My White Problem -- And Ours

New tales of the not so new racist South.


My White Problem -- And Ours
By Kendall Clark


   1.
   
   A condition of [1]antiracist work is a kind of attunement, an ear
   tuned to the pitch of racism, modulated such that one registers even
   the low, subtle tones of racial oppression. But sensitivity has its
   costs. The end of antiracist work is the end of racial oppression,
   an end that's worth any good faith mishearing. Better to be overly
   sensitive to race than a dullard.
   
   White Americans, particularly men, who would do antiracist work must
   acquire such attunement through moral education, through tutelage.
   Only rarely -- because of our socialization, itself a product and
   reinforcement of White privilege -- do we possess the ear we need,
   and then only by overcoming not only our lack of it, but our native,
   hostile clumsiness to it. Most of us have to earn it, through
   careful and attentive listening, chiefly to people of color, to
   women, to those for whom such an attunement is a skill of survival,
   imbibed with mother's milk. To gain the attunement we need, White
   men must destroy old attachments and form new ones. Only by our
   genuine love for the oppressed other may we dissolve our native
   attachments (to our privilege, to our arrogation, to our power) and
   form new attachments of justice and care and concern.
   
   One must be attuned before one may acquire the quality of opposition
   that comes from being antiracist rather than just acting that way at
   times. Like all social fitnesses attunement to racism is a matter of
   degree: sharpened by use, dulled by quiescence. One of my projects
   is antiracist work. I have need of a finely pitched ear.
   
   2.
   
   And so, during a recent car trip from Dallas to Atlanta and back, on
   [2]interstates 10 and 20, to the capital of the New South through
   the heart of the Old, I witnessed the following scenes.
   
   In Lafayette, LA, just off the 10, at [3]Mulate's, a classic
   Arcadian restaurant, a group of about 25 White men and women were
   drinking beer around the bar, watching a football game on tv, LSU
   and Georgia Tech. At one point, a lull in the ambient noise, I heard
   a male voice use the n-word to describe one of the players.
   
   During the long drive across Alabama, where there are few radio
   stations other than C&W (or fundamentalist Christian), I heard two
   songs repeatedly: Hank Williams Jr.'s [4]"If the South Woulda Won"
   and Alabama's "When It All Goes South." Each is little more than a
   tribute to [5]neoconfederates -- and their supporters, among whom,
   in the Congress alone, are Phil Gramm (R-TX), Trent Lott (R-MS),
   Thad Cochran (R-MS), Jesse Helms (R-NC), Strom Thurmond (R-SC), Dick
   Armey (R-TX), Lindsey Graham (R-SC); and [6]George W. Bush's
   Attorney General nominee, John Ashcroft -- who propagandize the
   antebellum South and [7]advocate a return to (at least) the [8]legal
   segregation of the Jim Crow era.
   
   (Ashcroft, whose views are confused and debased, goes so far as to
   claim that secession and civil war in service of slavery's
   perpetuation are honorable, not perverse ends:
   
     Your magazine also helps set the record straight. You've got a
     heritage of doing that, of defending Southern Patriots like Lee,
     Jackson, and Davis. Traditionalists must do more. I've got to do
     more. We've all got to stand up and speak in this respect, or
     else we'll be taught that these people were giving their lives,
     subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some
     perverted agenda ([9]Southern Partisan; emphasis added).
     
   Extolling the virtues of the Confederacy, with or without criticism
   of slavery or Jim Crow segregation, is a remarkable enactment of
   White privilege, especially from a Senator and future US Attorney
   General. I wonder if Ashcroft's pledge to "do more" to defend
   "Southern Patriots like Lee, Jackson, and Davis" will include doing
   less to uphold the law, including civil rights. The scornful
   neglect of labor laws by the Regan administration during the 1980s
   offers a chilling precedent.)
   
   In Atlanta (a city about which W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, in The Souls of
   Black Folks in 1903, that it "must not lead the South to dream of
   material prosperity as the touchstone of all success" -- save for
   MLK, it seems to have done little since), in an IHOP, within earshot
   of several black folk, a White male, a Protestant minister, loudly
   asked, "is there anything more ridiculous than a black nativity
   scene?" The clearly absurd implication being that White nativity
   scenes are less ridiculous (because, one presumes, less historically
   anachronistic -- a complete falsehood) than black ones.
   
   In Atlanta, at a holiday party in a private home, a White man, an
   on-call, out-of-uniform Georgia police officer remarked -- about the
   same football game playing at Mulate's a few days before -- that
   "they" must have played so poorly because "they'd eaten a lot of
   fried chicken before the game and had greasy fingers." A remark
   accepted without comment (or nervous laughter or dissent or dispute)
   by the White men to whom it was passed.
   
   In Atlanta, in a private home, during a vigorous conversation about
   drugs and decriminalization, a White man characterized the American
   drug problem as largely a matter of black crack users. He did so
   overtly and by using coded language about an Atlanta public housing
   project. He later denied that anything he said or thought about
   drugs had anything to do with race.
   
