2. Being white in America
It means apologizing as amendment; pat-on-the-back liberalism at best; knowing that, no matter how bad things get, at least you’re white. Almost no white person has the slightest idea of what it has meant to be black in America. White people constructed a concentration camp in which, with precious little change, black people have been forced to live for almost 400 years. The history we teach and believe—the ”truths” we believe to be self-evident—takes no account of this phenomena. I imagine what it would be like to be a Jewish student in a class on Germany from 1933-1945 in which no reference to the Holocaust was ever made. That is what we are, rather shamelessly, teaching our middle and high school students. Maybe a few doors open in February. Maybe.
“Nigger” is a white construction. Black men (especially) have taken the word and used it against the white purpose, not to sanitize the word but to make it an aggressive assertion, almost a negation of what the word was originally meant to signify—the African-American as a not-human being. Perhaps this is an irony born out of a sense of necessity: an obscenity that, when appropriated, becomes a word of defiance. Same as calling oneself a bad motherfucker. But that does not make the word less horrible or, in all probability, more important to disappear. It is the word of expressing social inequality. For the white person, a dehumanizing insult. For the African-American, an insult hurled back at the oppressor. A word that needs to disappear and not be replaced.
To accord a black person social equality, white people must cut them the same slack, make the same allowances, accept the same kinds of faults, be just as understanding as they would be for any white person. Treat all people as people, while at the same time acknowledging that it will be necessary to understand that trust takes time and that learning NOT to fear or hate requires the kind of openness and honesty that few people, let alone cultures, possess.
Does this actually ever happen? To treat a black man as a man and a black woman as a woman.: can any white person in America say they have done this consistently? A racist society is one which assigns sub-human status to a racial group that has been excluded from the power structure. America, as a living lie fervently believed, is a racist society.
At last, white people need to acknowledge and include the people best able to discern the needs of African-Americans: African-Americans themselves. White power structures legislate dribs and drabs to black communities, as if they could even define what or where these were. It seems that black people are never allowed to participate in the solution to historical issues with which they have been confronted. It’s not just a question of money or power sharing. The issue is that white people need to believe what they are told and let the black community have the means to solve the problems with which they are confronted. Certainly no white community would acquiesce in solutions that took no cognizance of their input into their needs.
But white people will not give up their power. White makes right; white knows best. Thus does our own government make hypocrites of the best of us. Our government is a white power government. Obama’s presidency, whatever his aspirations might have included, was nothing more than one more African-American political figure compromising his credibility in the black community by being managed by the minority white power cartel. He’s not to blame, except insofar as he knew this was what was going to happen and didn’t ‘fess up to it. Perhaps he hoped for better, and I can’t fault him for this. But neither can I fault the African-American voting public for not being enthused by voting for a candidate who would only continue the glacial progress of the past.