Considering how we respond to polls about the turmoil in Ferguson, you might be forgiven for thinking less of me because I am white. Let me assure you, however, that I am as disgusted as anyone about how my racial cohort views reality.
When it comes to, particularly, white males, I am pretty much disgusted every single time we are polled on any issue. And when we get to white male protestants (of which I am one, by heritage), the results are beyond demoralizing. If we were allowed to run things the way we say we’d like to see them run, I would not consent to live under the resulting tyranny.
I respect people who feel solidarity with their racial, religious, or ethnic heritage. But I am so far from feeling solidarity with my own that it’s a completely foreign concept to me. My group is wrong about everything there is to be wrong about. And we must be kept out of power.
Booman, your group may indeed be wrong about everything, but the sad fact of the matter your group is THE power structure in this country. How do we feasibly get that power divested? Where do we start? The facile answer is the ballot box, but until we deal with gerrymandered voting districts at all levels, that solution is gonna take generations to come about.
Perhaps we engage in a massive re-education initiative?
“Solidarity” with whites means solidarity with white supremacy. As I said in Steven’s post, in America (and most of the world) there is no such thing as “racism” against white people; it cannot exist, inherently.
I have seen lots of “white solidarity” throughout social media during this episode, though.
Consevative white males and Liberal white males are different.
They see reality very differently. Almost opposite. Did you not notice?
If they both disgust you, then you’re truly self hating.
Peace anyway… sad
yes, of course, which is why prejudice is wrong.
Large corporations and white bigots have paid big bucks over 40 years to get those poll results.
Umm…
You are part of your group and you are not wrong. Neither am I. Or many white males I know.
That means we can’t say monolithicly that our group is wrong. It is a nonsensical statement and points out the foolishness of identity politics.
Racist, know-nothing hate-mongers are such by a matter of choice. And they should be made out as fools and forced democratically from power. But you and I have as much in common with them as we do little green men from Mars.
Actually, it doesn’t invalidate identity politics. It shows two things:
But, for the purposes of my argument, white male protestants used to be charge. We can’t allow that to happen again. Not as a group, whether it is legal or quasi-legal. Their opinions, in the collective, are on the far right of the Republican Party.
Hang on.
Just plane “being wrong” is wrong.
Some things need to be hated. Despised. Rejected.
And mayby your prejudice is grounded in reality.
Just get it right.
Booman being in the same white male protestant cohort as you all I can say to your comments is: Amen…
Third this, as do many of my similarly white and protestant male friends.
But then we all live in NYC for a reason at this point I suppose…
I’ve got to the point where I pretty much don’t trust any white man over 35.
And I’m a 37 year old white man.
That the average white male can follow this story and conclude that the American domestic soldiery are the real injured party in Ferguson MO abundantly demonstrates that white tribalism is getting far worse, not better.
We can conclude that, far from being dismayed by this nationally televised demonstration that America’s “police” forces have been staggeringly militarized and see the citizenry as the “enemy”, white people view this development with satisfaction and approval. Private militias and political violence ala Hitler’s brownshirts is on the horizon.
This is how fascism happens here…
Wait a minute. You are looking at a poll that says that 37% of whites think that race is a problem, a Mitt Romney factor of 47% think that race is overemphasized, and the rest duck the question, which on this issue is not an “I don’t know” but a “I don’t want to say.”
I don’t see any cross-tabs for religion or gender in this poll report. So your conclusions there are statements about the general zeitgeist in your community and your reading about what’s going on in the rest of the country.
That is a very deceptive question that Pew put up. If I was being bloody literal minded, I would say that race has been overemphasized in America since its founding and the creation of race as the basis of a tri-partite balance of power frontier system that allowed rich planters and merchants to run the colonies and then the country and provided the surplus for industrial capitalism (How can you miss with stolen land, stolen labor, frequent financial panics and generous bankruptcy and corporation law for the rich?) And after the frontier ended, you had concentrated land ownership, a residue of federal land that you could mine and ranch for almost free, and concentration of capital. And a labor force that could be divided by white, immigrant, and black.
