So, I’ve been wondering, lately, about how we in this country—we white folk of the majority, in wealth and influence if decreasingly in absolute numbers—will manage to reconcile, going forward, our contradictory founding myths: equality and white supremacy.\n
We’ve only in my generation driven the white supremacist ideology underground. Our great development was the story we told ourselves of the crazy old uncle who spouted racist crap when he got drunk at Thanksgiving. That story defanged, deprecated and deplored the racism, taking away its authority. We convinced ourselves, culturally, that white supremacy was now old<\/i>, that most un-American of things. We hoped that when the older folk died out, their nonsense would die with them, and so would anyone’s responsibility for doing anything about it. We knew better, we who grew up with a federal holiday<\/i> honoring a civil rights hero<\/i>; we could celebrate equality and the other one, embarrassed and ostracized, would simply fade away.\n
It won’t.\n
But now what do we do?\n
I have thought that the way to tackle the contradiction was by focusing on America as an aspirational ideal: we failed to live up to it, we have always failed in various ways, but the ideal of equality and liberty was not to blame for that failure. And at any rate striving to live up to that ideal was the important part, striving and failing and continuing to strive. It’s na\u00efve, sure, but also inspiring, at least to me. Or, perhaps, it’s just a way I can reconcile the contradiction, or at least live with it. After all, it’s not really true that our Founders were striving for equality as I understand it; they believed that their heritage was superior to everyone else’s, and that the ability of everyone who didn’t share that (largely English, German and Dutch) heritage could participate in civilization only to the extent that they took that heritage on themselves. This was racist<\/i> to them when someone felt that a person’s skin color or ancestry prevented them from fully taking part in that Anglo-Dutch heritage; the non-racists pretty much felt that anyone, given enough encouragement, could attend church, wear starched neckcloths, discuss the writings of Aristotle and become properly civilized. I know that history; we all know that. That’s not falling short of equality. That’s rejecting it.\n
One of the ways we have, in our generation and in the past, attempted to reconcile these two incompatible founding myths of equality and supremacy is to insist that people of color were and by rights ought to be happy about it all. Those who were ungrateful for the gifts of technology, civilization and white supremacy had to be silenced lest they burst the fragile illusion. Now the new illusion that white supremacy is ancient history is perhaps even more fragile, and our outrage when it is burst is even more sudden and shocked for being (mostly) non-violent. Angry black men (and Native Americans and Latinos uswusf) scare us, not just because the blood of the lash may still be repaid with the blood of the sword and the gun, but because it throws off our own sense of who we are. If their anger is just—if Colin Kaepernick is legitimately angry and is not alone in his anger, if the Native Americans at Standing Rock are legitimately angry and are not alone in their anger—then our balance of those two primal myths is a lie.\n
Which it is, of course.\n
But now what do we do?\n
Our instinct, us white liberal folk who believe in equality, diversity and hope… I think our instinct is to push away the problem into a basket of deplorables, those terrible people who are so openly and horrifyingly vicious to Mr. Kaepernick or the Standing Rock protesters or the immigrants with or without documents or a Moslem woman who was just walking down the street in New York, for crying out loud, to anyone who expresses anger at the continuing legacy of white supremacy, and to tsk ourselves better that we are not in that basket with the deplorables. And it’s true that there’s a basketful of deplorables in this country, a racist rump of ten or twenty percent, and right now of course they are getting to make all the noise and fuss. And we really do need to keep deploring, to keep that racist crap underground where it belongs. That’s important. But I think it’s not enough. We thought it was enough, our generation, that we could just make fun of our crazy racist uncles and shut them up when they were sober and that would be enough. It wasn’t.\n
Now what do we do?\n
In truth, I have no idea. I don’t. If we can’t, as a culture, accept that people are angry enough to kneel in silent protest during the national anthem… well, I don’t know. I just don’t.\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Which Your Humble Blogger knows that most people would deny this stuff, which it would certainly be easier to do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15370"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16384,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15370\/revisions\/16384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}