If Dad Could See Me Now

Among the many things I did that drove my father to distraction, one of the worst was my decision to major in history.

At one level, it was if I had decided to become a ditch-digger.

At another, it was as if I had slapped him in the face as hard as I possibly could.

Like many parents, my father assumed that a history degree had little market value. His actual advice to me was, “Major in what you want, but minor in computer science.” He had no faith that I could grasp the brass ring of a career as a college professor. So he did what he could to persuade me to be at least a little bit practical, and learn something in college that might yield a job with some earning potential.

Thus for the ditch-digger analogy. But what of the slap in the face?

My father was the first in his family to graduate from college. He did so on the GI Bill, after his discharge from the Navy, and he did it in only three years. He had focus and he also had a passion for learning—a passion that after graduation he put to work teaching English in a small North Carolina high school. (His wife taught Home Economics just down the hall.)

My father liked teaching. He was good at it. And he could have made a career of teaching except for one thing.

He had a firstborn son who was sickly, and the teaching job wasn’t enough to pay the doctor bills.

He needed a better paying job and he needed it fast. He went to an employment agency. It transpired that that there was a need for something called an underwriter at the Raleigh branch of Nationwide Insurance Company, and because he was a responsible man he did the responsible thing and flung away his dream of being a teacher in order to become a white collar drone, toiling at a job for which he felt no sense of calling because he had an infant son—me—whose welfare depended on it.

The conclusion my father drew from this experience is that when you’re young, you can have dreams, but when you grow up, those dreams have to die.

Nationwide, it turned out, was not a bad fate for my father. He found ways to enjoy the work and within a few years he was a promising mid-level manager. But from what I could see, my father worked 50 weeks a year doing something for which he felt no passion in order to spend 2 weeks a year indulging his passion for catching largemouth bass.

The conclusion I drew from my father’s experience was that you figure out something you really like to do and then you figure out a way to make money doing it.

So when I matriculated at Ohio State in 1977 and announced my major, airily dismissing my father’s concerns for my future financial well-being, it was my way of saying that I thought my father had made the wrong choice concerning one of the most consequential decisions of his life. And we both knew it.

My father lived long enough to see me graduate from Ohio State with a so-so undergraduate GPA, to get a master’s degree from Kings College London (which I paid for out of my earnings from a modest job as well as the revenue from a modest inheritance), and to return to Columbus, where I spent almost a full year before I secured any job at all—and the one I did secure paid a pittance.

My father lived long enough to see me hospitalized for a manic episode and to see that job evaporate because my employer fired me the moment he learned I had a mental illness.

My father lived long enough to see me emerge from the hospital and take a minimum wage job at a Burger King just off the OSU campus.

My father lived long enough to see me accepted into the history graduate program at Ohio State, but without a teaching associateship, and long enough to see my new fiancée pay my tuition with her credit card.

My father lived long enough to see me do well enough during my first year that for my second year the history department awarded me a teaching associateship. He lived long enough to see me receive a summer internship at RAND Corporation. (His only comment, when I called to tell him that I got the internship, was to ask how much it paid. I told him the summer salary, he multiplied it by four to see what it would be if it were an annual salary, and grudgingly conceded that it was close to a respectable wage.)

My father lived long enough to see me go through my second year as a PhD student and he lived long enough to see me marry my fiancée, an outcome that gave him needed assurance that there would be someone in my life capable of taking care of me financially when I inevitably came to nothing.

He did not live long enough to see me compete successfully for the position which I now hold, he did not live long enough see me become the first OSU history professor to be hired directly out of its graduate program, and he did not live long enough to see me sign my contract as a new assistant professor, which I did while seated at a table in the Burger King where I had briefly held that post-hospitalization minimum wage job.

No: three years before that event, my father died of lung cancer. He was only 54.

Thus my father did not live to see me prove to him that I was right: that it was indeed possible to choose something you loved doing and then figure out a way to make a living doing it.

Thus my father did not live to see me prove to him that he was wrong: that the dreams of your youth can survive into adulthood.

