Dear White America (10 page)

No, most of us prefer to dwell in an entirely fictive place, a
Leave It to Beaver
or
Andy Griffith
fantasyland, where Opie Taylor casts lines down at the ol' fishin' hole with “Pa” and the experiences of racial others are ignored, forgotten, relegated to the backwaters of memory. Those other experiences we treat as if they were shown on some giant Etch-a-Sketch, which we can conveniently erase with a vigorous shake or two, obliterating all evidence of the inadequacies made visible by the work of our own hands.

Which then brings us to the second element in the nostalgic political project upon which the right has embarked, and in which they hope, sincerely, to enlist our participation; namely, the rewriting of history to sanitize the racist horrors visited upon millions of our brothers and sisters. Those who would engage in the whitewash are fully aware that many of us are quite open to the deception. The fact is, we have tried hard over the years not to hear the voices of those who have borne the brunt of systemic exclusion and marginalization. In effect, we have placed noise-canceling headphones over our ears, letting in only the pleasant sounds
we
wish to hear, while shutting out the rest. So the dulcet tones of patriotism, the self-congratulatory rhythms of American exceptionalism have soothed us to the point of inducing a collective coma, a hypnotic state of perpetual positivity. Meanwhile, the harsh and discordant notes and backbeats of racism and discrimination have been kept from our consciousness, drowned out by far happier melodies.

So we have the aforementioned Michele Bachmann insisting that the nation's history of racial oppression really wasn't that bad. The founders, for instance, worked “tirelessly” to end enslavement, according to Bachmann.
123
Forget that most of them owned other human beings and never even managed to “work tirelessly” to free their own, let alone end the larger system of enslavement that kept them chained as property; or that they wrote into the Constitution specific protections for slave owners, including clauses requiring that runaways be returned to their masters. Forget that whole Civil War thing (which transpired roughly half a century after most all the founders were dead), or the slave rebellions that helped undermine the system, or the John Brown raid. The founders were racially enlightened good guys, sayeth the former tax attorney from Minnesota. Indeed, when Congress decided to read the Constitution on the House floor shortly after the Republican Party took control in 2010—largely to mollify those in the Tea Party movement who insist they seek a return to Constitutional principles—they deliberately
excised
all portions of the document referring to slavery, as if to suggest that such a thing never happened, or that if it did, it wasn't worth reflecting upon.
124
Better to uncritically remember the genius of the founders, or to believe, as Bachmann apparently does, that they fashioned a nation in which “it didn't matter the color of your skin.”
125

And let's not forget that George Washington “loved the Indians,” according to Glenn Beck,
126
never mind that he waged an annihilationist war against them. Indeed, Washington wrote to Major General John Sullivan, imploring him to “lay waste” to all Iroquois settlements, so that their lands may not be “merely overrun but destroyed.”
127

Speaking of native peoples, what must they think as they listen to so many of us insisting that it is improper to allow the construction of a Muslim cultural center a few blocks from the site of the 9/11 attacks? That argument, after all—with which the majority of us seem to agree, according to polls—rests upon the notion that “Ground Zero” is virtually sacred land, and that to allow a Muslim center (and, God forbid, a mosque, as many mistakenly called it) would be to defile the memories of those who died as a result of Muslim extremism there. But as any indigenous North American can tell you, there is scarcely a square foot of land on which we tread that is not, for someone, Ground Zero. I am sitting atop one now as I write these words: a killing field for Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Creek; a graveyard in which are buried the bones of peoples whose holocaust occurred not so long ago and is still remembered by those who have not the luxury of forgetting. We haven't prohibited the construction of churches all over that land, just because the church and Christianity served as instruments of that evisceration.

It takes some nerve and a disturbing sense of entitlement to believe that our pain is the only pain that counts, that only
our
ground zero matters and should be memorialized in this way, or to suggest that we are the only ones who have known terror, and that having done so we now have the right to draw a circle around us, a bubble of specialness that can keep us warm and protected like some amniotic sac inside which we will forever be insulated from harm. But that is what our nostalgic and completely inaccurate remembrance of history practically guarantees: it allows us to rewrite the past and erase from our memories those aspects in which we come up a bit short in the greatness department.

Anyone who dares reflect accurately upon that history is made a pariah for daring to question the nostalgic narrative. According to the right, for instance, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan is to be condemned because she dared concur with the opinion of former Justice Thurgood Marshall, for whom she once clerked. And what was Marshall's opinion, the concurrence with which would invite such shrieks of indignation on the part of those out to discredit her? Simple: it was the part about how the nation, as originally conceived, was “defective from the start,” due to its enshrinement of enslavement and white supremacy.
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This is a position with which no intellectually honest or remotely informed person could disagree, but with which, apparently, millions of us do. Which says
nothing
about Thurgood Marshall or Elena Kagan, but volumes about those who would criticize either on this point.