   In Mississippi, along state highway 49 between Jackson and Biloxi, I
   stopped at a souvenir stand to buy a few Southern delicacies: chow
   chow, blackeyed pea relish, boiled peanuts. In the back I saw a
   shelf of racist statuary: dozens of (18" to 24" high) Aunt Jemima,
   Stepin' Fetchit, and jazz musician figures with features horribly
   distorted to match White supremacist representations of black folk
   -- in effect, I'd stumbled unwittingly into a roadside gift shop of
   the Klu Klux Klan.
   
   3.
   
   One tactic of oppression is the implicit denial of oppression by
   making its infrastructure as invisible as possible. The longer race
   or gender oppression can be plausibly denied or shielded or masked,
   the better for the oppressers. Not only is it beneficial to deny the
   facts of oppression, it's beneficial to deny their intended results,
   the privileges such oppression confers, and the mechanisms by which
   such oppression is created, maintained, extended. The denial of
   White privilege, like the denial of racism itself, serves the
   interests of those who enjoy it.
   
   It should not be surprising, then, that so many White people are so
   confused about what racism is; such confusion reinforces the status
   quo and sets the bar of justice and social change far too low. White
   people want to and do claim that racism is (only the) overt
   expression of racial bigotry or prejudice, and that such overt
   expression is socially impermissible. And so it is in situations and
   contexts, normally, where black people are really present because
   they have some social or institutional power -- but these are rare
   in the South, as I rediscovered.
   
   This patterned White response -- so remarkably uniform as to merit
   analysis -- obfuscates in two ways: first, by trying to make racist
   social structures and institutions invisible by directing critical
   attention away from them and onto the failings of individuals;
   second, by false claiming bigotry and prejudice to be unutterable
   and unuttered.
   
   A common thread running through these Southern vignettes is the
   maintenance or construction of White company. In each the context or
   institutional setting is White-dominated or controlled. Most White
   people would not be so brazen in the real presence of black folks --
   a fact that makes the corporate pollution of public airwaves by
   corporate-backed neoconfederate propagandists all the more dismaying
   -- but what can be done? Given history and White privilege and power
   as it's presently constituted (both in the South and elsewhere) one
   cannot fault black folks for staying away when possible. Every
   all-White assemblage or gathering isn't racist per se, of course;
   but they all seem vulnerable to expressions of racial bigotry,
   expressions which are both enactments and reinforcements of White
   privilege. And White company is certainly more likely to be the
   scene White privilege displays than mixed company. What can
   antiracist Whites do? Perhaps especially for White men -- who're
   often less physically vulnerable than women to racist White men --
   who would do the work of antiracism, we must publicly oppose, in
   clear and strong terms, racial bigotry, prejudice, and displays of
   White privilege, even when subtle or dim. As I found in the not so
   new New South, to my dismay and deflation, one doesn't have to look
   hard or long to find opportunities.
   
   What of presumptions and burdens of proof? The task of validating a
   claim belongs prima facie to the one who makes it. And so it is with
   marking the words or actions of others as antiracist. The coarse,
   vulgar pattern of opposition to marking racism is to deny its value
   in all but the most obvious or extreme cases. Charges of racism, so
   the habituated response goes, are so stigmatizing (really?) that
   making them effectively forecloses all possibility of rational
   discourse. The risk, they claim implicitly, of mismarking racism far
   outweighs the gains of marking it properly. That's exactly
   backwards. The costs of its perpetuation far outweigh the price of
   mismarking it. The presumption, that most black or White folk who
   make a claim of racism are either mistaken or insincere, itself
   makes or implies a kind of claim, which must be validated, if it can
   be, by those who make it. I happily accept the burden to validate my
   claims. I do not accept as valid the implied claim that most
   markings of racism are false or made in bad faith, especially since
   those who habitually make this claim never, at least in my
   experience, attempt to validate it.
   
   Attunement is a condition of antiracist work. One of its substantive
   tasks, at least for White people, is public opposition to White
   expressions of racial bigotry and prejudice, which are ultimately
   signs and enactments of White privilege. Recognizing those signs and
   enactments without going on to oppose them is little more than
   empty, private gesture.

References

   1. http://www.igc.org/igc/gateway/arnindex.html
   2. http://monkeyfist.com/articles/664
   3. http://www.mulates.com/
   4. http://www.deja.com/getdoc.xp?AN=574533687&fmt=text
   5. http://www.templeofdemocracy.com/
   6. http://www.templeofdemocracy.com/Ashcroft.htm
   7. http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,369585,00.html
   8. http://www.ushmm.org/olympics/zcc036a.htm
   9. http://www.templeofdemocracy.com/SouthernPartisanIndex1999.htm#Ashcroft


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Posted on Monkeyfist at http://monkeyfist.com/articles/734