(with extensive editorial assistance from C.R.Centers)
“I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
--James Baldwin
I’m an old white guy in Texas, but I’m as ready to smash the dominant patriarchy as anybody.
James Baldwin said, “A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people. It is not necessary that a people be wicked but only that they be spineless.” Is he talking about me, or you, or both of us? Of course, how do we know we are spineless, when the most likely counterpart to that trait is hypocrisy and willful blindness? And who accepts being told such things?
I grew up in a racially torn city in the north. When the black high school played the white one in football, there was “going to be a riot” if the black one lost. I say that in quotes because I don’t know if that was the truth, or just what we said to each other. I do remember one night picking up my elder brother at the field (I was a little kid in the back seat) and driving through many threatening, murmuring black faces and feeling scared.
There was an intersection in our city that white people didn’t pass at night. There were credible stories that black people would break car windows and drag the occupants out if they stopped at the stop sign, but looking back I think these might have been stories invented to make white people scared and angry. It worked.
Later, when I was in junior high, there were days when the black kids would line up on both sides of a hall and punch white kids as they passed. I knew these kids, black and white. Later we whites would ask each other if we had been hit. It was never a beating, but only a hit: a humiliation really. Of course if I saw this happening up ahead in the hall I’d turn and go around some other way, but once I got sucked in and had to go through. I saw other white kids getting punched, and I kept looking for who would punch me, but nobody did. I never knew why I was spared, if it was luck or they thought I was all right. A little thing like that can change you for your whole life. Anyway, nobody hit me, and I never felt any need for retaliation.
I was impressed by two things back then: 1) black kids had a unity. If you hurt one of them, you would have to fight all of them; 2) white kids were alone. The ratio of black to white was probably forty percent black, sixty percent white. The black students were mostly bussed in from the other side of town. In one seventh-grade class, a black kid who was not particularly fierce walked around to each white kid and thwacked him on the top of the head with his knuckle before the teacher came in. This happened often. We whites all submitted, sometimes chuckling to hide the embarrassment, and we never “told.” I remember being dumbfounded that whites didn’t stick together.
I bring up these memories because I never wondered why. Black kids were angry at white kids, and I never wondered why! Mainly I tried to avoid a fight. (I know now that this is/was my privilege, to avoid violence.)
The pain of a white liberal is a strange thing. If you are suffering actual fear and pain, you will likely see this pain of conscience (empathy, concern?) as enviable.
People of color experience the real pain of deportation, of police brutality, of vastly unequal standing in the courtroom; I feel the pain of guilt for their real, physical suffering because it is caused by white racism and classism in law.
I am apparently unable to divorce myself from white racists. I have to say, “Look what we did to Flint; look what we did to Ferguson.” I even say, “Look what we did to the indigenous peoples here when we invaded,” as though I was alive and responsible over the last five hundred years of conquest. This month there were 680 people picked up and disappeared by ICE agents around the country. My people did that to my people. That is the pain. I am white, and I am an American, which now are obviously two distinct and opposing standpoints. I feel the pain of self mutilation, of self destruction.
I actually believed that dream about America being all races, all religions, pulling together, and it’s a dream I hope I never wake from. I felt it was coming closer. Obama once said, “If you were going to be born any time in history, and you didn’t know what race or gender or sexual preference you would be, when would you choose to be born?” Of course the answer is now. Well, “now,” being back when he was president. I don’t know many souls wanting to be born here now, with this catastrophe! My white, fearful brothers and sisters have gained control of the executive and legislative branches locally and nationally, and are enacting racist, anti-people, anti-equal, anti-woman laws as though the tide of equality had been drowning them.
There is a believable notion that whites don’t mind being in a mixed group until the mixture approaches fifty percent. Perhaps this is being generous. I know we white liberals simply love when two or three people of color are in our group when the group is ten or more. White males in my experience (perhaps most males) strongly prefer a majority of men in their group to one of female majority. I’ve been odd in this respect, at least, all my adult life: I love being the only man in a classroom or workshop or cafe full of women.
I’m thinking here about a question of connection. In pre-history, humans only bonded with their own bloodline, then with their tribe. This bonding has grown ever wider, now even to include the concept of loving our neighbor, to all our benefit. What responsibility do you take for other humans? I look in my near blood relations and see two criminally insane people, one a grandfather, one a brother. Do you expect me to apologize for them? Of course you would if one of them murdered one of your relations. Well, I do apologize. Do you? Do you feel that humans should be responsible for humans, be “our brother’s keeper,” or do you feel we are all islands? Am I more white than I am a Mills, more white than human? If a human murders a human, do you take responsibility?
James Baldwin saw white innocence (or ignorance) as the chief crime in America: “I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. One can be, indeed one must strive to become, tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of man. (But remember: most of mankind is not all of mankind.) But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”
If there were two humans on an alien world, and the aliens caught one doing something horrid, they would certainly blame the other by association, they being both the same (human). I don’t think there is any doubt that actions of whites against other races have been horrid, and that whites can be found today acting out of hate against people of color in far too many places (here). But the worst thing is the duality: the constancy of action on the one hand, and the complete blindness and willful ignorance of the action on the other. We apparently grew tired of apologizing long eons before we grew tired of committing these acts.
I’m sure you can find other races behaving horridly, now and in other times. I am white, so it is my job to criticize whites; you, please, critique the erring humans who are most like you. Your criticisms of whites fail, as do mine, not so much by their (our) determination to rule badly despite the scorn, but by their galling predilection for lying about their (our) intentions, and altering facts to fit false narratives of history.
Texas was in the news last week for trying to alter textbooks (again) to hide the fact that Slavery was the cause for the civil war. They would rather we now all say that it was the fight over “States’ Rights” that propelled us all to murder, rape, and burn one another. Of course, any fool knows that fighting a war for the right to enslave other humans will be cause for the civilized world to desperately wish for your utter defeat. So it was a “war of Northern aggression,” a fight for States’ Rights. How many fictions does it take to rule brutally without guilt?
Willful blindness to one’s (or one’s people’s) horrid actions is not actual blindness, so whites now and always rightly feel guilt for conquest and racial oppression; but instead of reforming and/or apologizing, they (we) invent ideas of purity, ideas of superiority even, fictions that allow us to think we have tried our best to be kind and fair and “nothing can be done,” that somehow the problem lies in the inferiority of people of color. Can you invent a more obviously self-fulfilling prophesy? Certainly nothing can be done with such a fiction. The power structure says, “We won’t change our actions, we won’t forego our blindness, and we firmly state that nothing can be done.” What could be more infuriating to the people, day by decade, harmed by our oppression?
We, together, are facing these attacks against our brothers and sisters, facing the privilege we enjoy every day of our lives, facing the people of color we have ignored and negated for so, so long, and are standing in the way of the republicans’ fascist, racist, misogynist attempts to throw us all back to the 1930s. We know that the only place of honor in DT’s America is in the Resistance or in prison. With love and open hearts, we will not collaborate with insanity. Baldwin again: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can change until it is faced.”
I’ve seen this whole ten thousand years since the election of DT as a waking up and rising up of reality-based whites against the fictionally delusional white minority who are at this dark moment somehow in power. I hope it’s not too late, and I’m sorry it took so long. People of color can rightly ask me, “Where the hell have you been?” My answer is to apologize, truly, and say, “I’m here now. How can I help you?”