Tag: racism

It’s tough being a middle-class white Christian male

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Now some people will legitimately make that argument, although I should make it clear I’m not one of them, at least not without a major caveat.

For all of the successes of civil rights and affirmative action and such, America remains largely controlled by white men, and if middle class doesn’t wield the power, it controls access to that power, and collectively, that’s quite a “might”.

In other words, it’s demographically beneficial to be black, Latino, female, etc., because these things give good statistical appearance, but the language of discourse, the cultural qualities considered, the very definition of “normal” is still firmly white, especially Anglo, masculine, heterosexual, and (Protestant) Christian, although not so much as before, and certainly not so overt.

I might want to check a different box on a college application, but only as a veneer. Ultimately, I wouldn’t want to be any different than I am now because although I’m not The Man, I meet him often and can speak his language. Not just English but what words and how they’re spoken.

So that puts the complaint in context. To be white, especially a white man, in America is to be normal, and it’s terrible to be normal. Keep in mind it doesn’t outweigh benefits, whatever some misguidedly believe, and keep in mind that there’s a difference between outward fact and self-identity, but it is a real and valid complaint.

Jesus blessed are’d the poor and weak 2,000 years ago, but it was the 1960s that really flipped society on its head. We’ve become a society that celebrates diversity, the eccentric, and victimhood. Well, no, that’s not quite right. Everyone wants to be a victim in identity without actually suffering for it, or at least only suffering to an extent that can be quit at whim.

The Irish immigrant and their children wanted desperately to be considered white. The part-Cherokee wanted desperately to pass as white, to vote if nothing else. But with the ’60s, something akin to Christian martyrdom reappeared and victimhood became virtue. The 1/32 Cherokee, 31/32 European was Native American, not white. The person with any Italian ancestors was Italian, not white.

To be white isn’t to be without culture, but it’s considered to be. To speak Midwestern English isn’t without accent, but professionally and commercially, it’s considered without accent. It’s normal, bland, and boring. It is without movement because all things move relative to it. It can’t diverge because it’s the path all trails diverge from. Because of power, sure. Because those with power define it so, but arbitrary definitions are no less real.

Being white in America is to actively seek to be different, eccentric, wherever possible identified as a victim.

The American underdog is a long-held tradition, so no one wants to be considered rich, regardless of income. Ethnicity will be played in a sort of weird continuation of the one-drop rule. Some will throw themselves into causes of the oppressed in the hopes of being identified with them. But mainly, white salvation is only found in subculture.

Now, I don’t want to pick on pagans because they’re not actually offensive or harmful and do get mistreated, especially in the Bible belt. But I can’t take them seriously as a religious minority. I can’t be convinced it’s anything more than playing at religion and minority, fun with chats, Internet-purchased incense and daggers, similarly socially awkward adolescents. Certainly, many Christians, many of any religion, are in it artificially and only for appearances, but stick a gun to the head of many and they would say, “Pull the trigger, for to die is gain.” And they’re sure. Never have I met a gun-to-the-head pagan. They want only to feel a victim for something.

Whether being gay is more nature or nurture, I have no idea. If we can accept that some people are born with both sets of physical genitalia, why not homosexual attraction? But if the argument is, “Why would anyone choose to be gay and a victim of prejudice?” this is plainly wrong. Does anyone honestly believe Lindsay Lohan is a lesbian, including Lindsay Lohan? Yet she claims to be and is even personally offended by homophobia. That’s without even getting into actually weird sexual fetishes ranging from BDSM, scat, and genital mutilation, to the just plain odd ones like vore and inflatophilia. Some, like furries, even try to equate their level of discrimination to that of gays and ethnic minorities historically.

Tattoos, piercings, grunge, punk, hippies, Beats, basically every movement or fad since the ’50s and ’60s, there’s a conscious desire by many, if not all, to be set apart, to be noticed for being different. Notice how even Christian groups complain constantly that they’re a minority group being oppressed. To have lots of people agree with you is better than having almost everyone agree with you.

Minorities obviously have their share of identity problems, too. Our president spoke in his first book about the struggle against stereotypes, normalized black American culture, and normalized white American culture that only went away when he visited Kenya for the first time, where his name wasn’t odd or mispronounced, where knowing a name connected one to family history and belonging. “Here the world was black, and so you were just you; you could discover all of those things that were unique to your life without living a lie or betrayal.”

Very true. But freedom isn’t always liberating. Where there’s no group, only milieu, your individualism will still be sought in groups when your identity is in question. Now white flight isn’t to the suburbs but into anything abnormal, for its own sake.

Knowing this, when asked my ethnicity, I say I’m an American. When asked my lineage, I say Euro mutt, or if pushed further, English. I say I’m of the tiny island nation that conquered a fourth the world, made the empire on which the sun never set. I take pride, openly, in my bland, Man, mediocrity. And I worry I do these things not to be true and honest to myself, but because they’re abnormal.

