Well, so maybe it’s not a good idea to come in here with this today, but there are only a few days left to American Indian Heritage Month and only a few hours left to the weekend….FWIW, another couple 1,000 words, to be taken with a spoonful of sugar if necessary.
[WARNING! The following piece, while it addresses some very serious issues and contains a number of legitimate “action items,” is also riddled with heretical humor which may be offensive to some readers. Parental supervision may be advised.]
What the Fuck Is Your Problem, Babe!?
Ok, I admit. I’ve been sitting here asking myself the same thing. What the fuck is your problem, babe? Why can’t you just sit down and write that damn thing? That “Attitudes of Gratitude” thing? Do something constructive!
Hmm.
What the fuck is my problem? I’ve wracked my brain for an answer. Scoured the lines on my face in the mirror, checked under the table, the desk, the living room chair, cleaned up the office and am starting to feel like George Bush looking for WMD or the GOP trying to find a Black man from the City of Chicago to run against Obama. To be honest, I really don’t have a problem: I’ve got a decent (extremely flexible) job, money in the bank, wonderful husband, students galore, a few good friends, closet full of haute couture, car’s paid for, fridge is full. What the hell.
When in doubt, look it up.
So I went to Jeeves and typed “what the fuck is your problem?” Lo and behold, there it was! (Naw, you ain’t gonna like it, but geez, sometimes you gotta step back, stop and learn to laugh at yourself, and then none of it seems as dramatic as it was when you were crying over the millions most recently bilked from the tribes, see Abramoff, Scanlon, DeLay, etal ad infinitum!)
White People. That’s my fucking problem. White People who don’t get that it’s not my problem, it’s theirs. I found at least one white guy who agrees (there are a lot of them, you know, and yet far too few, and many more who know it, but are afraid to say it: the problem that dare not speak its name).
It’s not about Indians, it’s not about Blacks. The problem is white people, and until that problem is addressed, I can post all the “action items” and educational resources in the world on the subject of “what can I do? say a powerless few.” It would amount to telling Marie Antoinette to slap a bandaid on her head.
I haven’t yet read Robert Jensen’s recently released The Heart of Whiteness, but I’ve heard about it. Excerpts from the book which argues that, when it comes to racism, white people are the problem, were published this September in The Houston Chronicle under the title “The new White People’s Burden: Take a hard look in the mirror”.
And in fact, this is nothing new: people of color have obviously known it all along, and a lot of white people have been saying it for quite awhile as well. It is the underlying assumption behind the journal Race Traitor, co-founded in 1992 by John Garvey and former Harvard history professor Noel Ignatiev. It’s certainly not new to me, either, and I have been publishing articles in that journal since around 1995 in which I have repeatedly pointed to precisely this problem.
Frankly, since I personally have had increasingly less contact with white people since then, I haven’t really felt so much like I had a problem. But ever since Katrina, I’ve really had a problem. Going out in the world has been a serious problem for me, I confess.
And it was Jensen’s Houston Chronicle article that helped me understand why. Sheesh. How can anyone be so stupid as to miss the obvious? Yeah, sometimes I don’t feel like the sharpest tack in the drawer. Anyway thanks to Jensen for figuring it out for me.
Here’s what he writes:
As devastating as the physical destruction brought by Katrina has been, it may turn out that one of the hurricane’s most enduring legacies is the way it made visible the effect of racial and class disparities on who lived and who died, who escaped early and who suffered from being left behind.
Such realities have always been clear to those on the bottom of the hierarchy, of course, and to others willing to face the reality of white supremacy predominance. But now all of white America has an opportunity to see what racialized disparities in wealth and well-being look like, in painfully raw form.
Fair enough. We all know that.
But this question really gets to the heart of what my fucking problem is:
Will we take that opportunity, or turn away out of fear? Do we have the courage to face the meaning of what we have seen?
There you have it: my fucking problem in a nutshell. Apparently, America’s answer to this question is an emphatic: NO. I really thought, I sincerely believed, that, even if white rednecks in Texas kept believing “this was working out very well” for “those people” “in that part of the world”, the rest of us, would get up off our asses, our keyboards, our couches and chairs, and take to the streets in a frenzy of public outrage. That didn’t happen. The fact that it didn’t is a fucking problem.
