One advantage of being white, male, straight, and from Protestant stock, is that I don’t have any psychological or other need to belong to any group. While one of my grandparents was Italian, most of my lineage is German or English. You don’t hear people talk too much about English- or German-Americans, at least not since our wars with those nations ended some time ago.
I hear other people talk about WASPs, usually in either an envious or a condescending way, or a mixture of both. But I don’t run in the kinds of circles where WASPs talk about being WASPs. The luxury of being a WASP is that your “identity” isn’t really something you need to think about.
And, the passing of Julian Bond gives me another opportunity to rejoice that I don’t “belong” to this WASP group or have any responsibility for what they do.
Bond was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 1965, but his white colleagues in the House refused to let him take his seat because of his opposition to the Vietnam War. A year later, the Supreme Court accused the Legislature of violating his freedom of speech and ordered it to seat him.
Because if I did feel some kind of special affinity for this ethnic group and derive some sense of self-worth from it, I’d have a problem with them being the Bill Kristol of ethnic groups, always wrong, always behind the times, always kicking and screaming against even the most common sense baby steps towards more fairness and basic decency.
I don’t know whether it angers or amuses me more when I hear WASPs complain that every other ethnic group has a parade or special month to discuss their history or a department at the state university dedicated to studying their history.
It amuses me because it’s so blind about the advantages of being the dominant group, as if we’d rather have a parade than decide who gets to join our country clubs and law firms, or who gets to run the country.
It angers me because perhaps I’m just enough of a WASP to be embarrassed by other WASPs. I mean, it’s no surprise that I am not happy with white supremacists, even the peculiar ones who aren’t WASPs and have no memory of suffering religious, housing, or employment discrimination.
But the clowns in the Georgia House of Representatives who wouldn’t seat Julian Bond are supposed to be my ethic brothers, and I just find that ludicrous. I’d rather take up with barnyard animals than join in their race consciousness.
These folks will call me self-hating, which is really a form of projection on their part. I’d have to feel more a part of this group to actually feel bad about myself for being a member. You can pick virtually any political issue under the Sun, and WASPs (as a group) vote against what I believe is sane, just, or decent. They voted for Palin and they voted for Romney and they’ll probably vote for whatever moral reprobate the GOP coughs up at their Cleveland convention next year.
Letting them control things gives us things like the Vietnam and Iraq wars. I’m really not interested in more of that.
So, for whatever reason, I wind up cherishing the career and accomplishments of Julian Bond and shaking my head in disgust at the legacy of his political opponents who are supposed to be part of my tribe.
And, of course, I know I am being uncharitable to WASPs here, and I don’t want to denigrate an entire ethnic group for all the obvious reasons. It’s just that when you are discriminated against because of your skin hue or religion or ethnicity or sexual orientation, or gender, you don’t have a choice but to acknowledge that you’re part of a group. Unless I land in prison, I will never be forced to join in this group of mine, and I never will. That’s a luxury, and I don’t need a parade or a White History Month to tell me it’s a luxury.
It was 99% white male history in my time. Mostly white male and wars glorifying the decimation of other men. (WASP but religion wasn’t mentioned; easier to simply excise those that weren’t Protestant from the textbooks.) Oh sure, Betsy Ross made it for sewing a freaking flag (that may or may not be true) and the eminent George Washington Carver merited a couple of sentences. But that was about it.
It was all a dreadful bore for white girls and probably even worse for non-white girls and boys. But my how those white men howled when others demanded the rightful place of women and POC in history lessons. And then they wonder why we think they’re assholes.
Every “group” discriminates against every other “group.” I know how it infuriates many of you here to praise the Pauls, but I don’t care. Ron Paul has said things that…if only it was a human possibility given our overall level of evolution…would stop all racial discrimination in its tracks.
