“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].