And there was one more thing my father did not live to see. He did not live to see me essentially break faith with the pact I made with myself when I was young. He did not live to see me lose track of what I loved in favor of doing something that I didn’t love—or rather, trying but failing, year upon year, to do something I didn’t love.

Well, I’m rediscovering what I love to do. My problem is that it isn’t what my department thinks I should love to do.

And what is that thing I love? You’re looking at it right now.

But here’s the thing.

I teach at a Tier 1 research institution. Historians at such institutions get paid, in effect, to publish major archivally-based monographs of original scholarship.

They may also do what I am doing now. As an example I give you the superb young historian Heather Richardson. Heather currently has a Facebook page, “Heather Cox Richardson,” which has 139,000 subscribers. (I have less than 160). Since the start of the Ukraine scandal she has pumped out, night after night, first rate analyses of the developments for that day. Each of these nightly installments is shared, on average, about 4,000 times, meaning that 4,000 readers do what I do each night and place her updates on our personal Facebook walls, so that our FB friends can read them.

But Heather is also the author of five books. Her sixth, entitled How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for America is forthcoming in March from Oxford University Press. (Last night she completed the index to the book before completing her daily summary of the impeachment.) Put simply, she excels at the traditional role for a historian at a top research institution.

Heather and I are both engaged in a conceptual project known as “public engagement.” Within academe public engagement is recognized as a legitimate professional activity. It counts for something. There’s a space on my annual activity report where I can inform my department of what I have done during the year by way of public engagement.

So in writing my posts about the rise of right wing talk radio, and discussing diversity in the context of right wing media, and so on, I am doing my job (along with other things like teaching and service, of course).

But what if I decide that * this * is what gets me up in the morning, that this is what fires my passion, that this is what is restoring a too long absent sense of meaning and purpose?

What if I decide that my department can demand the elusive “promotion book” all it wants, but that I don’t want to do the promotion book: I want instead to do something I love to do and get paid to do it?

What if I decide to make this my professional main effort? I increasingly think I want to. Everything in me is telling me that I am finding my way back to a love of my work such as I have not experienced in years.

And there is this: Is it a coincidence that my Student Evaluations of Instruction for this semester—the university’s principal measurement of my effectiveness as a teacher—are stronger this semester than they have been in years?

Because it does seem to me that the sense of personal fulfillment I am somehow getting from this project has already had positive spillover effects in other areas of my professional (and personal) life.

So will I decide to say in effect, fuck that promotion book, and then throw my energies into this fledgling venture? I don’t know.

Could I do it and get away with it? Absolutely. I have tenure. Tenure is a many-splendored thing.

But would it be a “transgression,” as we academics like to call such things, if I did?

You damn sure better believe it.

So if I did this, I’d have to approach it with the same totality of intellectual commitment I would bring to a more conventional project.

And you better believe that if I actually took such a step, the quality and the outcome had better be pretty damn impressive. Otherwise this would simply be an inventive way to achieve professional self-immolation.

It’s too bad my father is 30 years in his grave. I’d be curious to know what he would make of this.

The Hurt

In the comments below my last post, I acknowledged that a problematic aspect of the project of diversity is that it values ethnic diversity, gender diversity, diversity in terms of mental and physical ability: everything except political diversity. A friend of mine—actually more than a friend, in our youth we did our basic combat training together—responded: “Interesting. Is it not one's life experience that informs her or his political opinion? And are you comfortable operating in such an environment?”

I didn’t reply in the comments. His question deserved more of a response than that. Hence this post.

The question of whether I’m comfortable teaching in my environment turns on a portrayal of what goes on in academe which I fear I have inadvertently reinforced. That portrayal is one of a kind of Orwellian world in which opinions are tightly policed. That’s simply not the case, particularly in the realm of diversity.

When it comes to the community of faculty and students (and staff) who are truly committed to diversity, we are still dealing with an enclave. The dominant power structures, while not exactly arrayed against diversity, are still not nearly as invested in it as one might suppose. It is perfectly possible—and not just that, common—for faculty to pay lip service to concerns about diversity and inclusion but to have those concerns inform their teaching and research little if at all.

