Dispatches from the Race War. Tim Wise
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with names like Donald Duck, which is unlikely to result in actual voter fraud unless Donald himself waddles into the booth to vote. But by pushing these stories, the right manipulates white fear and reinforces the feverish nightmare that “those people” are stealing your country from you.
Though it may be difficult to remember, there was a time when movement conservatives, precisely because of the patrician erudition to which they aspired, tended to speak in measured tones. There was a time when the right sought to engage on the battlefield of ideas with rhetoric that, however nonsensical it may have been, nonetheless imagined itself the very embodiment of enlightened reason. Conservatives were like the prim and proper family members who told you never to speak of sex, religion, or politics at the dinner table. Even when they engaged in the most despicable forms of racism, such as William F. Buckley’s defense of whites-only voting in National Review, you got the sense that, however venal, it had been written less with a sense of hatred and more with a sense of pitying regret. Buckley, it seemed, really wanted black people to be civilized enough to participate in the election of public officials. It’s just that, as he saw it, they simply weren’t there yet. Offensive? Of course. And racist as hell. But when you watch him getting his clock cleaned by James Baldwin in a debate at Oxford, as you can (and really should) on YouTube, you get the sense he was almost relieved. It was as if from that point forward he began to take the turn that many years later would cause him to admit (at least partially) that he had been wrong in his support for Southern apartheid.
Would that conservatives today were half as introspective. We have gone from the likes of Buckley, Goldwater, and Reagan, who were bad enough, to folks like Michael Savage, who calls his liberal adversaries “vermin,” who should be “hung high.” Or Neal Boortz, who referred to the black poor in New Orleans during Katrina as “human parasitic garbage,” and “toe fungus.” Or Glenn Beck, who once fantasized about beating Congressman Charles Rangel to death with a shovel.
One wonders as to the source of their devolution. Perhaps it’s the shift from books—lengthy tomes with a pretense to depth—to talk radio and internet communication. Perhaps it’s because anti-intellectualism has so gripped right-wingers that they no longer expect or even desire their leading thinkers to have formal education. Hannity, Limbaugh, Beck—all of them either college dropouts or persons who eschewed higher education from the start. Or perhaps it’s the danger they perceive, and the fear it generates, neither of which their forebears could have anticipated.
After all, white Christian men are no longer the archetypal American. Now the nation’s leader no longer looks like us, the popular culture is thoroughly multicultural, and the economy has melted down, confronting us with an insecurity we hadn’t experienced for three generations, however ordinary such insecurity might have long been the black and brown. And the demographics of the country are changing. Within forty years, our kind will no longer be the norm, the very definition of the “all-American boy or girl.”
To the right, the barbarians are at the gates. And because we believe those gates are ours, and that we built them (even though in every conceivable way they did), we have begun to lose our moorings. We cannot be special except in relation to them. The distance we have put between them and us is what serves to remind us of our betterness. It has mapped the territory of our more considerable work effort, our moral superiority, our more significant sacrifice. So too has it marked the boundaries of their laziness, dysfunction, and pathology. Their failure is a necessary prerequisite for the proper functioning of our egos. Their gains, however little they challenge our advantages, pose an existential threat to the psychological wages of whiteness, which W.E.B. DuBois told us were central to our existence.
In short, how will we know we’re good if we don’t know they’re bad? Our entire self-concept has relied upon their otherness. It’s almost as if we do not exist in any meaningful sense without them as a reminder of the level to which we cannot be allowed to fall. Confronted with our utter emptiness—forced to see the way that our entire identity has been predicated on a negation for nearly four hundred years—we now fight like hell to maintain it, for it is literally all we have.
Having made our bed, and entirely unwilling to toss it out for a new one, we find ourselves molding to its contours, no matter that we can feel the springs breaking down—or perhaps precisely because they are.
BULLYING PULPIT
THE PROBLEMATIC POLITICS OF PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY
SOMETIMES, WHITE PRIVILEGE isn’t about having better opportunities, jobs, money, or other material items relative to people of color. Instead, white privilege is as simple as knowing that, generally speaking, if you’re white, you’ll be perceived as competent and hardworking until proven otherwise. And unlike the case for people of color, no one will ever feel the need to lecture you about the importance of hard work and personal responsibility, as if these were foreign concepts.
To wit, President Obama’s recent commencement address at historically black Morehouse College—one of the nation’s preeminent educational institutions—during which he lectured the graduates about taking responsibility for their lives, and not blaming racism for whatever obstacles they may face in the future.
It’s hard to know what’s more disturbing. First, that President Obama thinks black grads at one of the nation’s best colleges need to be hectored about such matters. Or second, that white America so desires exculpation for racial inequity that we need him to say such things, and he knows it—hence the scolding of black men that he knows will be transmitted to us by way of media coverage. Either way, the result is tragic.
If the former, then Barack Obama has revealed himself to be not nearly as deep a thinker as many have long believed. After all, Morehouse men are not the type to slack off, or make excuses for their shortcomings, or wait for others to do things for them. They earned admission to a fantastic school and have now graduated from it based on their own hard work. To speak to them as if they were supplicants looking for a handout is crass. Even more, it is beneath the dignity of a president of the United States, especially one who shares the complexion of most, if not all, of those graduates.
Barack Obama knows full well how demanding Morehouse is. So to preach hard work to these men as if they had never heard of it not only insults their intelligence but also feeds every stereotype already held by too many white Americans about black males, no matter how educated. And yes, I realize that admonitions to hard work and personal responsibility have always been prevalent in the black community, in no small measure because of the history of racism, which the president rightly acknowledged in the address. But those typically are offered behind closed doors, not in public and by the most prominent person in the country, within listening range of white ears that are more than a little prepared to hear only the parts that reinforce preexisting biases.
Meanwhile, if the president thought it necessary to upbraid this year’s Morehouse graduates about not being lazy or using racism as an excuse for their shortcomings, precisely because he thinks (or perhaps knows) that white folks love that shit—the second possibility—then that, too, is pitiable. That Barack Obama seems to think he still needs to go out of his way to please white people is maddening. The white folks who are open to liking him don’t need him to serve as black folks’ moral scold, and the ones who need that will never be satisfied until he does the full Herman Cain. They will not be sated until he is prepared to lay almost all the problems of the nation at the feet of black folks and sing Negro spirituals in white churches while little old white ladies, either literally or figuratively, rub his head.
Since the president is in his second term, he no longer needs white votes. Thus his pandering to white biases—as with his father’s day entreaties to black men, and only black men, to be better dads (as if white men need no similar instruction)—suggests perhaps it is he whose views of the black community are to blame here. Maybe it is he who has internalized the idea that black folk, even highly educated ones, are would-be malingerers, just waiting for a reason to go soft and, as he put it, “blame the world for trying to keep a black man down.”
Needless to say, Barack Obama will never tell white people