Fear and Self-Loathing

Until America reckons with slavery white supremacists will continue killing people of color and conservative Republicans will continue adopting laws and policies that block the actual history of this country.

As a middle-aged white male afforded opportunity and privilege in a white dominated society, I believe that reckoning is coming, and I believe that all white people know it, too. While some of us, or, as I like to believe, many of us, welcome that moment, other whites fear it.

It is a fear passed on since the end of the war that broke one chain of that abominable institution, a fear that has promulgated the other chains of slavery: Jim Crow, systemic racism, white supremacy and the violent ignorance it breeds.

It is a fear both political parties have exploited to gain power, to divide their opponents and thus the state, and to inflict harm on non-whites. For Democrats, it was in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly those in the South who eventually became Dixiecrats when their party embraced Civil Rights. When voting rights legislation passed in the 1960s, they joined Republican conservatives.

The fear is familiar to everyone—an emotion that swirls deep, a nudging uncomfortable truth that we choose not to address to avoid the great responsibility of knowing, understanding, and acknowledging. It’s like looking in the mirror and realizing you’ve grown older, but not wiser; it’s the first-time hearing your recorded voice and realizing you don’t sound like you think you do.

Whites need to accept that racism exists like a virulent strain in this country, that it did not end with the election of President Barack Obama to the White House. In fact, Obama’s election stoked white fears about losing privilege (in the coming plurality I hope it’s shared among all races and tribes) and having to answer for America’s slave-holding past with reparations.

Indeed, on the eve of Obama’s election in 2008, a Republican conservative white woman of European background with whom I worked was in an absolute panic about soon having to pay reparations even though her family did not come to this country until the early 20th century.

Only someone privileged because she is a member of a racial majority would worry about that.

I’m sure that some whites worry about these things, which is why a concept called critical race theory, about this nation’s systemic racism discussed in some universities, was recently banned in the public schools of some GOP-controlled Southern states, even though it was never taught.

Curiously, those same states have not rushed to ban the teaching of the great replacement theory, a racist conspiracy Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and Republicans espouse.

What these whites fear most about a reckoning is the truth about how this nation was built—with the sweat, toil, ideas and visions of enslaved Black people; with the exploitation of other minorities of color. Their contributions were (and are) significant in making this country great.

The truth they fear is that whites today are the beneficiaries of slavery. They enjoy this benefit by largely by not accepting the truth that this country was born of slave-holding, which became an institution enshrined by the white men who founded it.

If the nation had reckoned with slavery in 1865, by building on the Emancipation Proclamation and re-building the South with equality for all, we might not feel the need to own guns today and thus not have mass shootings and mass deaths. Instead, our politics allowed hate to fester.

Within the core of the conservative movement there is self-loathing expressed through myraid policies and laws that are intended to harm Americans, from allowing more than 400 million weapons into the streets to voter suppression to banning abortion. Democracies are not about codifying grievances.

None of these laws help people or address an individual’s dignity or human rights. Despite that many of them were slave holders, the Founding Fathers crafted the Constitution to address human dignity, not provide a how-to-guide for living in a democracy; they left that up to future generations to determine.

Slavery is the greatest indignity that one human can do to another; forcing women to have children is another indignity. Both are violence against individuals.

Until the reckoning, we will suffer death and indignity.