Scientifically speaking, we are all “groups.” We are all groupings of genetic materials from far-flung corners of the globe…and perhaps even not of this earth. Booman is “English, German and Italian?” That’s just what living memory says he is. Who knows what couplings occurred in the previous history of mankind to produce Booman? No one but the most advanced genetic researchers, and they are probably missing a clue or two or three themselves.
Discriminate against say Julian Bond?
Hmmmm…
He’s beginning to look a lot like Wyatt Earp to me.
Just sayin’…
“Race” is a convenient construct for domination. Nothing more, nothing less. Not really. It results in more racism as the dominated seek to themselves dominate. ‘Round and ’round we go; where we stop nobody knows.
Let’s get off of this idiot merry-go-round.
It ain’t so merry anymore.
Later…
AG
Look, you keep trotting out that Ron Paul quote, I suppose because you think it is admirable or enlightened or something.
Standing alone, it makes some sense.
But you are just deliberately myopic on this topic and it needs to stop.
Standing alone, it makes no sense to me. Since when is every man (yes, man b/c women don’t count in the great libertarian paradise) an island unto himself? But not so completely autonomous that he doesn’t also require a government to protect him from other men that would interfere with his industry.
All a bunch of poppycock hogwash.
As the Pauls should know, since they revere it so much, the Constitution begins with these words:
I know how it infuriates many of you here to praise the Pauls, but I don’t care.
Actually it doesn’t infuriate me, it just makes me wish you would at least investigate the possibility of acquiring some basic critical thinking skills. There is a lot going on in that passage, but if I really break it down, the first thing that stands out is how thoroughly vague it is. Who exactly are the ‘the advocates of so-called “diversity”‘ that he talks about? Who exactly is obsessed with racial group identity?
And of course you only have to read the Constitution to know that this is ahistorical garbage:
Liberty means having a limited, constitutional government devoted to the protection of individual rights rather than group claims.
Hell, you don’t even have to read the Constitution, just the first freaking word: “We.”
And this:
Liberty means free-market capitalism, which rewards individual achievement and competence, not skin color, gender, or ethnicity.
Seriously? When did this ever happen? I’m pretty sure Ron Paul thinks we’ve lived under socialist tyranny at least since the dark and dismal year of 1913, which saw the passage of both the 16th Amendment and the Federal Reserve act, so it’s been at least a hundred years. And yet for whatever strange reason, back when free-market capitalism was really free, it overwhelmingly rewarded the individual achievement and competence of white men. In fact, it still does, to a disproportionate degree. Which leaves us with two possibilities:
I could go on, but of course you’ll just type some variation of WTFU at me.
Bet on it.
(Actually, could we see the Chicken of Doom? I love the Chicken of Doom.)
Doesn’t even get the basics of corporate charters at the founding of this country.
Specifically:
Various state regulations:
These “free market” capitalist freaks have only absorbed corporate (wealthy white man rules) propaganda. Completely unaware of their historical ignorance as they prattle on with their bs.
UTFW.
AG
“every group discriminates against every other group”? nonsense. why read further? there is neither historical, sociological nor anthropological evidence for that statement.
That is “nonsense.”
On basic experience and on the basis of all of human history. Majorities…those with at the very least least major military power and more often than not those with numerical majorities within a a given political or cultural/social system…always and forever have “discriminated” against those who lack that majority and or power.
The history of mankind, writ plain.
Where you been?
WTFU.
AG
majorities? and who did they discriminate against.? how do you line up your generalization with 11th and 12th century France?, just to take an interesting example. or
anyway, it’s pointless to debate with you since you consider your own experience as normative and extrapolate from it (and maybe a reading of Lord of the Flies) to draw conclusions instead of say, studying the details and diversity of history.
Sixty years ago Will Herberg wrote Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology. It represented the elite consensus that Jews were white and dissected the new post-World War II religious toleration. Another group ushered into whiteness, whether they liked it or not.
