We white liberals, always opposed to racism, understand that racism is in the national water, in the air, the ether, the soil, and while we are trying to eradicate it, and clean the air and soil of it, and we've had some success, it still infects us. And so we find that we are racists struggling with our racism. It's not intentional racism, but if it's in the polluted air we breathe and the polluted food we eat, we're bound to be a bit diseased by the pollution.
White conservatives, the political ancestors of whom defended cultural racism and 400 years of institutionalized racism with slavery and Jim Crow and segregation, become apoplectic when it anyone even hints at the possibility of racism coursing through their healthy bodies politic. No inoculation needed! Their insistence of complete racial innocence is inoculation enough! Then they point to people of color who've done some wrong to some white folks. "That's racism!" they insist.
The racism I harbor as a white liberal is not something unsophisticated like thinking "n____r" when I'm saying "Black" or "African-American." It's not a matter of hoping our sons and daughters don't marry "one of them." No, my racism involves sometimes forgetting the unearned pergs and privileges that come with being born white in the United States and acting like I earned, all by myself, every break I've ever gotten.
A conservative doesn't typically harbor the unsophisticated racism either. They don't see a rash, so they don't see the insidiousness of the disease. So a conservative's racism involves an unwillingness to acknowledge the unearned pergs and privileges that come with being born white in the United States and an insistence that the real racism now is a indignities exhibited by people of color toward whites. It is an unwillingness to do a damn thing about continuing racism "because, after all, laws have been passed and slavery's been over for more than a century and you better not call ME racist!"
Saturday, November 3, 2012
Republican Revulsion and Obama: How Much is the Opposition to Obama Founded in Simple Racism?
Garry Wills in the Nov. 8, 2012 New York Review of Books:
[U]nder the vague general feelings about Obama—reports to pollsters that he is not quite one of us, perhaps not a citizen, not a Christian—there were radioactive centers too hot for a candidate to handle directly. He could, nonetheless, profit from their broader toxic waves, an unconfessed (sometimes, perhaps, unconscious) force. It was rightly said that a historic boundary had been crossed when a black man was elected president. That breakthrough partly escaped but did not cancel a long sad record of historic American racism. A proof that many were not willing to live with this new level of tolerance is that twice as many conservative Republicans (34 percent) now say that Obama is Muslim as the number who said it when he was elected (16 percent). The number of Republicans in general who say it is 30 percent.
That is not because more evidence has emerged in the last three years, or because the evidence has been more carefully considered. It is because a number of people are digging in their heels even more firmly against where the nation is going. As I say, there is no open racism in the Romney campaign. But it has to be fiercely concentrated on other things (like the economy) to turn its eyes from what sizzles below the surface, and sometimes not very far below.
Dinesh D’Souza’s book Obama’s America became number one on the New York Times best-seller list, and the film based on it has played in over a thousand theaters, yet its chapter on Obama’s mother revives one of the oldest racist stereotypes, that a white woman must be a slut if she has sex with a black man. A “documentary” with that same theme has been mailed to thousands of voters in key states, screened by Tea Party groups and by Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum Council. Guess which man the audience for these, and for hundreds of obscurer tracts, will vote for?
Romney, of course, does not cultivate these voters. He does not have to. He does not denounce them, either. He needs them. He cannot disown a third of his party—and those are only the hard-core Obama revulsionists. Who knows how far the penumbra of softcore revulsionism has spread among the less candid or more cautious harborers of it?
[U]nder the vague general feelings about Obama—reports to pollsters that he is not quite one of us, perhaps not a citizen, not a Christian—there were radioactive centers too hot for a candidate to handle directly. He could, nonetheless, profit from their broader toxic waves, an unconfessed (sometimes, perhaps, unconscious) force. It was rightly said that a historic boundary had been crossed when a black man was elected president. That breakthrough partly escaped but did not cancel a long sad record of historic American racism. A proof that many were not willing to live with this new level of tolerance is that twice as many conservative Republicans (34 percent) now say that Obama is Muslim as the number who said it when he was elected (16 percent). The number of Republicans in general who say it is 30 percent.
That is not because more evidence has emerged in the last three years, or because the evidence has been more carefully considered. It is because a number of people are digging in their heels even more firmly against where the nation is going. As I say, there is no open racism in the Romney campaign. But it has to be fiercely concentrated on other things (like the economy) to turn its eyes from what sizzles below the surface, and sometimes not very far below.
Dinesh D’Souza’s book Obama’s America became number one on the New York Times best-seller list, and the film based on it has played in over a thousand theaters, yet its chapter on Obama’s mother revives one of the oldest racist stereotypes, that a white woman must be a slut if she has sex with a black man. A “documentary” with that same theme has been mailed to thousands of voters in key states, screened by Tea Party groups and by Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum Council. Guess which man the audience for these, and for hundreds of obscurer tracts, will vote for?
Romney, of course, does not cultivate these voters. He does not have to. He does not denounce them, either. He needs them. He cannot disown a third of his party—and those are only the hard-core Obama revulsionists. Who knows how far the penumbra of softcore revulsionism has spread among the less candid or more cautious harborers of it?
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