America: Love It or Leave It!

This piece was inspired by some comments posted on floridagal’s diary from Friday, What have you to offer me

The subject turned to the notion of “unintentional dismissiveness” in the context of harmless, unintended sleights made by members of racially, sexually, religiously, physically and/or otherwise “privileged” communities.

I pointed out that these unintended sleights and offenses were so all pervasive, especially for anyone who is marked as Other in multiple ways, that they could amount to as many as 10,000 a day, to which Booman responded [here http://www.boomantribune.com/comments/2006/2/17/0826/47852/119]

What bothers me are people that see a slight in every glance, or turn of phrase, or lack of an invitation, or professional disappointment. I think there is an actual psychological term for this mindset (at least when it becomes a problem and requires treatment). But it is a very annoying trait.

I’m the last person to deny the many slights that people must endure in this world, or to deny your basic point. But if you are getting 10,000 slights a day, you need to see a doctor.

So I got to thinking about that. Maybe this is indeed my own personal mental health issue. In fact, I was so preoccupied with that prospect that I managed to lock myself out of the house (in subzero temps) yesterday and ended up having to hang out at a local bookstore for a few hours before my husband could come and rescue me from my predicament. While there, I picked up the most recent title by civil rights activist and Harvard-educated attorney, Randall Robinson, “Quitting America: The Departure of a Black Man From His Native Land.”

As synchronicity would have it, already in the first chapter, I stumbled on some quotes that fit right into the discussion and posted them here, belatedly, along with a couple of interesting linkson the author:

Most white Americans in their dealings with black, brown, and all other varieties of nonwhite people are altogether well-mannered and are often all the more damaging for it . For indeed fine manners and America’s national opiate of choice, chauvinistic narcissism, combine to immunize white Americans en masse from self-knowledge, self-doubt, self-criticism. If they don’t like us, it is only because they are jealous of us.

[. . .]

Many, if not most, Americans will read this and no doubt sigh a “what’s the big deal, and where is this place you’re talking about, anyhow?” As a practical matter maybe it wouldn’t be such a big deal,were not such coarse little bricks being hurled willy-nilly across the world daily by brainless, insensate white Americans, high and low, numbering in the thousands . And no, I have not suffered an inexplicable lapse of language judgment. I use the words brainless and insensate advisedly, if perhaps somewhat desperately. White people around the world insult black people, brown people, everyone-but-them people, regularly and gratuitously, without even the bitter, dubious flattery of conscious intent.

I’ve highlighted in bold the points in which Robinson is referring to the same kind of “convenient cluenessness” (as aptly described by susanw) or unintended dismissiveness included in my “wtf?-who’s-really-counting-“anyway citation of the 10,000 daily insults: Robinson estimates what he calls the “coarse little bricks being hurled willy-nilly across the world daily” to be in the “thousands”. My estimate, was admittedly not based on any actual ‘count’ of unintentional dismissals but rather was used metaphorically to say “ongoing barrage of unintended assaults on my sensibilities”–I thought the subsequent “winka-winka” comment about “who’s counting” ought to have made that clear.

At any rate, since I’ve since been asked to “tell the whole truth and nothing but”, I will freely admit that I took serious offense at this comment.

So, are you suggesting that someone who is so sensitive to unintentional insults that he has to leave the country is a well adjusted and happy individual in no need of a psychiatrist?
It seems like that is what you are saying.

But I can’t think of a better example of someone who is neurotic and intensly unpleasant to be around.

He makes a valuable point and a point that needs to be reiterated often. But he still needs a chill pill.

But rather than waste my time on an unintended offense, I decided to weave from the silver lining and focus on this: “Robinson makes a valuable point that needs to be reiterated often.”

So I decided to use this instead as an opportunity to take a closer look at this civil rights activist who, shortly before 9/11 “changed everything,” decided that he had to leave America in order to find any sense of serenity in his life. This post is an attempt to reiterate and reiterate often the point that Robinson and others like him continue to make.