Racism toward President Obama

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Several years ago, at the height of the first wave of gasoline-price hysteria, an older white man came into the convenience store I worked at complaining about a lot of stuff. Real salt-of-the-earth type fellow, had a twang and maybe even cowboy boots on, although I may just be adding stuff I wish were true to my memory upon recall.

The only reason I remember this grumbler, as opposed to the dozens of others that came through each day, was that he suggested, apparently quite seriously, that George W. Bush be strung up and hung ’til death.

The man may be racist, and considering his age I wouldn’t be surprised, but there was nothing racist about him suggesting a lynching of a U.S. president. If he felt the same way about Barack Obama, of course, most people and establishments would consider it totally unacceptable.

The New York Post incident with the cartoon chimp getting shot was the same sort of thing where for eight years George W. Bush was outright drawn as a chimp caricature, called stupid and uneducated — every Texan/Southern stereotype you could think of. We know it would not be acceptable to do the same thing with black stereotypes and Barack Obama (except to call him “cool” and “stylin'”).

You may say, “Well, Barack Obama was never part of the stereotypically black culture, so it would be absurd to mock him in that way.” George Bush is not in any way a cowboy and only marginally a Texan, but it was safe to put a hat on him and set him on a horse for an editorial cartoon.

I’m not saying geographic discrimination is anything like racial discrimination historically, or that a white Southerner is less likely to get a job than a minority solely based on that. But as many racists are there are who hate “that —— spending our money,” publicly I can almost guarantee that Obama will receive less personal criticism than Bush, because it was safe to call Bush an imbecile, fascist, and child molester in ways it probably will never be to criticize Obama, unless you’re Rush Limbaugh or have his fanbase.

Liberators: The truth, or some of it

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I was browsing wikipedia the other day (several years ago) and happened across this picture. I don’t remember exactly how I got there, really. These things happen. Immediately, I fell in love with it.

liberators

On one level it’s not hard to see why. It’s 50-freaking-stories-tall, wields a tommy gun, and has a bomb for a foot. Suck on that Optimus Prime.

On another, on the level of my political sensibilities, it may not. I’m not a fascist, leftist radical, or even anti-American. I rather like us. But, I like the picture and what it has to say about us as a nation, at that time certainly, but very much now as well.

It is racist, Nazi (well, basically Nazi) propaganda, and like all good propaganda, tells half of one truth and none of another. In this example, the United States is destroying the good Ol’ World by bombing the crap out of it. Oh it’s true, but the other half is that Germany conquered and looted it first (and declared war on America). That completes the picture. And of course the poster says nothing at all about the Nazi regime’s treatment of Jews, Romani, and other undesirables. I think it neglects that state’s activities altogether.

By the standard of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, it does not do well, but is it a lie, except in the literal sense that America did not possess a 50-story-tall monster? No. And that’s why I’m so fond of it.

The Second World War is widely seen as “the last good war” for a lot of Americans, probably as much for the totality of our victory than the moral clarity of the situation. But what moral clarity there was! Japan bombed us, Germany immediately declared war on us, and from Abyssinia to Nanjing to Auschwitz, the Axis powers proved themselves very bad folk. The Allies were clearly the good guys. Well, except for the Soviet Union. But they were on good behavior during the war. Except for the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Russo-Finnish War, mass rape of German women… Anyway, the French and the British didn’t do any of that stuff. Besides, they were democracies. Okay, yeah, they were also empires with vast colonial holdings that exploited millions kept in grinding poverty to maintain the homeland’s standard of living. But those citizens at home could vote.

America, though, didn’t have an empire then, or at least not a substantial one, anyhow. There weren’t many Hawaiians still around, and the Philippines had settled down. And hey, the vast majority of the population lived in the continental U.S., and we’d achieved universal suffrage there. Even in the South, black people could vote, they just didn’t for some reason. Or hold any elected offices. Or go to the same schools. Or drink from the same water fountains.

I don’t need to mention Dresden or Hiroshima or internment camps; those get thrown around enough, and I’ve made my point, I think. It is the same point I take from, although not intended by, that poster.

As George Orwell (I like George Orwell) said way back in 1940 and of England, “If I side with Britain and France, it is because I would sooner side with the older imperialisms — decadent, as Hitler rightly calls them — than with the new ones which are completely sure of themselves and therefore completely merciless. Only, for Heaven’s sake let us not pretend we go into this war with clean hands. It is only while we cling to the consciousness that our hands are not clean that we retain the right to defend ourselves.”