White and immigrant labor caught on to this system in the late 1800s and early 1900s and reached tacit agreements to allocate labor unions by ethnicity (sort of like medieval guilds) and exclude blacks. That delighted the capitalists who used blacks as scabs until blacks started wanting to be part of the labor union system.
In 1938, that black-white fusion union almost happened in the textile industry. It was white Southern Democratic governors who saved the day for the textile mill owners through sending in what today is called the National Guard. In South Carolina, it was called the Home Guard and in the small textile town of Honea Path where I grew up twenty years later eight people were murdered by company goons.
The farmer-labor coalition wing of the Democratic Party in South Carolina continued to elect conservative anti-labor Democrats, who ran on an open race-baiting platform. The failure to gain a union biased future attempts at unionization. Part of that failure was the lack of support for organizing by the rest of the labor movement, specifically because of the attempts to have an integrated textile workers union. A lot of those non-Southern unions were made up of Catholics. A lot of the textile and apparel trade unions were made up of Jews. Ethnicity and religion aligned then and it continues to today.
We have a primarily white, primarily Catholic, primarily male Supreme Court that has declare racial issues fixed contrary to accurate observation. We have a primarily white, religiously diverse, mostly male Congress that is paralyzed by its own money games and frat-boy political power maneuvers.
Identity politics is a sham for white people to try to convince other white people that there is not institutionalized caste and class in American society, that what is needed is toleration for a diversity of identities as Americans within our institutional unity. As a post-civil rights era tactic to try to bring about that unity, it can be forgiven in the 1970s. Most all radical and liberal whites of any religion were at that point. And up to maybe 2009, it may be forgiven; after all, that was the narrative that the campaign of Barack Hussein Obama played to.
Ferguson, if not before, has made that tactic false and ineffective.
We are not dealing here, as we thought in the 1960s, with matters of individual prejudice and psychology that a little “love” will cure. We are dealing with large institutions run by institutionally initiated men and women of all races, genders, religions, and all the other identity categories whose primary loyalty is to an institution that divides people by race and class (the polite word for that is demographics) in order to disempower them, disenfranchise them, and strip what little opportunity remains in this society from them–in the slim hopes that they will come out a little bit or a lot in the competition with everyone else. One need only look as the horrifying and humiliating transformation of Captain Ron Johnson of the Missouri Highway Patrol from community organizer to St. Louis County Police Department shill in four days to understand where we are.
The same institutions also shaped the powers that be into their current personalities and attitudes. Once can begin to ask whether a Harvard education and initiation into the higher elite of the legal profession paralyzed Barack Obama. Whether similar intiations in institutions functions to make our national security institutions and law enforcement institutions continuing brutal failures that will tear this society and the world apart. Or turned the Koch brothers into King Midas’s that destroy the world as they turn it into more electronic bits in the net worth.
The problem with us heterosexual, white males of any religion is that we continue to think in individualist terms and that brings us to the point that we think it is still all about us. Replace all the powers that be with Clarence Thomases, Thomas Sowells, and Herman Cains, and you get the same results–likely including other Fergusons. And so on.
The problems that we face are so large that they cannot be solved by one-on-one approaches alone. And we have neglected (or been forced by economic circumstance to neglect) the political, community, and social infrastructure institutions that counter servitude in increase freedom that we are very close to a political, economic, ecological, and cultural cul-de-sac from which last-minute hamster scrambling cannot save us.
Whites, unless they are plantation institutional oppressors or wannabe oppressors, have not ethnic heritage or identity. We are English-Americans, French Huguenot Americans, Scotch-Irish Americans, German-Americans and so on an each of those heritages is very different and the story of it relative to American institutions is very different.