OK. So the guilt trip’s not working. I get it. (And in fact, the still unwritten “Attitudes of Gratitude” piece was planned as an attempt to shift the paradigm from one of guilt to one of gratitude). But let’s look at what Jensen proposes:
We can pretend that we have reached “the end of racism” and continue to ignore the question. But that’s just plain stupid. We can acknowledge that racism still exists and celebrate safe forms of diversity and multiculturalism while avoiding the political, economic, and social consequences of white supremacy. But, frankly, that’s just as stupid. The fact is that most of the white population of the United States has never really known what to do with those who are not white. Let me suggest a different approach.
Let’s go back to the question that W.E.B. Du Bois said he knew was on the minds of white people. In his 1903 classic, The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois wrote that the question whites were afraid to ask him was: “How does it feel to be a problem?”
Du Bois was identifying a burden that blacks carried — being seen by the dominant society not as people but as a problem people, as a people who posed a problem for the rest of society.
Du Bois was right to identify “the color line” as the problem of the 20th century. Now, in the 21st century, it is time for whites to self-consciously reverse the direction of that question at the heart of color. It’s time for white people to fully acknowledge that in the racial arena, we are the problem.
The moral task of white America is to do something that doesn’t come naturally to people in positions of unearned power and privilege: Look in the mirror honestly and concede that we live in an unjust society and have no right to some of what we have.
We should not affirm ourselves. We should negate our whiteness, strip ourselves of the illusion that we are special because we are white, steel ourselves so that we can walk in the world fully conscious and try to see what is usually invisible to us white people. We should learn to ask ourselves, “How does it feel to be the problem?”
That is the new White People’s Burden. Instead of pretending to civilize the world, let’s try to civilize ourselves.
In an earlier piece in which Jensen addresses the issue of racist Indian mascots (and in the broadest sense, a subject I have touched on elsewhere in some of my posts to this forum, i.e., the “power of naming and claiming” (LaDuke, Recovering the Sacred, he also speaks to a matter that has generated considerable confusion in my recent postings on the subject of the past:
Let’s start with the past, which people often want to avoid. It’s history, they say. Get over it — don’t get stuck in the past. But this advice to forget history is selective; many of the same folks who tell indigenous people not to get stuck in the past are also demanding that schoolchildren get more instruction in the accomplishments of the Founding Fathers. It is commonly asserted, and undoubtedly true, that Americans don’t know enough about their own history (or that of the world). The question isn’t whether we should pay more attention to history. The relevant questions are: Who gets to write history? From whose point of view is history written? Which historical realities are emphasized and which are ignored? So, let us not take the seemingly easy — but intellectually and morally lazy — path of selectively contending that “history doesn’t matter.” Everyone knows it matters.
And in this context, Jensen also provides insights into related issues that have come up in the context of recent discussions out here on the blogs:
I am not asking anyone who is white to feel guilty about this. I do not feel guilty about this. I feel incredibly pained and saddened by it, just as I feel pained and saddened by other acts of brutality that litter human history. But I cannot take on guilt for events that happened before I was born. Feeling guilt for things outside my control would be illogical.
However I can — and should — feel guilty about things I have done wrong in my life, over which I do have control. I should feel guilty not simply so that I feel bad, but so that change is possible. Guilt is healthy when it leads to self-critique, to moral reflection, to a commitment to not repeating mistakes. We can feel that guilt both individually and collectively. We can see what we have done wrong or failed to do right, both by ourselves and with others. That brings us to the present.
… One easy place to start could be eliminating a nickname and logo to which a significant number of Indians object. All that white people would have to do is accept that simple fact, and change the name and logo. It would cost no one anything, beyond the trivial expense of changing the design on some stationary, uniforms, and university trinkets.
But wait, many white people say, isn’t systemic poverty on reservations more important than a logo? Of course it is. Are there more pressing problems for Indians than the Fighting Sioux design? Sure. But there is nothing to stop anyone from going forward to address other problems and, at the same time, taking the simple step of changing the nickname and logo. It’s not an either/or choice.
