Real Americans are White

In my last post, I talked about Robert Wuthnow's analysis of the American mythos of identity and our troubling inability to speak the whole truth about who we are, what we value, and how Americans operate. A good example of this syndrome is the active part that race is playing in the presidential contest and the bizarre ways that our collectively unacknowledged racism is deforming and distorting the dialogue, in the press, at the podium,and between ordinary people.

The denial that race is an issue for voters reached an absurd height in August, when McCain accused Obama of "playing the race card" because Obama told voters that "he doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills." Absurd because Obama would obviously be the first black president, which is not inconsequential in a country that turned a blind eye to lynching less than fifty years ago. Absurd because being black has rarely, if ever, been an advantage in this country. And absurd because the Obama campaign engaged with McCain's incoherent accusation, and denied any attempt to make race an issue.

Yes, we all just one big happy family here in the United States.

In "This is Your Nation on White Privilege," Tim Wise provides examples of the many ways that racism colors the rhetoric that surrounds the Obama/Biden and McCain/Palin tickets. For example, Wise writes:

"White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen, like Bristol Palin, and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because 'every family has challenges,' even as black and Latino families with similar 'challenges' are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay."

"White privilege is being able to go to a prestigious prep school, then to Yale and then Harvard Business school, and yet, still be seen as just an average guy (George W. Bush) while being black, going to a prestigious prep school, then Occidental College, then Columbia, and then to Harvard Law, makes you 'uppity,' and a snob who probably looks down on regular folks."

"White privilege is being able to sing a song about bombing Iran and still be viewed as a sober and rational statesman, with the maturity to be president, while being black and suggesting that the U.S. should speak
with other nations, even when we have disagreements with them, makes you 'dangerously naive and immature.'"

Wise concludes that "White privilege is, in short, the problem."

I say yes, and no. White privilege, the flipside of a disowned racism, is a huge problem. But if there is one problem, THE problem, it is our lack of mythological consciousness, which would foster complexity and facilitate greater awareness of what we repress and deny.

View the Tim Wise post in its entirety.