-23-3-4_84-85-121; Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (1998): 558, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344178.

37. For example, see Michael Eric Dyson, Know What I Mean? Reflections on Hip Hop (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 7; Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 1–2, 94–95; Mickey Hess, “Hip-hop Realness and the White Performer,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 22, no. 5 (2005): 375–78, doi:10.1080/07393180500342878.

38. Hess, “Hip-hop Realness,” 373–74, 383–84.

39. Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 45.

40. Sexton, Amalgamation, 65.

41. Fernández, “La Raza” in Racially Mixed People, 139.

42. G. Reginald Daniel, More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2002) and Kerry Ann Rockquemore and David L. Brunsma, Beyond Black: Biracial Identity in America (London: Sage, 2002), as cited in Sexton, Amalgamation, 6.

43. Sexton, Amalgamation, 78.

44. Ibid., 8.

45. Ibid., 8.

46. Ibid., 6.

47. Ibid., 7.

48. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 190–93.

49. Todd Boyd, The New H.N.I.C.: The Death of Civil Rights and the Reign of Hip Hop (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 72.

50. Stacy Lambe, “The Making of Macklemore,” Out, May 8, 2013, http://www.out.com/entertainment/music/2013/05/07/macklemore-ryan-lewis-gay-anthem-hiphop

51. “Macklemore Talks ‘Same Love’ Inspiration, Homophobia in Hip Hop,” Huffington Post, July 12, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/12/macklemore-same-love-homophobia-_n_3587294.html

52. Celeste Headlee, “Macklemore's Brand of Socially Conscious Rap,” NPR, November 23, 2012, http://www.npr.org/2012/11/23/165667816/macklemores-brand-of-socially-conscious-rap

53. Kyler Geoffroy, “Macklemore Talks Homophobia,” TowleRoad, July 12, 2013, http://www.towleroad.com/2013/07/macklemore-reveals-the-inspiration-behind-same-love-video-.html

54. Macklemore and Ryan Lewis's Blog, July 18, 2012, http://macklemore.com/post/27481163762/this-song-which-i-wrote-in-april-is-a-response (no longer accessible).

55. Sexton, Amalgamation, 7.

56. Duggan, “New Homonormativity,” in Castronova and Nelson, Materializing Democracy, 177.

57. Ono, “Postracism,” 227–28.