If I chose to do so I could teach my military history courses entirely in terms of the European and American experience, and within that frame I could focus exclusively on males operating in a world of politics and technology. No one would stop me. No one would punish me. Even among the most ardent proponents of diversity there is still a deep, almost reflexive respect for academic freedom. They might roll their eyes at me—or, more likely, lament the intellectual poverty of such an approach. But that’s pretty much all.

Comfortable in my environment? In many ways I’m not. But the reasons have nothing to do with any diversity police, because it just doesn’t exist.

I can tell you who is *not* comfortable in my environment for reasons that do relate to diversity.

It is the female instructor who is lesser, in the eyes of too many students, because she is not a man. It’s hard to believe that the stereotype persists that a “real professor” is a pipe-smoking white male in tweed—if you happen to be white and male (pipe-smoking and tweed are now optional). But persist it does.

Uncomfortable too is the faculty member of color who is even more blatantly stereotyped—and who usually has to bear the brunt of student comments and opinions that range from clueless to downright hostile. A student may say that immigrants are largely criminals (something that they will have heard not just at home but from the lips of the President of the United States). They may wonder aloud why African Americans didn’t *want* to go back to Africa after the destruction of slavery. Neither example is hypothetical. I have heard both of them in my classrooms. But they don’t hit me where I live. That, however, is exactly where they hit my colleagues of color.

The easiest thing in the world is to invalidate the feelings of others. At the moment the term of convenience is “snowflake.” People—by which one always means *other* people—should be less fragile, less sensitive, less easily offended. Yet I’m often struck by how fragile, sensitive, and easily offended are those who use the term “snowflake” most freely.

But that’s kind of the point. We speak of identity politics—but we all of us have an identity, and the world tells us relentlessly that central to our identity is our race, our gender, our sexual orientation, our economic class, our physical, mental, and emotional ability. We are more than these things, and none of us likes being reduced to them, stereotyped because of them, criticized or disregarded because of them.

I have written sympathetically of the way in which heterosexual white males have, in recent decades, been at the receiving end of this reduction, this stereotyping, and this criticism. They don’t like it, to say the least, and the popularity of Rush Limbaugh—to whom I promise to return—is largely built upon El Rushbo’s ability to articulate that resentment.

Underpinning resentment is anger, and anger is generally underpinned by fear, and fear is ultimately underpinned by hurt.

And that is what strikes me. Diversity (or inclusion, or multiculturalism, or whatever you want to call it) raises issues that hit all of us where we live. But it doesn’t so much generate hurt as it calls attention to hurt, forces us to confront the ways in which we live in a world that was constructed to work in favor of some people at the expense of others; in that sense, a world constructed to hurt.

That confrontation is overdue. It is messy. It is sometimes badly framed. But it is necessary.

So am I comfortable in my environment? As a heterosexual white male (who can hide or disclose my mental disability at will), I am very definitely comfortable. But if I care anything about the human beings roundabout me who cannot say that, I have to make myself less comfortable. I have to be willing to hurt a little (if it comes to that) for the sake of those who still hurt a lot.

Rush is Right - Part 2

In my last post I said that I agreed with Rush Limbaugh that proponents of diversity position heterosexual white males as Pharaoh. That’s not the way Rush would put it, of course. He’d say it more directly: the “feminazis” and multiculturalists demonize heterosexual white males and blame them for everything.

That’s a more extreme characterization than I offer, and it takes no account of the fact that the Exodus trope *forces* diversity advocates into insisting that at least one category of human being must not and shall not be part of human diversity. But that insistence is needless, intellectually bankrupt, and in moral terms a failure of nerve.

As used within academe, “diversity” tracks back to the 1978 US Supreme Court decision of Regents of the University of California versus Allan Bakke. Bakke was a 35-year old white male who sought admission into the UC-Davis medical school, and when turned down challenged the rejection of his application as being discriminatory. He argued—successfully, as it turned out—that the affirmative action policy of the University of California—which in the case of the UC-Davis medical school reserved 16 seats for minority students—was unconstitutional. That seemingly knocked the props out from under affirmative action policies in general, and certainly in terms of academic admissions.

