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“We have not
yet reached a situation in which white people and white cultural
agendas are no longer in the ascendant. The media, politics, education
are still in the hands of white people, still speak for whites while
claiming—and sometimes sincerely aiming—to speak for humanity.” – Richard Dyer
“There is a physical difference between the white and black races
which I believe will ever forbid the two races living together on
terms of social and political equality... And inasmuch as they cannot
so live, while they do remain together there must be the position
of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor
of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”
– Abraham Lincoln
“As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more
closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal.
On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will
reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be
adorned by a downright moron.” – H.L. Mencken
I recall speaking with an English friend of mine just days before
the 2004 Presidential election. As an outsider to American politics
and society, he faithfully believed the American people would right
the wrongs of the previous four years, and I believe him to have
been dejected by my ardent cynicism. In so many words I told him
to “never underestimate the stupidity of the American people,” which,
truth be told, was a statement of anguish, one founded in my distrust
in white America, or better stated, the white electorate’s predictable
political behavior. Understandably, my English friend had reason
to think in the manner in which he did, as his image of America
was greatly misrepresented; in his short stay in the states, he
found himself surrounded by white liberals – and one black male.
In his essay “Reagan, Race, and Remembrance: Reflections on the
American Divide” (BC June
10, 2004), the always insightful Tim Wise illustrated succinctly
the racial divide in America magnified by the former President’s
death and the hullabaloo that ensued. In the words of the author,
“If one needs any more evidence that whites and people of color
live in two totally different places, politically and psychically,
one need only look at the visual evidence provided by the death
of Ronald Reagan.... While persons of color make up approximately
30 percent of the population of the United States, the Reagan faithful
look like another country altogether...far whiter...than the nation
into whose soil he will be deposited within a matter of days.”
Of course, the racial disconnect that is obvious to non-whites is unapparent
in the eyes of the majority of white Americans. As Wise noted, whites
and non-whites reside in completely different worlds, not only politically
and psychically, as Wise mentions, but physically and geographically.
It took, for example, the tragedy of 9-11 to occur before soccer
moms the country over became overtly concerned for their children’s
safety, whereas non-white mothers, a disproportionate number of
whom are relegated to incubators of crime and violence, worry daily,
incessantly, about their children’s safety. It is fair to say that
most non-white mothers are more concerned about whether or not their
child can take the short walk home from school without duress than
they are of any sort of terrorist act; they are far too concerned
with the malevolence of their fellow Americans to be saddled with
that worry.
Though the previous example spoke to the combined geographic and
psychic differences found in the white and non-white “worlds,” the
next example, a personal one, attempts to acknowledge how this psychic
difference in the two “worlds” informs the inhabitants politically.
There was an instance in which I sat among a group of white peers
and commented on how President George W. Bush stumbled and misspoke
in whatever speech he was giving at the time. Undoubtedly, these
are the usual characteristics of all his speeches, but that aside,
the torrent of comments that fell upon me in his defense was nearly
unbearable. I was a fool to think I could challenge their presumption
that one need not be articulate or overwhelmingly intelligent to
hold the highest office in the land, because, well, he graduated
from Yale and Harvard after all. But it was only moments later that
this group of white males would denigrate and ridicule the Afro-American
basketball player Allen Iverson (a college drop-out) for, of all
things, being inarticulate, and by extension, unintelligent. If
only Iverson had completed Georgetown, he might have found himself
free of mockery from this band of hypocrites.
Alas, there is no greater indicator of the racial
divide than that presented by the political process known as elections.
As voiced by
Robert Oscar Lopez in “How White Liberals Became a New Racial
Minority,” “Race has everything to do with the November 2 election.
It was a race conflict slowly boiling into a race war. It’s not
a huge surprise to people of color, because if you’ve been a racial
minority all your life, you treat racial strife as a given, like
rainy days or rust.”
It wasn’t a huge surprise either that the white-controlled
media failed to acknowledge this assessment, an assessment not difficult
to make in light of the numbers: eighty-eight percent of blacks
voted against the incumbent-cum-sitting president, along with some
seventy percent of all non-whites. Rather, attention was diverted
away from the racial divide, and brought to the tent of religious
fervor. And left out of that dialogue is that black evangelicals
voted nearly in step with the rest of the black electorate.
Even so-called liberal media have been complicit with this sort
of delusional behavior, though, again, this is of no surprise: in
the January 31st issue of that venerable magazine of liberal ideology
The Nation, the editors postulated in the
editorial “None So Blind” that “the central question of his
[Bush’s] second turn is how soon Americans, recognizing their error,
will demand a change in direction.” The fallacy in this statement
is that, by “Americans,” the writers mean “white Americans.”
It is problematic – and this has been so since the founding of this
nation – to assume the dominant culture, in this case "whites,"
speaks for the whole of our diverse nation, especially one so very
segregated, psychically and physically. Is it wrong to suggest that
the "American" people got what they wanted in the 2004
election? Though in some ways it pains me to continually cite Mencken,
it was he who said, “Democracy is the theory that the common people
know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” In this
case, “common people” can be said to be normative, which is a highbrow
way of saying “white,” at least as it seems to be defined in everyday
and political vernacular, as evidenced by The Nation’s statement.
The “inner soul of the people" referred to by Mencken (which
I propose to be the dominant “white” culture) spoke in the 2004
election. Even white “Americans” who voted against Bush seem to
be content with their supposed “error.” It is this group's inability
(or unwillingness) to recognize their own complicity in perpetuating
the "color line" that impedes the formation of a true
progressive movement in this country. If this fact is not recognized,
then white liberals, like their non-white peers, will find themselves
remaining in a subordinate status to their conservative counterparts.
If this is to be the case, I pity not only “Americans,” but the
world.
Rodney Foxworth is currently
an editorial intern at Baltimore's City
Paper, a college student, a member of the Baltimore Green Party
and contributing writer to the radical youth journal
Left Hook. Foxworth’s blog is called
Down in the Foxhole. He can be contacted at [email protected]. |
