This post is adapted from an essay that I placed on another liberal community site. It is apropos of a continuing discussion here at Daily Kos on how liberals amd progressives, including specifically white liberals and progressives, can discuss race, racial politics and racial identity responsibly and with integrity.
Someone once said that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. More accurately, hypocrisy is a "strategic unbundling" to strip the useful political, social and economic benefits of "being nice" from the unpleasant, hard work of "doing nice." In politics, of course, we have a permanent, movable feast of hypocrisy, one that predated social and religious conservative Larry Craig's "wide stance" by several millennia.
We have so many examples of hypocrisy when it comes to race, culture and caste in this country that one staggers to enumerate them. The thickness of liberal hypocrisy on these topics makes me appreciate some of my racist relatives more, who are open and above-board with their resentment of black Americans. I suspect many Black Americans would rather deal with folks like one relative of mine who carries a knife in his boot that he once described as his "n----r picker" than with some of the condescending liberals who spout happy horseshit in saecula saeculorum, but let Black Americans (and everyone) speak for themselves.
In prior essays here at Daily Kos and elsewhere, I have argued that there is not much - actually nothing my my view - that unites white people, i.e. white caste people, as a collective other than caste privilege itself. In my view, it would be a helpful rhetorical choice to attack racism as a caste system of oppression. This rhetorical choice, if implemented more widely, might accomplish a number of things at once.
(In this essay, I capitalize "Black" but not "white" because I consider "Black" culture to have positive content outside U.S. racial caste structure but not "white" culture so-called. I do capitalize European-American because Europe is real and European-Americans had distinct cultures before they threw them in the trash and demoted themselves to "white" American identity. My essay - my orthography.)
- Racism as caste system, versus "racism" as not-nice feeling by a white (or perhaps other) person. I don't mean to presume about what Black Americans think - let anyone correct me if I am wrong, please - but my experience is that Black Americans are not walking around frustrated that white Americans are failing to extend them happy good feelings constantly. In fact, grown-ass adults do not generally expect to be loved by strangers, either as individuals or for their cultures. Black Americans themselves are not categorically in love with Black culture, people, etc., all the time in all places, and grown-ass adults of any culture would not realistically expect outsiders to love their culture or people.
Racism from the standpoint of white people may be a sense of "not nice feelings" or racist jokes told in the locker room. While Black Americans might take offense at the expression of such sentiments, it's not the fact that Biff at the country club is not their Best Friend Forever that causes problems for Black Americans. It's the systematic discrimination against them when it matters - government, politics, economics, education, housing, jobs, law enforcement, credit (which is part of housing.) White people, generally, do not give a fuck about what Black Americans often have to put up with not from "not nice feelings" but in the things that actually matter.
Black Americans have expressed to me privately and to others in fora I have attended that a major source of frustration for them is white defensiveness and hypocrisy about racism. Being called a "racist" can be politically or career-wise damaging to a white person in some contexts so white people will go to the mat denying racism, usually pulling out a lot of the same standard defenses: "I have Black friends" and "I don't see race," the first usually being bullshit (if they were friends and not acquaintances, you'd know better) and the latter being a lie when spoken by any American except the late Ray Charles. The cognitive dissonance between white people's lies and the truth, like all cognitive dissonance, leads to the distortion of reality in white people's minds to tolerate that distortion.
Turning the discussion rhetorically to caste, rather than "racism," makes it clear that the issue is hierarchy and damage inflicted, not impure thoughts in the head of a white person. When white people are less defensive about protecting their cognitive dissonance, they will be more reachable. Whether this is fair or not fair does not interest me in the least; it is reality and we should all be reality- and result-based.
I suspect that turning the discussion to racial caste, rather than white people's impure thoughts, would make it easier to cope with media stupidity. The indictment of Bill O'Reilly, for example, should not be that he held an "soft-bigotry-of-law-expectations" view of Black cultural institution such as Sylvia's Restaurant or an Anita Baker concert. In a sense, who cares? Sylvia's still got his money, good on them. The better indictment of O'Reilly is that his comments as a major media player reinforce caste privilege, since he is de facto an organizer and mouthpiece for the White Resistance wing of the Republican Party. Black Americans are not (unless I am mistaken) heartbroken that Bill O'Reilly failed to hold them to the great Falafel Standard of professional conduct.
- Black cultural identity as not parallel with "white" cultural identity. You can find white nationalists, Nazis, skinheads, Klansmen, white power music, etc. Most white Americans don't have anything to do with them, or with any explicitly self-described "white identity." Why? Because doing so would be a bullshit pre-text for racism, not an actual cultural event for anyone but Bill White, Matthew Hale and their
ass-lickers sycophants.
When most exclusively white institutions segregate by race, they usually segregate by other factors as well - religion, class, economics, region, politics, ethnic sub-group - and not by some sort of "pan-white" identity. This is not to suggest that elements of Black culture don't sometimes do likewise, but whites engaged in all-white activities are balkanized and only implicitly "white," not explicitly. A white grunger from Seattle, a white Orthodox Jewish dad from Baltimore and a white farmer from Alabama are simply not going to have common "white" cultural ground - other than caste itself.
To reach white Americans, separating caste from culture rhetorically is important. Most white people have not had occasion to consider explicitly that for all of the race-based politics and talk in the country, they actually have nothing in common with other white people as a group other than caste. They have been checking the box marked "white" on government forms for years, but they have nothing in common with the other 195 million people who would check the same box, other than caste.
When white people explicitly recognize that the reason they don't participate in "white culture" is that the culture is an empty set except for caste privilege - there is no "white" take-out, no "white" music that reflects the heritage of 195 million white-caste Americans in 50 states - they may become more reachable. Maybe it will be easier to penetrate the stifling cognitive dissonance that one suffers through when hearing shiny white liberals raise their shields like Captain Kirk when challenged.
Ideally (gulp - did I say that word!?), it might lead a few white people to examine their own worldviews less defensively, to distinguish their own particular culture (which is real) from the bullshit concept of white culture (which is a wooden nickel exchangeable only for caste privilege.) Maybe they will take a little more pride in being who they in fact are, rather than being defensive about a caste system that they did not create. Maybe more would be willing to assist in the direct assault on the caste system, if they could first conceptualize that attacking the caste system does not attack "who they are" by culture and values. For other white Americans who have no culture other than the buncombe happy horseshit 3rd grade version of American history, the one in which Ben Franklin was not corrupt, Lincoln not a racist in all senses of the word, Jefferson a proponent of freedom and equality for all, separating caste and culture might - MIGHT - become a teachable moment.