Justice Lewis Powell, however, was able in large measure to rescue affirmative action by arguing that the state has a compelling interest in securing the best possible higher education for students, that this requires exposure to a wide variety of life experiences and points of view, and that this in turn requires that universities should encompass a diversity of students. The lower court decision in favor of Bakke was thus affirmed in part but also reversed in part, and the reversal was mainly the result of Powell’s intervention.

Powell was by and large a conservative, and he would have thought it absurd that heterosexual white male students could not, by definition, contribute to the wide variety of life experiences and points of view he regarded as of such importance. But proponents of affirmative action essentially embraced Powell’s formula for the preservation of affirmative action while ignoring logical consistency in applying the underlying principle.

Over time, that has had expensive consequences, and needlessly so. When the Rushes of the world get exercised over diversity it is not about affirmative action, it is about the moral hypocrisy of affirming the validity of everyone’s point of view except that of heterosexual white males. I am not saying that Rush would not object to affirmative action. I would be highly surprised if he didn’t. But affirmative action is a tool to achieve a goal—that of diversity and inclusion—and few would argue any longer that minorities ought to be excluded from higher education. If affirmative action is a problematic tool there can be a rational conversation about what might be a better tool. But the villainization of white males, as Rush would put it; or consigning them to the role of Pharaoh, as I would put it, is not rationally defensible. It is an article of faith, and it simply excites the invocation of a countervailing article of faith, namely that the advocacy of diversity is a mere power play.

The conventional formulation of diversity is not only unwise, at a personal level it is offensive. I myself am a heterosexual male, and in that respect I’m barred from the world of diversity. But I also have bipolar disorder, which falls under the category of a disability, and persons with disabilities *do* contribute to diversity. My mental illness thus gives me an entry into the world of diversity. My contribution, however, is limited to my experience of mental illness: the project of diversity tacitly insists that this must be a core component of my identity. To the extent that I have life experiences and opinions that derive from anything other than mental illness, then within the realm of diversity they do not matter.

This takes us to my second area of agreement with Rush. I also agree with him that there is such a thing as “political correctness” and people who approximate a “diversity police.”

The charge of political correctness is thrown around far too freely. It is generally used as a way to instantly invalidate the viewpoint of any group that makes conservatives uncomfortable. I bridle when anyone uses the term.

But on some subjects a conversation that touches upon diversity simply cannot be had.

Within the realm of diversity the concept of “implicit bias” is now much in vogue. And justifiably so: it brings into bold relief the many ways in which our views and behaviors manifest prejudices that lie outside our conscious awareness—unless we make an effort to bring them to awareness.

The logic of the concept is that *everyone* is vulnerable to implicit bias. If this is true, it may help to explain why the groves of academe—of the humanities, at least—are overwhelmingly populated by liberals. It is possible, of course, that most conservatives do not self-select into the humanities. It is theoretically possible (although vanishingly unlikely) that most conservatives somehow do not reach the intellectual threshold required for admission to graduate studies or faculty appointments.

But implicit bias suggests that those already within academe systematically reject and exclude conservative voices—and therefore that this is a hypothesis that merits consideration. On several occasions, however, I have wondered aloud about this, and have been instantly shut down, always reflexively and often quite rudely. Certain aspects of diversity are very plainly policed, and in that respect, a self-appointed diversity police must, in the nature of the case, exist.

Rush is Right - Part 1

Once upon a time, a significant portion of Rush’s listeners were liberals, but those days are long gone. I’m probably one of few liberals who still hang in there, not because I enjoy it, but because Rush mirrors the views of a good many Americans, including some of my best friends. El Rushbo is worth an estimated $330 million; he didn’t acquire that fortune by challenging his listeners. He does not shape their opinions so much as articulate them.

Arguably there is an exception to this: Rush excels at playing upon the emotions of his listeners. His basic frame is that liberals are willfully, knowingly wrong. Liberals don’t have policy differences with Republicans. Rather, they are intent on taking your freedom and establishing a totalitarian regime in which everyone must embrace their ideology or else. This is a modern expression of a trope that has existed since the American Revolution. Historian Richard Hofstadter dubbed it “the paranoid style in American politics.” It is a continuation of the revolutionaries’ conviction that the British government was a threat to liberty. Thus, throughout our history, one’s political opponents have been depicted as a threat to liberty as well.

