The piece is, as usual, insightful, well-reasoned, and sharply written. And it made me pause for a moment to realize that I don't really have a clue which aspects of my life are made possible entirely by what sociology departments used to call "white privilege". That's the problem with privilege; you get to take it for granted. It's hard enough to cope with age and injury, the way those things disrupt what I thought was just the way the world worked and always would. It's hard enough to cope with the changes in my profession, and the devaluation of some of my best skills. I hadn't sat down lately and thought about what happens when the issue isn't, "how fair am I to ethnic minorities?" but, "how fairly can I be expected to be treated when I am the ethnic minority?"
My one experience in this role, being among the 10% of white kids bused into the city's one all-black elementary school in fifth grade, in 1968, to meet integration quotas, was not pleasant: it included being beaten up on the playground, having my lunchbox stolen, being mocked for my facial asymmetry, and once getting punched into my desk in math class by a classmate who thought I was laughing at him.
It also included having to go back to school after Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, dressed irremediably in my white skin. I wished the weather would stay cold so I could keep wearing mittens and a hat, to cover my face and hands and hair, and maybe not be a target from quite so far away. It gave me the revelation that this was probably something like what my black classmates felt every time they left their neighborhood and set foot in the rest of the city; 15 years later, it allowed me to respect the way my husband went on alert in some parts of Boston. In situations with the potential for racism to turn violent, you are the race you look like from 50 feet away.
One inherent benefit of fairness as a system is that it offers the hope of decent treatment when you are not the one in power. Even if you lack empathy, at some point self-interest ought to suggest at least considering what happens when the table is turned. But I guess if you have enough privilege to draw on, you can pretend there isn't even a table. Anyway, Brit, Rush, Newt, Bill, et al should calm down. They'll be dead before they have to give up very much.
But Rich's essay also included an historical reference that grabbed me.
"The escalating white fear of newly empowered ethnic groups and blacks is a naked replay of more than a century ago, when large waves of immigration and the northern migration of emancipated blacks, coupled with a tumultuous modernization of the American work force, unleashed a similar storm of racial and nativist panic."When I was in pop culture school I did a bunch of research on the way panics about drug abuse coincided with nativist and racist panics. The temperance movement was, to some extent, a reaction to wine-drinking Southern European immigration; anti-Chinese and anti-black sentiments were exploited in support of the Harrison Act; later rounds of anti-drug legislation parallel waves of black American relocation to Northern cities. There's some kind of panic that connects drug use with demographic change; and the measures introduced in an attempt to control drug use and trafficking also get used to control non-majority populations. It is not entirely a coincidence that the US currently has the highest incarceration rate and largest prison population in the world, nor that our prison population quadrupled since the 1980s as a result of mandatory sentencing enacted as part of the "war on drugs"; nor, finally, that some 70 percent of those imprisoned are "non-white"--including 10% of black males in the United States between the ages of 25 and 29.
So I'm thinking there's one thing that Rich got wrong. His conclusion was this:
The one lesson that everyone took away from the latest “national conversation about race” is the same one we’ve taken away from every other “national conversation” in the past couple of years. America has not transcended race. America is not postracial. So we can all say that again. But it must also be said that we’re just at the start of what may be a 30-year struggle. Beer won’t cool the fury of those who can’t accept the reality that America’s racial profile will no longer reflect their own.But it looks like a certain segment of the white establishment has been working on its response for 30 years already. And maybe it's time conclude that this is not the path that will keep us safe on the playground in 2042.
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