Others
The truth does not set us
free, it typically just makes us uncomfortable.
A prime example of this is the rampant racism in this country. Despite, or more likely because of, electing
a black President, bigotry has not declined.
Tangential to this is the strong uptick in sexism that runs parallel to
racism. This is the uncomfortable truth
that we face. However, rather than just
complain about the phenomenon, I would like to try to examine some root causes
of the behavior: shame, fear, and identity.
The first driver of
prejudice is shame. For generations we
literally enslaved blacks and we oppressed women. Both were treated appallingly by the power
structure and denied recourse to protest that repression. Black men were not counted as people until
after the civil war, and then it was a further 100 years before they truly
earned the right to participate in the democratic process. Women didn't get a universal right to vote
until 1920, although some states adopted suffrage before that.
This is shameful, and any
rational person in 2013 should recognize how appalling that truth is. However, people don't always react the same
way to shame. Some people, and I would
hope the majority, although recent events make me question that assertion, use
the shame as a driver to guarantee that those mistakes are never repeated. Shame has been used throughout history as a
powerful method of discipline in a social structure, and therefore is often
corrective.
Unfortunately, some people
cannot correctly process shame. Instead
they refuse to see their behavior as inappropriate, and actually transfer the
shameful behavior onto the actual victims.
You see this in a number of events recently. President Obama being constantly criticized
as un-American, arrogant, uppity, and a host of other epithets that condemn him
for the audacity of becoming President.
You also see this in the Trayvon Martin case, where the black teen is de
facto guilty, and judged to be in the wrong automatically, even though, if he
did fight back, he was acting under the same principle that allowed George
Zimmerman to legally murder him. And
even further, you see this is the repeated refusal to acknowledge rape as an
actual crime, and the pushing of the idea that women contribute to their own
rapes through their bad behavior.
In all of these cases, shame
is being transferred off of the person who cannot accept it, and it is being
placed on a person or group who in way have any guilt in the matter. This is unfortunately a common behavior
pattern among people who lack the maturity to face a horrible reality. Part of the problem here is that since they
did not personally engage in those behaviors, they feel that they bear no responsibility. Further they feel that assigning them
responsibility for the actions of people in the past, or other people in the
present, is utterly wrong.
This is correct as far as
the individual goes, but there is another layer at play here and that is
societal guilt. Societal guilt is not personalized,
but belongs to a large group of people and is the method of mitigating bad
behavior by a culture. A prime example
would be the Holocaust; only a relatively small percentage of the German
population actively participated in the atrocities, but a wide swath stood by
and watched it happen. In this, they
became complicit, is not directly guilty; and that is what societal guilt is
meant to address.
Even though the Civil War
ended almost 150 years ago, and the Equal Rights movement ostensibly came to an
end 30 years ago, much of the bad behavior is still being perpetrated. But rather than acknowledge it, the guilt is
off-shored and placed on the people who do not deserve the blame. The racist attitudes justify the ill
treatment of minorities and women, by essentially blaming them for their own
condition. In doing this, the racist and
sexist attitudes become fully justified in the mind of the person who holds
them, and removes the burden of shame.
And to address another
elephant in the room, there is a genuine phenomenon of reverse racism and
counter sexism, where minorities and women turn the tables against white
men. However, it should be noted that
this phenomenon is distinctly different from traditional racism and
sexism. These are response behaviors,
basically stemming from the idea, "You hate us, so we will hate you back
just as much." Although it
drastically increases the problem, it is a natural response. However, since is it such a different
imperative from traditional racism, I am going to leave it out of this
discussion.
The second driver is
fear. As I have discussed in previous
blog posts, the fear-anger-hate chain is powerful and ubiquitous. But the root imperative is fear. With racism and sexism, the fear is both
extremely simple and highly convoluted.
The root cause of the fear is the idea of loss of privilege, white men
have essentially run the show in most of the industrialized world for
centuries. Losing that basic power
structure is deeply troubling.
White men have been on top
for so long that we literally do not know how to function in a world where we
are not the ultimate power. You see this
in the repeated meltdowns over President Obama.
He is going out there and acting just like a white man, asking for
motorcades, for marines to hold an umbrella over him, traveling the globe and
talking to world leaders as an equal.
How arrogant of him. To many who
fear the loss of their influence, he is the ultimate harbringer of their doom.