A basic tool in Rush’s arsenal is mockery. He not only excoriates liberals, he caricatures them, typically by impersonation. Apparently liberals habitually speak in an indignant, flustered tone. This mockery is especially pronounced when he touches upon diversity. He has a pet term for feminists—“feminazis”—but other groups attract his scorn without even the honor of a pejorative tagline. Essentially diversity has no purpose other than bashing white males and indeed, the “diversity police” have no tolerance for any viewpoint that does not wholly conform to theirs. Rush takes particular umbrage in multiculturalism and particular glee in mocking it.

There are nonetheless two respects in which I agree with Rush. In my previous posts I have outlined them. To begin with, according to Rush, in the cosmos of diversity’s proponents, “The only people that are racist are white men — and, even further, white Christian men.” This is an extreme formulation of an argument I have advanced that diversity’s dominant trope is the Exodus: the liberation of people long oppressed. This narrative requires a Pharaoh, and the role is thrust upon heterosexual white men. That is what once annoyed me about the work of Jamaica Kinkaid in "A Small Place" and Malek Alloula’s "The Colonial Harem."

One available response is to just suck it up and listen to what they have to say. A better response—although difficult to pull off—is to reject whiteness as a core feature of one’s identity. If you don’t think you’re white, you’re not going to feel targeted by the world’s Kinkaids and Alloulas. But it is really no wonder that a good many white males just get angry and resentful and switch off. Rush faithfully reflects their sense of alienation.

I’ll explore my second area of agreement with Rush in my next post.

I Know You Are But What Am I? Rush on Race

One of the obligations of maintaining a blog is that you have to post at a consistent rate. For a while I was publishing a discursive post every day. The trouble is, since my last post I’ve been too swamped with my regular work to fulfill my promise to get back to posting about Rush Limbaugh and racism. But consider this a down payment.

Rush’s characteristic take on racism is to declare that the proponents of multiculturalism are the real racists. A sample:

“You can give the proper definition to a lot of things. The proper definition of socialism? They [Millennials] don’t know what that is. They don’t know what the real definition of communism is. Millennials today hear ‘socialist’ and think that it means being social, being nice to people. Living in groups of people that treat each other fairly. That’s what think socialism is. They have no idea what it is. Same thing with racism. Racism now is any disagreement with somebody… By the way, the only people that can be racist in America today are white men.

“(paraphrased) ‘African-Americans or women, Asian men or women, Injun men or women? It’s impossible for them to be racist ’cause they’re minorities. They don’t have any power to hurt anybody with their racism. The only people that are racist are white men — and, even further, white Christian men. White Christian gay men are excluded because they’re gay, and gays are a minority and therefore they can’t be racist.’ It’s hideous, and it’s ridiculous. It ought to be… It should have become a joke by now, as frequently and as often as the Democrats are out there charging it. It’s lost whatever meaning it ever really had.

“There are some genuinely rotten people out there who are racist, and there’s many proper definitions of the word. Now, Al [a caller] was right that a lot of what is just rude and impolite behavior is being chalked up to racism. But racism, in its real form, is hideous. It believes in the inferiority of other human beings because of the way they look. It believes in the inferiority of people over things they have no control over. Real racism is despicable, it’s hideous, and it’s ugly — and this is what’s so outrageous.

“They’re just charging that any white person’s existence today is racist, and it traces to the founding of the country. That’s what they’re saying. I mean, there are college courses now on what type of where white people are being forced to take it so that they’re being forced to understand their born-with, inbred racism. They’re being taught there’s nothing they can do about it, that they are inherently flawed in this way. The only thing they can do is constantly apologize and make amends at every turn. Well, what we’re talking about here is not racism.