My own heritage inescapably moves through small farms adjacent to plantations in South Carolina, and I have slaveholding ancestors, and oodles of Confederate soldiers, and a dad who had the advantages of the New Deal to rise from a tenant farm to the management class. We were small town Southern middle class in a country that because of World War II was no longer perceptually regionalized and was perceptually all middle class.
There is stuff in that history to be proud of an stuff to be ashamed of and comedies and tragedies. Heritage is what it is. And the national strands of history are the interrelationships between all of these personal heritages in specific times and places.
My New York son-in-law’s heritage includes and Alabama governor, an Alabama plantation owner who in the late stages of the war was a Union spy, and a migrant to DC who illustrated USGS publications. Another son-in-law’s heritage is of an ancestor who was born mid-Atlantic Ocean of an English father and Scottish mother, was a Great Lakes fisherman, then turned farmer. His grandson was a railroad agent, whose transfer caused his family to be Montanans.
Solidarity with your own does not mean what the neo-Confederates trying to nationalize their ideology want it to mean. At bottom, the pre-Civil War South was a Constitutionally permitted network of private work camps (the Russian word is gulag) surrounded by small independent and tenant farmers who functioned as serfs, villeins, and franklins. And a tiny emerging bourgeois class of lawyers, doctors, and merchants. It was medieval by in no ways knightly in the romantic sense of the 1800s prose used to defend it. It was outwardly hospitable and inwardly hostile. And it demeaned women by iconizing them. You might as well have solidarity with the Germany of 1932-1945. Or the Russia of the same period.
No matter how separated from the past you try to be, your views are shaped by that past that you cannot escape. How you incorporate that into your story affects how you relate to the overpowering institutions that are threatening to wreck us.
And there I’ve been the perfect white cracker I warned against.
An anthropologist should explain to me why in a world of freedon in movement, tribal instinct is returning as a nationalist movement. Fear for the unknown, outsiders, possessive, not willing to share fruits of the earth. I often wonder how indigenous peoples took that step to meet, confront another group, or made a choice between peace and war.
Self-Awareness of Self and Death
As humanity progress, humans were endowed with self-awareness and conscious self-reflection. This is necessary to ensure humans are aware of the greater dangers that are a threat to the suvival of the human specie.
Unfortunately, self-awareness also make humans aware of their eventual unavoidable mortality. The awareness of one eventual death invokes the death anxiety and fears at the conscious and subconscious level to avoid death. This death anxiety at the extreme can bring a sense of fear and terror to the individual. For the majority, the death anxiety is programmed to cause unbearable uneasiness, terrific, horrifying painful feelings of fears and anxieties.
It is part of human kind, but it appears we are sliding on a fast track backwards on the “human” part.
I recall a film about tribes in Australian Papua New Guinea, a coordinated attempt to live side by side with another neighboring group. During the documentary, tides turned and a horrible slaughter ensued. A battle of Hutsis and Tutsis in micro-format.
People in the U.S. want to defend their homestead just like the days of the [lawless] Wild West. If we don’t change drastically, it will be the Hatfield and McCoy feuds all over again with 21st century arms and dynamite.
[In 50 BCE the Roman philosopher Lucretius wrote the epic poem On the Nature of Things]
Found in my mailbox, thought provoking … so I like it!
At least you’re not alone!
Signed,
Also-Disgusted Older Protestant White Male Trying to Wake Up As Best He Can
White males founded the country and got a lot right.
A lot of racist, sexist, idiot men were in charge in the first half of the 20th century but others in charge put a lot of progressive ideal into practice, won a world war, expanded civil rights and brought down a corrupt president.
Today I will take a lot of white males before I would take Palin or Bachmann or Cain or Jingle or Whitman or Haley or… Should I go on?
The enemy of progress is fear and ignorance and corruption, not chromosomes or pigment.
I feel you, man. God forbid white male Christians get their hands on the levers of power in this country.
You’re an idiot.