Jail Break - Part 1

It’s time to bring this series of posts in for a landing so we can return to El Rushbo and his gleeful embrace of “Barack the Magic Negro.” This requires a post longer than usual, so please bear with me. I have divided it into two parts. Even so, this first part is 1,100 words in length.

The project of multiculturalism, or to put it another way, diversity, implicitly reflects the Exodus narrative—the release from bondage of a people long oppressed. The “long oppressed” includes a long list of people: African Americans, Latino/Latinas, Native Americans, women (aside from conservative women unsympathetic to multiculturalism), persons who identify as LGBTQ, and persons with disabilities, to name a few. That narrative requires a Pharaoh, and white males are assigned that role whether they like it or not. I myself do not like it, although I am prepared to tolerate it.

But plenty of white males--and for that matter plenty of white females--have had it up to here with playing Pharaoh. Which is a big reason they listen avidly to Rush Limbaugh and his hordes of imitators. It’s also a big reason so many of them voted for Donald Trump. For years they have howled about “political correctness,” although, whether or not they know it, they deploy the phrase as a way to invalidate any opinion they find uncomfortable. Instant invalidation is, indeed the go-to tactic of aggrieved whites. Black Lives Matter? No, ALL Lives Matter. (No shit. But the force of meaning of “Black Lives Matter” is “Black Lives Matter Too.”)

To be sure, political correctness does exist. Some people, no matter their ideology, are temperamentally fundamentalists, and political correctness is a reflection of that. But it’s not nearly as widespread as it’s cracked up to be. What *is* widespread are the millions of people who honest to God really have been oppressed. And historically their oppressors have been white. White heterosexuals, to be precise.

I have just turned 60, and I am old enough to recall a time when this oppression was unabashed, when heterosexual whites still openly regarded this country as a country of, by, and for heterosexual white people; and non-white and/or non-heterosexual people had better know their place. That African Americans should “know their place” was a byword, and, with some allowance for socio-economic class, it applied to Hispanics just as forcefully. As for individuals who nowadays self-identify as LGBTQ: they had no place. They were regarded as perverts, pure and simple.

The incomplete triumph of the modern Civil Rights Movement changed that, sort of. But white racism didn’t disappear, it just took another form. It went underground—often so far underground that many whites didn’t realize that it continued to exist, alive and well and residing in themselves, manifested in a myriad of ideas and actions that were racist but operated outside their conscious awareness.

Aside from being self-aware about it, I am not so different from those whites. I was born in North Carolina during the final years of legal segregation, and although my parents were not virulent racists they reflected the racism of their time and place. They breathed it in and out as naturally as they breathed oxygen. Inevitably, they raised me to breathe it in and out as well. Infants and toddlers figure out the world with astonishing speed, and one of the first things I learned is that my skin was white and so I *belonged* in a way that other kids did not.

This did not mean that I hated Blacks, nor did my parents, and we did not consider ourselves to be racist. Yet that was a mistake. Because racism is frequently vicious and ugly, it is too easily conflated with racial hatred. In fact, however, the essence of white racism is the preservation of “white privilege;” that is, the dominant position of white power and values. That privilege can take a variety of forms, many of them so obvious that, paradoxically, whites overlook them completely.

The term “white privilege” is unfortunate. Although innocuous in academic circles, once released into general discourse it drove many whites straight up a wall. “Privilege” had strong associations with inherited wealth, and when used in that way most whites, accurately, could say that it did not apply to them. “White advantage” is a better term. Yet even this requires explanation.

“White privilege” echoes “male privilege,” a common term in the feminist lexicon. But In 1988 feminist scholar Peggy McIntosh published an essay reporting on the result of a thought experiment in which she replaced “male” with “white,” and considered the ways in which her white skin gave her the sort of unearned advantages that feminists had long ascribed to males.

Mulling this over, McIntosh compiled a list of forty-six ways in which her whiteness operated, on an everyday basis, to make her life less burdensome. A sample: “I can if I wish to arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time. . . . I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed. . . . I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented. . . . I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to ‘the person in charge,’ I will be facing a person of my race. . . . My culture gives me little fear about ignoring the perspectives and powers of people of other races. . . . I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me.”

To repeat a point, whites take such advantages so much taken for granted that they operate outside conscious awareness. McIntosh herself reported that in order to remember her list she literally had to carry it around with her.

By this reasoning the essence of white racism is not hostility toward other races but rather the preservation of the advantages that go along with owning a white skin. This imperative is so deeply engrained in our society that the advantages are nearly impossible to relinquish even when one wishes to do so. There is seemingly no altar upon which to place one’s whiteness.