Bloodthirsty Liberal

[I’ve had a draft of this sitting around for months, as some of the dated references will attest to. I’ve considered deleting it, I’ve considered posting it. If it has any relevance at all, it would be today, Inauguration Day.]

Americans of the white persuasion seem to be falling all over themselves to apologize for something—but I’m not sure we know what for, and I’m not sure we know why.

I’d like to address that.

Should we apologize for slavery? Of course. It’s one of the fundamental sins one person or people can commit against another. It is an insult to humanity and to the laws of God, as most of us understand them (and him… or her).

But, like murder, it’s also one of the oldest and most pervasive sins, and I don’t think I need to document that. It has been committed by all races at all times, including by Africans on Africans today. By all means, let us apologize—but our voice ought to be but one in the global chorus, as in that old “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” Coke commercial.

Our country was neither the first nor the last to abolish the “peculiar institution”—but I can’t think of another that went to war with itself over the issue. Blood does not wash out the stain of slavery, but the American Civil War ought to remind us that, alone among a flawed species, we committed one immoral act—war—to rid ourselves of another—slavery—the double negative somehow turning the butchery of that war into something noble and uplifting. Lincoln’s rhetoric at Gettysburg deliberately recalls Jefferson’s in the Declaration, and declares that the unfinished business at the founding of the nation would be completed with this “new birth of freedom”. (More about this in a minute.)

Now, on to race. Are we a racist country? Yes, but see above. Tutsis beat on Hutus (or is it the other way around?), Arabs hate on Persians, Palestinian clans fight among themselves, native American tribes warred like fighting cocks. If slavery is a nearly universal crime, racism is its nearly universal motive. Given the intra-racial violence of those examples, I suppose I should amend that to say that fear and hatred of the other is a universal failing. It occurs to me that this explains why many of us embraced the world at large in our youth, but withdraw into the family—the very institution we shunned when we emerged from adolescence—as we reach middle and old age. With maturity (or with the increased responsibility that usually comes with maturity), we seek security over solidarity, sanctuary over sanctimony. This is only natural, hardly a sin, and felt equally among the minority as it is among the majority. It doesn’t take a village to raise a child, we learn, but a family (extended however broadly we comfortably define it).

Stop being coy, some of you say, address racism in America, don’t sidestep the issue by citing racism in Iceland or Belarus. (I might point out that the reason we don’t hear about racism in Iceland is that there is only one race. Nobody really cares about white Lutheran on white Lutheran crime. As for Belarus, I wouldn’t be surprised, if I were you, to stumble across a few neo-Nazis among the throng.)

Very well: there are racists in America. I will name two that come to mind immediately: David Duke and Jeremiah Wright. Oh yes, Robert Byrd, too—though he’s a recovering racist. It would help if we could all agree on a definition of racism, so that we could conveniently label people as more or less racist, depending on how their views measure up to that definition—but after hearing a social worker acquaintance repeat to me that racial minorities, by definition, cannot be racist, perhaps we’d better not get bogged down in meaning or sense. What appalled me this time was not the absurdity of the claim (which I had already challenged and refuted once before, but which had been drummed into him in social work school), but the confidence with which he stated it to me a second time. Logic is helpless against brainwashing.

The racism I see quite often today is the anti-racism racism, an example of which is the racism of low expectations. While Barack Obama has plenty of traits that make him a worthy candidate for president (a worthy failing candidate, I believe), how did he get there, but two years removed from the Illinois state legislature? I know people who on the very eve of his election to the US Senate declared their wish to vote for him for president some day. Talk about audacity! At least make him buy you dinner first.

But though I seem to have dismissed centuries of slavery in America as but a cosmic blink in eons of servitude; and racism as nought but a common human failing, like covetousness or nail-biting, I can think of one crime—one hundred years in the commission—of which America is indeed guilty: Jim Crow.

What greater insult could there be to the memories of those who died to free the slaves than the years wasted denying these freed men and women their full civil rights? The evasions and outright atrocities of Jim Crow America were an outrage against the founding principles of this country, however short of those principles we may have previously fallen. “Separate but equal” is an oxymoron if mandated by law: the very enforcement of separation implies inequality, an implication spelled out very clearly in practice.

The crimes of Reconstruction and Jim Crow did call out for redress, I think. They were too recent, too dehumanizing to shrug off as historical disappointments beyond which we’ve all evolved. Hence the need for not only the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s, but even some of the affirmative action legislation that followed. If black people had been legislated out of certain positions in society, they ought to be legislated in.

But if that’s the history, where are we now? Civil rights have been guaranteed under law for forty years. Most Americans alive today, I would wager, were born after the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. The armed forces were integrated in 1948, baseball in 1947. O. J. got off in 1995. What are we still arguing about?

We can no more wish prejudice out of the heart of our fellow man or woman (see Obama’s typical white grandmother) than we can abolish left-handedness. Unlike handedness, however, we can legislate against prejudice.

But haven’t we already done so? Even twice over (hate crime laws)? What rights are withheld from blacks, Latins, women, Asians, etc.? I know in practice some or all of the above are denied certain opportunities because of their race or sex—just ask my wife. She doesn’t need to walk in Barack Obama’s shoes, or anyone else’s. Indeed, he should try walking a mile in her heels, wearing nylons.

What we haven’t done yet is live up to the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr. We still judge men by the color of their skin, not the content of their character—as evidenced by the man who takes office today. We don’t know the content of his character—how could we? Most of us haven’t known his name for more than two years, and what little we know is troubling, or should be. His spiritual mentor is a hater and a racist. His early supporters range from crooks to terrorists. The political machine from which he sprang fully grown is as corrupt as any in the country. And he thinks he can lower the ocean levels.

He is the Magic Negro projected nationally. And we have projected on him all our hopes and guilt-racked feelings. But is it any different to look upon him and see a Savior than it is to look at a black man on a dark street and see a stickup man? What does it say about us that we can’t look at a black person and see—oh, I don’t know, a person?