But what can we expect, in a nation where the likes of former Senator (and now Republican presidential candidate) Rick Santorum can chastise President Obama for making the point that America didn't really begin to come into its promise until after the civil rights revolution of the 1960s and the creation of certain social programs like Medicare and Medicaid, intended to provide a modicum of health security to the American public? As Santorum recently bellowed on the campaign trail, America was a “great place before 1965,” a statement which is not even remotely true, and which stands as a slap in the face to every person of color who resided here before that time.
129
Before 1965, this country was a system of formal white supremacy and institutionalized apartheid. It was not even decent, let alone great, for millions of Americans. That it had the potential for greatness is inarguable, but that is neither what Santorum said nor what he intended to suggest. He intended to obliterate, by his comments, the lived experiences of people of color, about whom he apparently could not care less.
His
memories of the past, and ours (as white folks), are the ones that matter to him.

So too with Mike Huckabee, formerly the Governor of Arkansas and a
Fox News
personality, who has criticized the president for “not seeing America” the way “we do,” and specifically because while Obama was living in places like Indonesia for a brief period, or Hawaii (doing God knows what), “we” were going to Boy Scout and Rotary Club meetings.
130
Really?
We were? Who was? Not black folks on the South Side of Chicago. Not Latinos in East L.A. Not Lakota people on Pine Ridge. For that matter, not even most of
us
were living that small-town, Mayberry, cornpone kind of life. But by saying it, by suggesting that the
real
America is different from Obama's America—and for that matter, folks of color generally, or urban types more broadly—Huckabee can play directly to that sense of national glory squandered, national identity under attack, and the need for some type of small-town (implicitly white) rebirth.

Upon close reflection the attempt is transparent, but sadly, close reflection on such matters is not what we're encouraged to engage in. Rather, those who brandish nostalgia as a political tool know that for people who are anxious, nervous about cultural, political, economic and demographic change, this kind of thing works. It primes the pump of racial insecurity, making it that much easier for those so primed to stand and declare their desire, above all else, to “take their country back.”

Of course I know that many of us white folk get upset at this suggestion—at the notion that this mantra of national reclamation is somehow connected to a narrative of racial nostalgia or resentment. Two years ago I engaged in a rather lengthy email exchange with someone whose views no doubt mirrored those of many millions more. She was upset because of something I had said during a television interview on CNN regarding the Tea Party movement. Being a part of that movement, she took offense to what she perceived to be my position; namely, that the Tea Party was propelled forward by racial hatred of a black president. I tried to explain that, in fact, that was not my argument. I do not believe that the Tea Party movement, or its individual members and supporters, are operating necessarily out of racist motivations, nor have I ever claimed that opposition to the president automatically or even necessarily makes one racist. I had said, however, and do believe that the mantra of taking the country “back” contains an unhealthy degree of racial resentment as part of its “background noise.” It isn't racism in the classic sense; rather, it is the rhetoric of white anxiety operationalized in a political movement. When white people—and especially older white people—speak of going “back” to an earlier time, it is not unreasonable to become a bit nervous about what they might mean. I know the kind of country that was theirs as children and young adults.

The difference between racism and racial resentment was lost on her, and she continued to press her case. Race had
nothing
to do with the Tea Party movement, she insisted. The desire to take the country back is not about segregation, she assured me, not about going back to the days of overt racial oppression and Jim Crow. So I decided to play the game, and asked her quite simply what the Tea Party folks mean when they say they wish to “take their country back?” What
is
that about, if it's not about race? Simple, she said: we mean that we want to go back to a time of lower taxes and smaller government. And more to the point, we'd like to return to a time when people were self--sufficient and didn't rely on others to provide for them—when people believed in taking personal responsibility for their lives. This, she explained, was the kind of self-reliance that was directly at stake in the health care debate. If health care reform passed—even the minimalist reforms proposed by the Obama administration, which would have fallen far short of a guaranteed national health care system—the rugged individualism that had long marked our nation's culture would be destroyed. People would become ever more dependent on others to take care of them, rather than relying on their own initiative and hard work.

I suspect that many of you who consider yourselves conservatives—and even some who aren't that far to the right—would echo her sentiments in this regard. Such conservatism, you might say, is largely about a philosophical belief in limited government intervention in the economic workings of the nation—a preference for individual self-sufficiency and independence—and a tax burden less onerous than what you experience today. So far so good. But might we dig a bit deeper? Because when we do, we begin to notice that the debate about the size and scope of government, about taxation, about “individualism” versus the “collective good,” has been implicitly about race for several years now. It is not merely a philosophical issue but an intensely racialized discourse.

Take taxes for example. The Tea Partier insisted to me that she wanted to go back to a time when taxes were lower. Yet she failed to specify when that might be. I wanted to know exactly when in our nation's history did she think we had more or less gotten it right when it came to the proper level of taxation, and so I asked her. Now, I suppose she could have said 1897, or 1909. Both were before the imposition of the federal income tax, and in relative terms, I suppose they were periods of “low taxation.” But I knew she wouldn't say either of these. Children were working in factories and mines in those days, workers had no rights whatsoever, and unless you were one of a handful of rich white people or their kids, life was pretty rough. She could have said 1926, I suppose. Although this was after the imposition of the income tax, the rates of taxation were relatively low on most people, so was that perhaps, what she meant? But of course not. The 1920s were rather miserable for most folks: not just people of color suffering under the weight of racial apartheid, but most whites as well, whose economic and social condition left more than a little to be desired.