The United States then was the Klan and the gangster, the jitterbug and the banker, and the bomber and the war profiteer, and the vain woman and lecherous man, and the Zionist Jew, too. A melting pot of crime and corruption and “mongrelization” and ulterior motives. The Nazis were right to poke fun at calling a war bomber, a machine designed to rain down indiscriminate destruction on what’s below it, “a Liberator.” Sure. But that’s not all we are. We are many good and laudatory things we like to remember, and so they’re easier to remember. It’s just dangerous to forget and deceive the self. Better, better, a thousand times better to deceive yourself and believe you’re something better than what you are than to cease striving and revel in your failure, but better than both beyond compare to be honest and continue striving.

So it’s not as though the Holocaust and Jim Crow have moral equivalence or are so similar we can’t judge Germany poorly for their actions. Obviously, we must. But there is no one good, no not one, and it’s just as important to remember the concentration camps we liberated as we do the ships full of Jews fleeing the Nazis we turned away. Not because that makes us just the same as the Nazis but because by recognizing we have fallen short, rather than staying content as we are, we can be sure to get closer to the ideal.

Us and Them

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I was walking through a parking lot the other day and spotted a suburban with a Nimitz football sticker in the wildshield. My first impulse was to find a rock and smash the window in.

I didn’t of course–find one–and wouldn’t have smashed anything if I had. I mean really. I’m reasonable, and I walked to my car and drove away peaceably like a reasonable person.

I haven’t gone to school at Bonham Junior High since 2002, I went to Permian with people from and even had friends from Nimitz, and where a person went to junior high hasn’t even been a meaningful thought to cross my mind in at least four years. Yet somehow those three years of conditioning have stayed with me in some form or another.

I had a friend in college who claimed he didn’t ascribe to any artificial division between people. Geographical, national, racial, whatever. Maybe he was telling the truth, well-traveled and easy going fellow that he was. Yeah, I’ll take it at face value. But if so, he’s denying himself one of the fundamental aspects, and I say joys, of the human experience.

Nimitz is a small thing, and no less or more artificial a boundary than a lot of the ones we draw between ourselves and others. But in another way, the lines are as absolute as anything gets.

“We’re playing Nimitz, and we hate those guys.”

For all our individuality, our diverse backgrounds, and adolescent sub-cliques, what we have in common is that aren’t Nimitz, and we hate those guys. What is Bonham? Owls? Blue and gray? Who can really get excited about that? We’re familiar with ourselves, and there’s not much great or special about us, but what we’re unfamiliar with, all sort of things can be attributed to them, and we aren’t THEM. We’re US.

It’s crude, but I really do think you can trace at least one strain of identity through sports loyalties. Odessa High vs. Permian. Odessa vs. Midland. West Texas vs. East Texas. Texas against all other states. The South vs. the North and West Coast. America versus the world. When our alien overlords arrive and want to play a game of basketball, humanity will hate them, too.

It’s nice to belong, to know who you are because of who you’re not. Obviously there’s more of a draw to this as an insecure 14-year-old than a hopefully mature 40-year-old, but there’s still a lot of a draw at forty. When you’re part of a group, you don’t have to succeed or contribute anything to be a success.

“America is the greatest country on earth.”

The vast majority of people who say that have never been to more than a handful of other countries, if any. Luxemborg may be a wonderful place. I don’t know. I’ve never been. But America is number one. We can’t hear you above all the freedom.

And there are those on the Left who say patriotism is irrational and ignorant. That’s probably true, but if their chests don’t swell with pride seeing an American flag raised, if something doesn’t stir in them to hear the Star Spangled Banner or God Bless America or America the Beautiful, they’re missing out on their humanity because that “something” that stirs is wonderful.

And so long as it remains private or at least doesn’t come at the detriment of someone else, who can complain?

Marxism ceased to be relevant about the time I was getting potty trained, so correct me if I’m misunderstanding something here. When Karl Marx called for workers of the world to unite, he expected them to choose class differences as their identity. If so, he was incredibly foolish in his understanding of masses of people.

In the American South, who did poor white trash have more in common with just before the Civil War, slaves or their white masters? Economically, they were closer to the slaves. Economically, they, and the slaves, would be better off if slavery didn’t exist in the South, and all labor was free and competitive. Oh, but their human interests, their human interests lay with the fact that they were white and the poorest, dumbest, ugliest, most worthless white man in the South was worth more than any black person was or could ever be. Worth more than all of them put together. The poorest white was still white, and that made him like the richest plantation owner, if only in his own mind. That is a mighty consolation prize for having to scrape around in the mud. That’s US being winners, and THEM being losers. If your situation as a loser is better than as a winner, that’s poor consolation for winning.

The relationship between myself and Nimitz is not that. I’m not a Bonhamedan anymore, for whatever it really meant that I was then. But at a time when identity was really taking shape, it meant something not to go to school at Nimitz, or Bowie, or Crockett, or Midland Lee. Any real success of my school meant I was, and I enjoyed the illusion of superiority because everyone who went to Bonham was superior to those others schools, including me. And the hostility programmed, intentionally and otherwise, hasn’t, may not ever fully dissipate.