“And the racism that’s properly defined, there isn’t that much of it. That’s the real thing that irritates me. When you start talking about actual, real racism, the Democrats want you to believe it’s everywhere, and that it exists solely in one political camp: The Republican camp. Barack Obama was one of the biggest racists you can believe. Racism is also the active attempt to divide people on their human differences. I’ll tell you: Trayvon Martin was the first episode where Obama sought to divide.”

Left Cheapens Real Hate , Calls Ivanka's White Dog Racist

Jail Break - Part 2

Some years ago I chanced to attend a Pentecostal church whose membership was about evenly divided between whites and Blacks, with numerous interracial families. After the service I stood chatting in the parking lot with a number of men, all of whom happened to be white, married to African-American women, and thus the fathers of children of mixed heritage. We all knew that in our society these children would all be seen as African-American and treated as such—which would of course inevitably make them subject to racial discrimination. Thus these white men had a problem that most white men do not: the anxieties that go with raising non-white children in a society still suffused with white racism.

They knew that, although themselves recipients of “white privilege,” they could not impart this privilege to their own flesh and blood. Thus they urgently wanted a society in which the privilege was dissolved. They had no idea of how to accomplish this—not because they were unintelligent but because they knew the grip that white racism still holds upon our society. They understood its power—so powerful that even as individuals, they could not cease to receive its benefits. There was, as I suggested in my previous post, no place to leave their whiteness upon the altar.

What does it mean to be white? It means to be the member of a race, so what does race mean? In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, scholars were confident that they knew. They went about classifying humanity into races and assigning characteristics to each. By the twentieth century, however, the problems with this “scientific racism” became apparent. Writing in 1942, a white Southerner noted that scholars of race could not even agree upon the number and composition of the races. “Thus one scholar makes an elaborate classification of twenty-nine races; another tells us there are six; Huxley gives us four; Kroebner, three; Goldweiser, five; and Boas inclines to two, while his colleague, Linton, says there are twelve or fifteen. Even my dullest students sometimes note this apparent contradiction.”

The races have no objective existence. They are invented, inhabited, modified, and destroyed. In the antebellum United States it was common to hear scientists speak of Slavs, Teutons, Celts, Hebrews, Alpines, and Mediterraneans as separate races, though nowadays all such individuals would be considered Caucasian or white. The historical melding of these groups gives the game away, for the success of “whiteness” resides in its political and social utility, and each of these groups was able to place itself on the same political and social footing as the Anglo Saxons who long dominated the United States. Whiteness is ultimately about power, pure and simple.

I own a white skin, and I have no idea how to divest myself of the privilege that whiteness confers. But I *do* have it within my ability to recognize that this privilege is unfair. I may be stuck with it, but I can choose not to make it part of who I am. I don’t have to think of myself as white—or I can at least try not to think of myself as white. By this reasoning whiteness is no longer about privilege. It is about inhabiting a kind of prison.

When I think of this, I think of a passage from “John Brown’s Body,” Stephen Vincent Benet’s epic poem about the American Civil War. It is in a context far removed from the prison of white identity but it conveys a sense of what is involved with any form of psychological imprisonment.

The passage occurs in a soliloquy in which Lincoln’s thoughts range across the course of his life and psyche as he awaits the outcome of the battle of Antietam—which, if a victory, he has decided will bring the moment to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Toward the end of the soliloquy he imagines himself in a psychological prison, and speaks of languishing in “the blind darkness, … the lonely cave // That never hears a footstep but my own // Nor ever will, while I’m a man alive // To keep my prison locked from visitors.”

Lincoln then asks:

What if I heard another footstep there,
What if, some day—there is no one but God,
No one but God who could descend that stair
And ring his heavy footfalls on the stone.
And if He came, what would we say to Him?

Here is where the poem, for me, captures the tragedy of making whiteness the core of one’s identity:

That prison is ourselves that we built,
And, being so, its loneliness is just.
And, being so, its loneliness endures.

Still, there may be hope of a way out, a jailbreak:

But, if another came,
What would we say?
What can the blind say, given back their eyes?

No, it must be as it has always been.
We are all prisoners in that degree
And will remain so, but I think I know
This—God is not a jailor….

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.