“Perhaps
life is not the black, unutterably beautiful, mysterious and lonely
thing the creative artist tends to think of it as being; but it is
certainly not
the sunlit
playpen in which so many Americans lose first their
identities
and then their minds.”
– James
Baldwin, Mass Culture and the Creative Artist
Jess Row, author of White
Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination, writes
about Donald Trump and the political transformation that made his
election possible along with the rapid growth in racial resentment
and white nationalism as primary issues among conservative and
right-leaning white Americans.
According to Row, this is
how it all happened. He states ...
“My
own theory has to do with space and the American landscape: how the
growth of suburbs, the ever-creeping sprawl outside American cities,
has managed to keep white and nonwhite Americans physically and
psychically apart, so that many white Americans my age (born in the
1970s) have grown up in what I call white
dreamtime – never having to think seriously
about racism or witness its effects.
“For conservative
white Americans, this meant that President Obama's election, and the
widespread public dialogue about race that followed it, felt like an
existential threat – preparing them to rally around Trump with the
intensity that propelled him to an unlikely victory.”
(Jess Row.
“Why America Still Can't Face Up to Trump's Racism.”
CNN.
August 11, 2019.)
A white man himself, Row
understands we still live in a culture in which white people are very
seldom stopped from doing anything they want to do, and when they are
stopped or challenged, they get extraordinarily upset about it. He
says, “I’m one of them. I inherited this attitude and have
inhabited it all my life.” His realization is honest and
refreshingly revealing.
As part of this “white
inheritance,” Row contends white people are not taught to feel any
loss over the absence of people of color in their lives. He says,
“Isn’t it true, though, that white people are taught, endlessly,
in trainings and seminars and mandated HR videos, about the value of
diversity? They are – at work, where diversity has
demonstrable monetary value, and the lack of it carries serious legal
risks. But the ultimate lesson of the suburbs has always been that
home and work are different worlds … neighborhood
segregation in the US has changed very little since 1980, the end of
what’s usually thought of as the era of 'white flight.'”
To support his theory, Row
cites this statistical analysis of the 2010 US Census, sociologists
John R. Logan and Brian Stults ...
“The average white
person in metropolitan American lives in a neighborhood that is 75%
white. Despite a substantial shift of minorities from cities to
suburbs, these groups have often not gained access to largely white
neighborhoods…a typical African American lives in a neighborhood
that is only 35% white (not much different from 1940) and as much as
45% black. Diversity is experienced very differently in the daily
lives of whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians.”
What strides have been
made when it comes to diversity? Row contends …
“It turns out, not so
surprisingly, that if white children are raised in homogeneous
suburbs, go to homogeneous schools, and are given few opportunities
to encounter people of color other than on TV or the internet, the
boilerplate language of multiculturalism, diversity, 'tolerance,' and
unspecific reverence for Martin Luther King Jr. will have little
effect on them; it will seem, at best, hypothetical. This is
particularly true if they’re constantly reminded—as white
children even in liberal communities often are – that they are the
fortunate ones, that they should be grateful for the good things life
has given them. The underlying message children hear in these
situations is: We’re lucky to be white, and things are perfect just
the way they are.”
(Jess Row.
“A Safe Space for Racism.” The New Republic. November 23, 2016.)
James Baldwin (August 2,
1924 – December 1, 1987) – African-American novelist,
playwright, and activist – once called this suspension the "sunlit
playpen" of white American existence. Baldwin contrasted the
American dream of affluence with the American black's general
“experience of life,” which he saw as a daily grind against “the
force of the world that is out to tell your child he or she has no
right to be alive.”
Baldwin saw blacks thrust
into a world that would deny their humanity, forcing them to
improvise an identity. And, Baldwin believed that if blacks deluded
themselves about it, they would die.
“Thus, you begin to
see; so, you begin to sing and dance; for those responsible for your
captivity require of you a song. You begin the unimaginable horror of
contempt and hatred; then, the horror of self-contempt and
self-hatred. 'What did I do? to be so black, and blue?'”
– James
Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption
Sunlit playpen
and white dreamtime , the metaphors help
us understand the changing culture of American bigotry. They also
help explain why so many whites are not able to grasp that racism has
become a national emergency. Even if whites – conservatives and
liberals alike – are alarmed over Trump's bigoted assaults, most
still hang on to the belief that one day it will all be over, and the
U.S. will have come back to its senses. What a self-serving fantasy –
they think they will just wake up from a “bad dream” without the
deep scars inflicted by Trump and his supporters in their aggressive
white nationalist movement.