The convoluted part comes in
the realization that ye shall reap as ye have sown. The comedian Patton Oswalt talks about using
a time machine, and how it would be great to use it to visit the past, because
there never has been a time when being a white man hasn't been awesome. However, he cautions against using it to go
to the future, because what we have done is going to catch up to us, and the
future is "gonna suck." We are
going to eventually have to pay for our millennia of bad leadership decisions.
This fear drives both racism
and sexism. They are the dying gasps of
trying to stave off an inevitable future where the white male has, at best,
limited ability to control events, and at worst will become the oppressed
minority. The fear of what might happen
to us makes it imperative that we keep everyone else down, by whatever means
are necessary, and bigotry serves that very well. In fact, through careful application of it,
we can even get some of the oppressed people to buy into the story. Allen West and Phyllis Schaffley are perfect examples
of this.
Add to that the second layer
of fear, the fear that we are not superior.
Much of racism and sexism is supported by the indisputability of the
superiority of the white male. We view
ourselves as smarter, more talented, better leaders, and generally better
people than either minorities or women.
And every time one of the other groups does an excellent job in a
"white role" it undercuts that certainty.
This is also why President
Obama gets described as lazy, ineffectual, and incompetent. And unfortunately, to be honest, it comes
from both sides of the white political spectrum. The issues of complaint about the President
may be different, but underlying both sides is this hidden message that a white
man could do it better. The lionization
of Bill Clinton by both side proves this idea.
I should note here, there has been significant criticism of the
President from the African-American community, but it is fundamentally
different in tone, and often echoes the idea that he isn't doing enough for
their community. However, given the
issues surrounding his Presidency, he would only make it worse and heighten the
racism, if he actually did more. Notice
the furor over his relatively mild
statement regarding Trayvon Martin,
The last piece of the racism
puzzle is identity. For much of human
history, the world has revolved around ideas of us and them. We define ourselves by certain identifiers,
race, religion, and culture. The ideas
of what make us, "us" are very powerful and form the basis of a
racial identity.
The vampire mythic sequence
illustrates this very well, we are both drawn to and repelled by the
other. In the older vampire stories, the
monster wanted to seduce our women and steal them away, which meant that he had
to be destroyed with a stake through the heart.
This symbolized the need to strike at the core of the dangerous other.
In today's world of
"sparkly vampires" we want to mate with the vampire, not to embrace
the other, but to subsume the other. The
ultimate message of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight is that we need to
make the vampire more like us.
This returns to the issue of
bigotry. We can accept a black man if he
is more white than the average white man.
In fact, most of my white friends who have the one black friend
typically describe them as "the whitest black guy in the world." By taking on a "white" identity,
the otherness becomes neutralized and they are save. Even if they are a different skin color, they
do not challenge the predominant white identity of our culture. They become "neutralized."
The same goes for
women. If a woman acts girlish in the
work world, she is basically a threat to the cultural identity of what an
employee should be. If she cries, or
talks about "female problems" or in any way breaks the mold, she
becomes a danger. Basically, to function
effectively in the work world, a woman must be indistinguishable from a man.
However, there is a double
standard for women that does not exist for racial issues. It is OK, and even expected, that a woman
fill a traditional role in the non-work realm.
That is also part of the identity issue, a woman has a specific role to
play in our cultural structure. She can
step outside of that at work, but not outside of work, and that is part of what
is expected. However, a minority can
never step outside of the "white" role, or they instantly become a
threat.
The problem with this arises
from the fact that we are not allowed to talk about these issues, and that
acerbates all of them.
If we were allowed to
address the issues of shame, we could talk openly about the atrocities of
slavery and Jim Crow and try to make some sort of peace with the past. We cannot fix what has gone before, but we
certainly can acknowledge that we have done horrible things and commit to never
repeating them. Germany
Second if we could openly
discuss our fears and our insecurities, we could meet them head on. Most of the time, fear is unfounded, and in
this case, it is particularly so. If we
were allowed to have open discussions that made people realize that another
group's success does not in any way diminish our own, we might come to terms
with our fears. Just because white male
influence is waning does not mean that we have become reviled. However, if we do not address this issue, our
fears will become a self fulfilling prophecy.
Finally, we need to stop
defining our identity by race, sex or creed.
Even defining identity by nationality can lead to problems, but that is
a more natural division. At lease, if
kept in check so that it doesn't devolve into extreme nationalism, it can
become a tool to unify people.
At the end of the day, we
need to realize we are all Americans, whether we are male or female, white
black or brown. Only then can we begin
to move past this mess we have made for ourselves.
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