For those of you familiar with my history, you know that I came to the same conclusion in 1984, when I left the country in protest of Ronald Reagan’s reelection, only to return in 1992. I suppose I’d have left again in the year 2000, but, if William Greider’s analysis of the situation (as presented in his 1996 “One World Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism”) is any index, there is, to cite the title of the well-known East German author Christa Wolf, “No Place. Nowhere.” (Kein Ort. Nirgends.) No place on Earth. To get away from this shit. To be free of the constant barrage of assaults on identity and everything one holds sacred and dear. America is everywhere. We are all wearing the orange jumpsuit, the blue dress, the electrodes attached to our genitals.

And yet, I know an increasing number of people who are nevertheless setting out for “distant shores” in search of places where the barrage is at least not as intense. As more and more of my friends move to Canada, to South America, to Europe, to Africa, the West Indies–anywhere but here–I do have to question the wisdom in my decision to “stick it out.” But I’ve always been that kind of glutton for punishment.

Since I certainly can’t afford a shrink and really don’t relish the thought of losing my mind, blogging has become a form of “alternative therapy” and today I’d just like to pay tribute to the sense of loss I feel at the “brain drain” that is occurring as this country continues heedlessly and recklessly down the same path of mind-numbing refusal to look itself in the mirror that it has always been on. And today I do that by highlighting the life and work of Randall Robinson.

It is not insignificant to note that Randall Robinson left this country before 9/11. Before the illegal invasion of Iraq. Before the re-installation of B*shCo, before, before, before, before. A February 22, 2004 post at CommonDreams summed up my gut reaction to the news that Randall Robinson has joined the ranks of “America-quitters”: the headline reads, simply–“America Loses a Hero.”

I’m not quite sure who Booman is talking about when he refers to someone “intensely unpleasant to be around”, but if the photo on the Salon site might suggest, doesn’t look as if Maxine Waters considers Robinson all that unpleasant to be around, and judging from this January 2001 NPR interview with the man, he certainly  sounds pleasant and sane enough. But we all know how it is with sound-bites and photo-ops.

The Horowitz crowd, as the April, 2004 commentary at Salon.com points out, “savaged the book” and termed Robinson a “smooth-talking racist”–and it is no surprise that the wingnuts at Frontpage.com consider Robinson’s departure no great loss.

Randall Robinson has made his choice for another country; Americans are none the poorer as a result.

Almost makes you wonder whether this isn’t the strategy: let’s just make it so unpleasant for all those who depart from the white male/female, heterosexual, Judeo-Christian, able-bodied norm to stay that they finally pack up and leave–the ones who can afford it, anyway. As for those who can’t, we’ll just let God and FEMA take care of them!

His bio at the The Huffington Post, where he is apparently a regular contributor, has this to say about the guy who needs a chill pill and/or a shrink:

Randall Robinson, is an internationally respected foreign policy advocate and author. He established TransAfrica in 1977 and was its president until 2001. The mandate of TransAfrica was to promote enlightened, progressive U.S. policies towards Africa and the Caribbean. While president of that organization, he spearheaded the U. S. campaign to end apartheid in South Africa. His leadership in support of the pro-democracy movement in Haiti – which included a 27-day hunger strike – also caused the United States Government to lead the 1994 multinational effort to return to power Haiti’s first democratically elected – but violently overthrown – government.

Mr. Robinson was actively involved in efforts to expose the brutality of the Mengistu regime in Ethiopia, the corruption in Nigeria during that country’s era of military dictatorships, and fought passionately to thwart US attempts to end the Caribbean’s access to the European banana market by the mid-90’s.

Randall Robinson is an author whose works include national best sellers (i) Defending the Spirit, (ii) The Debt – What America Owes to Blacks, (iii) The Reckoning – What Blacks Owe to Each Other, and (iv) Quitting America – The Departure of a Black Man From His Native Land. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School. Twenty-one universities have bestowed upon him honorary Ph.D’s in recognition of the impact he has had on U.S. foreign policy. He is the recipient of numerous awards for his global humanitarian work, and among the organizations that have honored him thusly are the United Nations, the Congressional Black Caucus, Harvard University, Essence Magazine Awards Show, ABC-News Person of the Week, The Martin Luther King Center for Non-Violent Change, the NAACP, and Ebony Magazine Awards Show, to mention a few.