Those whites under Trump,
unabashedly usurping their rights of white privilege, do not consider
the direct parallel to the “sunlit playpen” of the past. Many of
them never even lived through the struggles of the civil rights era;
thus, they remain contented in their dream state because their lives
have not gotten measurably worse during Trump's presidency, and they
still believe life is good. Most see racism as a battle concluded
long ago and believe they have no further obligation to advance
equality. In fact, white nationalists preach about the evils of
reverse discrimination and warn of dangerous threats posed by angry
minorities.
“We are the only
people in this country, in this part of the North American
wilderness, who have never denied their ancestors. A very important
matter, for the price of the American ticket – from Russia, from
Italy, from Spain, from England – was to pretend you didn’t know
where you came from; and, furthermore, that you would not pay dues
for where you came from. It’s called 'upward mobility.' No one with
a job in England got on the Mayflower. I’m the only American who
knows he didn’t want to come here.”
– James
Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption
The election of Trump is a
renewal of white identity politics – a foundational assumption that
white people should always and forever be the most privileged and
dominant group in the United States. White
identity refers to the way in which this sense of racial solidarity
influences whites’ view of the political world. Many
whites see efforts to help disadvantaged minorities as allowing
nonwhite groups to “cut in line.”
This sentiment also
appeals to white identifiers who look around a more racially and
ethnically diverse nation and worry that they are no longer seen as
prototypical members of the United States. They feel minorities have
taken their manufacturing jobs and left them behind.
People high on white
identity tend to be older and without college degrees. Women are
actually slightly more likely to identify as white than men. And
white identifiers are not exclusively found among those in the
working class. White identifiers have similar incomes, are no less
likely to be unemployed, and are just as likely to own their own home
as whites who do not have a strong sense of racial identity.
Of course, the election of
the nation's first African-American president, Barack Obama, was
symbolic to white identity politics. That, for many whites,
guaranteed that the United States no longer was a white nation
dominated by the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture. Consider that
Barack Obama won his second term, but not with the white vote. Obama
had the lowest share of white voters of any successful presidential
candidate. Obama won because of a coalition of people of color. In
the minds of many whites, Trump brought back privilege and power –
“Well, the blacks had Obama now we've got a white man to do
something for white people.”
Thus, for identifiers,
racist rhetoric and bigoted actions are justified. Under Trump,
accusations of racism have become politically ineffective. Many
whites often see them as “crying wolf.” Think about the “Go
back to where you came from” controversy. In reaction to Trump’s
racist remarks, Democrats were outraged and called Trump “racist.”
Republicans simply responded by saying, “You just want to make
everything about race. You just want to play the race card.”
Race card? Perhaps
Republicans should listen to a worried nation.
In January, 2019, a CBS
News poll found nearly 6 in 10 Americans saying race relations in the
country are generally bad. A Pew Research Center poll earlier this
year showed 56% of Americans saying Trump has made race relations
worse. Americans gave similarly poor assessments of the president’s
impact on specific racial, ethnic and religious minorities. Nearly 6
in 10 considered Trump’s actions to be bad for Hispanics and
Muslims, and about half said they were bad for African Americans,
according to a February 2018 poll from The Associated Press-NORC
Center for Public Affairs Research. That poll also found that 57% of
Americans considered Trump to be racist.
It is very difficult to
disagree with the assessments of Jess Row and the late James Baldwin.
White and nonwhite Americans remain physically and psychically apart.
Trump has greatly widened the division by using white identity
politics. Coming from a white, privileged playpen himself, Trump has
successfully conjured a new dreamtime that reinforces white privilege
while denouncing so-called “threatening minorities.”
As Jess Row says, “Why,
Trump asks, should we be asked to care about people of color, or
immigrants, when we don’t actually care about them, when we never
see them or interact with them, or share their concerns?”
“None of that has
prevented the past fifty years of right-wing myth-making about race
in America, playing on the fears and suspicions of whites living in
overwhelmingly segregated communities: That black people are innately
predisposed to commit crimes; that uncontrolled waves of immigrants
are destabilizing the economy and taking 'good jobs'; that people of
color in urban centers receive more tax dollars than rural
communities; that people of color are 'takers,' receiving government
benefits they don’t deserve; that 'it’s impossible for a white
man to get a good job anymore.' These are lies that have become, in
many white contexts, a kind of unspeakable common sense, the
definition of what isn’t 'P.C.'”
(Jess Row.
“A Safe Space for Racism.” The New Republic. November 23, 2016.)
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