In the course of the past week, I have been asked countless times why I reacted so strongly to the casual metaphorical use of a term like “trail of tears,” and many have understood why. But some have not. Jensen’s discussion of the use of Indian images as mascots in team sports might help to clarify:
Why should Indians have the right to make the decision over how their name and image are used? Because in the absence of a compelling reason to override that right, a person or group of people should have control over their name and image. That’s part of what it means to be a person with full humanity. And in this case, the argument for white people giving Indians that power is intensified by the magnitude of the evil perpetrated by whites on Indians.
To acknowledge all that is to acknowledge that the American nation is based on genocide, on a crime against humanity. The land of the free and the home of the brave, the nation that was born as the vehicle for a new freedom, rests on the denial not only of freedom, but of life itself, to a whole group of people — for the crime of getting in the way of what the European invaders wanted for themselves, the land and its resources.
And finally from one white male to his fellow fighting whites (see also below), Jensen issues an invitation:
I am calling for white people to acknowledge that we have no right to choose how Indians are named and represented. We have no standing to speak on the question. Our place is to shut up and do what we are told. Let me say that again, for emphasis: We white folks should shut up and do what Indians tell us. Let’s try it, first, on this simple issue. We might find it is something we should do on a number of other issues.
And if we do that, individually and collectively we will take a step toward claiming our own dignity and humanity. The way in which white America refuses to come to terms with its history and the contemporary consequences of that history has material and psychological consequences for Indians (as well as many other groups). But in a very real sense, we cannot steal the dignity and humanity of indigenous people. We can steal their resources, disrespect them, insult them, ignore them, and continue to repress their legitimate aspirations. We can try to distort their own sense of themselves, but in the end we can’t take their humanity from them.
So call him a windbag. Tell him to fuck off. Whatever.
(If you still don’t get what the problem is, maybe this will help. Otherwise, I give up. Go play in the street or something.)
But, if you want to take his advice, here are a few suggestions for getting started:
First of all, educate–yourselves, your children (their teachers!), your neighbors, friends and enemies.
One of the best resources I know for unraveling the lies that American history teaches all of us is James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me. Check out his site, he’s since published a number of additional titles that are equally valuable. You may want to consider purchasing this and other titles from another grumpy old white guy Thomas Metz, director of the Honor Resource Center and proprietor of a bookstore/website. Tom has been diligently engaged in the attempt to deal with his fucking problem and mine for a lot longer than it’s been fashionable to do so, and in addition to providing a wonderful resource with a carefully “vetted” selection of titles for educating white people, he’s been doing a lot for the Native peoples in southern Wisconsin. Check out his site. It’s marvelous and worthy of support. Tom is truly an unsung hero.
Do the mascots piss you off as much as they do me? Want to piss off your Redstate friends, family and foes this holiday season? Send `em some Fighting Whites paraphernalia. Proceeds go to the Fighting Whites Scholarship Fund which, by 2003, had raised $100,000 in scholarship funds for Native students.
Systematic poverty piss you off? Sure pisses me off. And it pisses me off especially on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Been working on this particular problem for a number of years, but, hey, my resources are not unlimited. You can help me get over your fucking problem this holiday season (and throughout the year) by putting one of the many, many organizations and private individuals who have declared themselves Friends of Pine Ridge Reservation on your shopping list. This is an incredible site and a tremendous resource for anyone sincerely interested in taking a bite out of the problem. You can spend hours browsing there and looking for individuals and organizations to match your interests. I would advise against contributing to any of the government agencies that are also listed on the site, however, and make a sincere attempt to support Indian-owned and-or operated groups and projects.
Ha! And for you Froggy food freaks and gourmet gurus out here in the Pond, this is the hottest tip since Columbus. The White Earth Ojibwe Winona LaDuke’s Native Harvest store. You can max out your credit card, impress friends, family and neighbors with exotic culinary delights that are in fact the most domestic of all: wild rice, maple syrup…and the packaged gourmet soups are exquisite. This is a 100% Native owned business that provides jobs for community members based on a truly innovative model for establishing a sustainable economy on the reservation.