In all the ways I break down my world into US and THEM, surely Bonham and Nimitz are the least significant. I wonder how I’m affected by those divisions that seem more important.

Honesty

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We say we value honesty, in ourselves and other people, but hard as it may be, it’s much easier to tell the truth than to hear it. “We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves,” but intellectual dishonesty is as much a problem of perception as deception.

Humans are rational beings, or so I’m told. Occasionally, we gather evidence to come to an unbiased conclusion, check the facts to come to a reasoned answer. More often our reasoned conclusion is the result of irrational prejudices, or at least subjective opinions framing and coloring what information we receive and how we sort it.

In the 19th century, Quakers and Virginians were reading the same Bible so far as I know. Yet somehow they managed to come to completely opposite conclusions about the place of slavery in Christianity. God had created blacks as mentally inferior therefore their natural place was under the control of white masters. A few decades later, the curse of Ham had been replaced by the science of Darwin, now proving objectively that the Negro was naturally biologically inferior. The reasoning changed, but the conclusion remained unchanged.

Today people look at test scores and poverty rates and alternately prove that African-Americans are biologically/culturally inferior to whites or victims of a structurally racist society. “Just look at the evidence!” both sides say. “It’s plain to see.”

That’s a poor example, at least today. That’s not an issue with a 50-50 split anymore, but like writers of The Bell Curve or James Watson, very intelligent people can gather a great deal of evidence and see in it something they already want to.

A better example, or fairer one, is the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights, commonly called “the right to bear arms.” On this subject, you will find Clyde Jr. of Arkansas and Antonin Scalia holding roughly the same views. They support their views with entirely different levels of complexity, but in the end, they support the same thing. Ruth Ginsberg is no less qualified a legal scholar than Scalia, has probably read all the same books, histories, and decisions as he has, but her conclusion is more in line with a pot-smoking hippie.

It bothers me very much to read editorials, most of them written by intelligent people, claiming that the Second Amendment clearly says this or that when the only thing clear about it is that when you read it for yourself, “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” comes after a very clear qualifier: “A well-regulated militia being necessary.”

That muddles things. Historical context muddles things. Just to what extent “arms” was supposed to encompass then and now muddles things.

I’m phrasing things in this way because I’m actually sympathetic to the gun rights cause, and that makes me more sensitive to and critical of how they go about things.

I would support a city’s right to restrict gun rights based on my personal libertarian principles of local control and heterogeneous laws. The free market of ideas, competing sociological laboratories, etc., etc. Of course the Supreme Court ruling came on the District of Columbia, so setting that aside, whether gun ownership is a right is not an answer that can be read into the Constitution, and certainly not by the chicken-bone soothsayers running around today.

The only way to answer the question honestly is to surrender all claims of superseding authority and make the most convincing argument you can at a fair level of discourse.

That is, start with the question of whether gun ownership is a natural right. There’s no document, political, religious, or otherwise to answer this question, just your own reason and beliefs, and it’s either a yes or a no. For me, it’s pretty obviously “no” because guns have only existed for the past 500 years or so, and one would think intrinsic rights would be as old as our species. But, gun ownership may be a derivative right of something else, that is the right to self-protection and defense. Whereas in the days of Og bonking Unk on the head with a club entitled Unk to a club or rock of his own, so too a world of guns entitles us to guns for this purpose. This seems sensible enough to me.

The question, as a libertarian, is always where your rights stop and another’s begin. Where is the border between your right to protect yourself and another’s right not to be threatened? That’s an important question, and consulting the Constitution does nothing. A nuclear weapon can’t be acceptable to remain in private ownership just because the founders hadn’t the foresight to prohibit them (and I’ve heard some arch-libertarians sincerely make that argument).

I heard Scalia use as an example that when he was in high school, a fellow classmate complained about reading Shakespeare. The teacher said, “Sir, when you read Shakespeare, he isn’t on trial; you are.” In the same way, the traditions and laws aren’t on trial by contemporary measures; we are.

Well, if we are on trial, the judges are absent. The Founders with a capital “F” aren’t here, and they never really were. Jefferson’s vision of the nation is not more valid than Hamilton’s or Adams’ or Washington’s. When we try to use them to parrot our own opinions and substitute persuasive argument, we may be doing our best to tell the truth, but ultimately we’re lying.

The best way to be an honest person may just be to admit when you’re telling a falsehood. The best way to be intellectually honest, then, may be to admit your biases and work around them as best as you are able, lying as you go, but not compounding the lie with claims of impartiality.

We’re only impartial to things we care nothing for, and rarely does anyone comment at any length about things they care nothing for.