He has presented his views on US foreign policy as well as the role of race in America on ABC’s “Nightline”, CBS’ “60 Minutes”, NBC’s “Today Show”, CNN, C-Span and other American television programs. He lives in St. Kitts with his wife and daughter, where he continues to write.

Shit, with a resume like that, I’d probably be in need of a chill pill, too.

In this October 2005 interview in The Progressive, Robinson elaborates on some of his reasons for leaving the country–and I’m sure many of us can relate to at least some of what he is saying here:

Question: Why did you decide to leave the United States?

Randall Robinson: I was really worn down by an American society that is racist, smugly blind to it, and hugely self-satisfied. I wanted to live in a place where that wasn’t always a distorting weight. Black people in America have to, for their own protection, develop a defense mechanism, and I just grew terribly tired of it. When you sustain that kind of affront, and sustain it and sustain it and sustain it, something happens to you. You try to steer a course in American society that’s not self-destructive. But America is a country that inflicts injury. It does not like to see anything that comes in response, and accuses one of anger as if it were an unnatural response. For anyone who is not white in America, the affronts are virtually across the board.

Q: Would you offer similar advice to progressives who feel beleaguered?

Robinson: A good many white Americans are leaving the country, too, moving to Canada. My book provoked a lot of mail, but it is the first time I have written a book where at least half the mail came from white Americans. So while the parts about race may not have resonated with them, the diagnosis of the culture did. Something is very, very wrong with American culture. The signs are everywhere. I think the country is in almost terminal descent. The business class is combined with the evangelicals. And I think the evangelicals want to provoke an immense global disaster to precipitate the second coming of Christ. So they are very happy about what we’re doing to Iraq–and the menace we present now for Syria and for Iran–because they think that the apocalypse is an important thing to get into so that they can see vindicated their most literal interpretation of the Bible.

And I’m aware that because America is so powerful–with its tentacles reaching out to the world–one doesn’t escape it by leaving. This is the most dangerous and disturbing time in my life.

In the same interview, he actually speaks directly to some of the concerns raised by Booman in his comments concerning the man’s psychological frame of mind when he says:  

In an interior way, I am not as bleak as I sound. I’m a fairly happy human being. But am I in the short term optimistic? No. I search for reasons to be, and I’d be interested in you telling me what some might be, but I haven’t found anything in the short term. So I’m sorry, but I’m just not hopeful. And then there’s the collaboration or the accommodation of prominent blacks like Dorothy Haight and Andrew Young who stood up for Condoleezza Rice. One asks the question: Well, doesn’t one have to be something more than black to elicit your support?

And, while I’m not entirely certain, I do believe one could plausibly argue that, with the following statement, Robinson is more or less suggesting that, if anyone needs to take a chill pill, it’s “white America”:

Anyway, in my arguments for reparations, I’m not talking about writing checks to people. The word reparations means to repair. We’ve opened this gap in society between the two races. Whites have more than eleven times the net worth or wealth of African Americans. They make greater salaries. Our unemployment rate is twice theirs. You look at the prison system and who that’s chewing up. Now we’ve got the advent of AIDS. Fifty-four percent of new infections are in African Americans. Many infected men are coming out of prison and infecting their women. So when I talk about reparations, I say there has to be a material component. It has to have a component of education that is compensatory. It has to have a component of economic development that’s compensatory. But in the last analysis the greater damage is here [points to his head]. So I’m not really talking about money. And I’m not really talking about the concerns of people who say, “I didn’t benefit from slavery.” Nobody said you did.

It’s important for white America to be able to face up. Far beyond its relations with the black community, it is important for white Americans. It’s important in helping us in our approaches to the rest of the world, and in being sensitive to Islam, and to look at the way other cultures handle their management of themselves, and to look at it with respect, with the possibility that you even might learn something. We’ve got a country that never takes any responsibility for anything. It forgets its role and makes everybody else forget what happened, too. And that it is not just dangerous for the victim, but also for the perpetrator.

Then again, anyone who turns down an honorary PhD from a prestigious school like Georgetown probably ought to have his head examined–even if his reason for doing so was that he could not accept such an “honor” from an institution that, only days before, had awarded the same to George Tenet. He talks about this in this 2003 interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!

