Tuesday, August 13, 2019

White Dreamtime and Sunlit Playpens -- Identity and Elections




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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