Last year He once declined an honorary degree from Georgetown University because George Tenet, the director of the CIA and an ardent supporter of the invasion of Iraq, had been invited the day before to speak at one of Georgetown’s graduation exercises.

RANDALL ROBINSON: I wrote this, of course, on the commencement day in May in my hotel room in Longhand just before I was to leave to go over to the school.

“I wish to begin by apologizing to all of you if what I am about to say on your day causes you discomfort. I have fought all of my life against social injustice. I have opposed unjust communist regimes and unjust capitalist regimes. I have fought against unjust white regimes and unjust black regimes. I do not live in the United States anymore. I live on the tiny democratic Caribbean island of St. Kitts-Nevis. I only learned this morning that George Tenet, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was to be the speaker at your School of Foreign Service exercises yesterday. I sincerely believe that in the years ahead, the entire world will come to accept that the United States has committed in Iraq a great crime against humanity, a crime against innocent Iraqi women, children, and men. Indeed, a crime against our own men and women, who have paid and will continue to pay with their lives, for the greed of America’s empire makers. In my view, President Bush, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Powell, and Mr. Tenet are little more than murderers. There are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and they knew this. There is no Iraqi connection to 9-11. There was no legal justification for a war in which we have not bothered to count the Iraqi dead. America has committed an awful wrong in the sight of God, and I trust in time, that this will be the prevailing view or verdict of humanity. In any case, you have chosen the wrong person this morning. I should not have come. Indeed, I would not have come had I known before what I learned this morning, when I opened the newspapers. Americans must choose. They must choose between decency, of course, and empire, between morality and murder, between truth and deception. Mr. Tenet has the right to speech protected by our constitution, but that right should not be exercised on a platform so broadly respected as yours. I cannot accept your honor, for in my view, Georgetown University yesterday disqualified itself of the moral authority to bestow one. My candle lights little other than the interior of my own conscience; but for me, for all of my life, that has been enough.”

So anyway, I’m starting to feel better now, knowing that, if I do indeed need a shrink, then I’m not the only one. There is an odd sense of cold comfort in this Robinson quote, posted at the AmericanIdealism.com blog

America. America. Land of my birth and erstwhile distress. Hypocrite immemorial. My heart left long ago. At long last, I have followed it. Trying my very best, how could I, in good conscience, remain for a country that has never ever, at home or abroad, been for me or for mine? … I am afraid. I am afraid for the world and for myself, afraid of my own country. For if they could do so patently wrongful a thing [the invasion of Iraq] and sell it to themselves so convincingly as right, they could do anything–to anybody, anywhere… I have fought for and with America’s creed–against America… I am all but spent by the effort. A life now near used up contesting a fraud.

Yeah, Robinson got tired of wasting his time trying to ignore the unintentional sleights and insults. Got tired of the “Buy the bullshit or bury the truth”-line of thinking that would leave him with two options for finding serenity in his native country: see a shrink or get over it. Buck up, Buy Blue and make sure you mark the column that says “D” at the ballot box!

Of course, Robinson’s not the first in a long line of African American “heroes” we have lost to our persistent inability to look ourselves in the mirror and make even minor adjustments in our behaviors, if only for the sake of accommodating those neurotic and intensely unpleasant people who can’t seem to get a grip on the reality of life in these dis-United States. Dr. J. Cherry Muhanji, educational director of the School for Moral Courage, posted the commentary of James Clingman from January 2006 on the school’s site
:

Before you attribute this article as a call for Black people to move out of
the U.S., let me make it clear that I am not advocating such an action, but
I certainly understand why it occurs. One day I may leave this country for
good, but I am not saying all Black people should do so, nor am I saying
we should stay here. I just want to use history, both old and recent, to
stimulate thinking around what is happening to Black people in this
country.

It’s not so much that DuBois left for Ghana; it’s what he said when he
departed. It’s not so important that Robinson quit this country; it’s what
caused him to quit. The rest of us who remain in this country must, first,
see what is happening to our people, and then make up our minds, both
individually and collectively, to do something about it.

And it’s good to see that there are still a few white folk out who realize that this really is about saving the souls of white folk more than anything. Tim Wise, whose work I have posted in other contexts on this blog, addresses some of these issues at the Blackcommentator  in the context of varied responses to the death of Ronald Reagan. Wise, of course, since he writes and comments in venues where most of the authors are assumed to be Black by default, is always careful to remind his readers, that he  is not:  

But knowing white folks – I am after all one of them, and have been surrounded by them all of my life – I have little doubt that where there’s a will to remain in la-la land, we will surely find a way.

And this is what he had to say about Reagan:

But how can healthy people feel good about a leader who does and says the kinds of things mentioned above? Obviously the answer is by denying that racism matters, or that its victims count for anything. Even more cynically, it is no doubt true that for many of them, it was precisely Reagan’s policy of hostility to people of color that made them feel good in the first place. By 1980, most whites were already tiring of civil rights and were looking for someone who would take their minds off such troubling concepts as racism, and instead implore them to “greatness,” however defined, and “pride,” however defined, and flag waving.

Whites have long been more enamored of style than substance, of fiction than fact, of fantasy than reality. It’s why we have clung so tenaciously to the utterly preposterous version of our national history peddled by textbooks for so long; and it’s why we get so angry when anyone tries to offer a correction.

It’s why we choose to believe the lie about the U.S. being a shining city on a hill, rather than a potentially great but thoroughly flawed place built on the ruins and graves of Native peoples, built by the labor of enslaved Africans, enlarged by theft and murder and an absolute disregard for non-European lives.

What was that about Reagan again? What was that about la-la land?.  

I don’t know. All I know is that I feel like I’m in good company with nutcases like Robinson and others who make themselves intensely unpleasant to be around for some people. All I know is that there’s not a chill pill in sight here, so I’m just going to crawl back into my Hobbit Hole and hope that, for anyone who’s made it this far into the post, the trip hasn’t been all that unpleasant.

Rest assured, y’all will be the first to know if I ever find a way to “get over it” without leaving the country. Again. For now, all I have to say is: Love it or leave it? I do love it, I have left it, and if you aren’t man or mouse enough to look yourself in the mirror in order to accommodate my “neurosis”, why don’t you think about leaving. I am here to stay.

It does help to live in a 90-99% Black neighborhood where the millionaires aren’t all drug dealers and gang bangers–heck, maybe one of these days I might run into a good shrink willing to work pro bona on helping me get over my “problem”. (see note below)

Please note: This by way of “Happy Ending”….and clarification for why I find it possible to resist ever running away from my home again:

When I was growing up, for as long as I remained with my birth family, the drug dealers in my neighborhood were the “rich” people–it’s why a lot of us aspired to become drug dealers. So, for the first ten years of my life, I lived on the Ghetto side of the “Hood,” aspiring to become a rich drug dealer like my brothers were, or perhaps to go into “go-go-dancing” like many of my mothers’ friends: stripping was easier for the women than drug dealing.

In the myriad foster homes I went through, I lived in neighorhoods (all of them all white) where the millionaires were doctors, lawyers and not “Indian chiefs.” I spent the next 8 years trying to get back to the ghetto side after social services stepped in and decided that I was definitely the stuff of the “gucci” side.

Today I live smack dab in the middle of the Hood, on what I call the “Mason Dixon line” on the border between the Ghetto (to the South) and Gucci (to the North).

I am happy to say that today I live in a neighborhood where people like me don’t have to aspire to become drug dealers in order to be in a position to purchase high-end properties in this nearly all-Black neighborhood.

People in this neighborhood are indeed doing something about the problems–and we have also found innovative ways of dealing with gangbangers and drug dealers; our condo community, for example, worked very closely with the family of the last junkie who bought a condo in our complex, to get him therapy and get him cleaned up; ultimately, we failed, we had to force him out and he ultimately committed suicide in his next place of residence. We don’t always succeed in our efforts to fix what is wrong with our community, but we’re working on it.

It’s really nice to have found a place where the Ghetto and Gucci live side by side. These days, I try not to stray too far from the neighborhood–as a prophylactic measure to avoid the problem of the unintended insults. It’s working out all right.