To your list of labels, I add Southern, having been raised in a deliberately and legally structured segregated and discriminatory society. My ancestors were among the first to be classified as “white” by the state and by familiarity become the unstated default white culture. Nothing describes this process of the 1600s and 1700s better than the histories of the construction of the American frontier in the southeast. After all, the West and the attitudes that accompanied it were fundamentally offshoots of the rapid settlement of the southeast in order to extend slave plantations as fast as possible and then with the end of slavery in 1865, opportunity seems to grow in ranching on formerly or current public land opened and promoted by the subsidized railroads. Many of the cultural and institutional forms of the South were brought west with former Confederate soldiers without prospects in the changed South. The logic of the construction of the frontier that stole land, stole labor, and created capital through successive bankruptcy are the basis of the US’s incredible wealth and also its concentration. And that logic as Alan Gallay recounts in The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717 involved the legal establishment of socio-economic classes based on skin color and ethnicity. The most lasting of those categorizations of classes were “Indian” (no matter what town or ethnicity or friend/foe), “negro” (the Portuguese/Spanish word “black” that was the slaver’s term and advertisement), and by default “white” (not “flesh” or “beige” or “pink”). So around the time my ancestors arrived in Virginia as indentured servant or transported criminals or debtors, or minor free settlers, they would be told by the colony’s authorities or their betters that they were “white” and that all laws that applied to “white” people applied to them. They would also be told the colony’s position on relgious dissent, and other local idiosyncracies.
White culture is most threatened and white folks are most anxious when the default and unstated nature of their cultural dominance is questioned. That certainly was the case in the early 1960s and the anxiety over the cross-over appeal of rock and roll, but it is not the first documented time. It is no coincidence that the height of the interwar KKK was also the time in which jazz, which accompanied (ironically) prohibition, was highly popular among white elites. Or that there was a movement called in retrospect the Harlem Renaissance or that there were a slew of “black Wall Street” commercial sections of major and minor cities.
Because of its exploitative role (militia and posses) in frontier and plantation society, there is no non-malevolent self-conscious white culture. And that most white-appearing people who are non-malevolent come up with a blank when asked their ethnicity or seek a retreat in the quaint anthropological term “Caucasian”. Nor is it surprising that whiteness academics seek refuge in the term “Western Civilization”, being very protective that the Egyptians were white.
The difficulty most Americans have in categories is the fact that we all are pretty much mongrels of one combination or the other; that is what that tidy term Caucasian is meant to hide. That any pretension to full-blood anything is false. Native Americans are coming to the same conclusion; the emphasis on pure or at least some precise fraction of kinship to an indigenous American might not serve the ethnic and cultural survival of their cultures or of the number of people who look like them. Anyway, the issue is the remaining privilege of cultural survival of a way of life and land ownership relative to the laws of the states and the United States.
It is interesting that the categories of what the bigots are defending keep changing. The conceit of the post-Reconstruction era, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, with all its Dark Age folderol mythology and heroic narrative, has now become “real Americans”.
Deray McKesson of #blacklivesmatter says that the notion of “white” identity has always in history been connected to plunder and that it still is.
Nonetheless, those of us who enjoy the benefits of the financial infrastructure that plunder has provided us, in contrast to the plundered, need to understand that that is the white privilege being referred to. Those great universities founded on the capital from white plantation owners and benefiting from the support of white bigots who thought that equal education would never apply within their subsidized walls have benefited from white privilege. Those non-white students who have benefitted from those same institutions might be considered to have been given a small fraction of the reparations due them–some minor return of the plunder.
Julian Bond was one of those remarkable young men who were of college age at the beginning of the 1960s and felt the South and the country changing just enough to risk themselves. Bond was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives at age 25. In 1965, he had already decided that the war in Vietnam was a mistake.
John Lewis was another one of those young men. It is a shame that their relationship was sullied by a very personal campaign for the same Congressional seat.
Julian Bond will be missed. He and his colleagues in the 1960s civil rights movement provided the witness that allowed me to become conscious of white privilege and the discrimination though the due of non-whites. Struggling with the 20 years of acculturation in a segregated society has been one of the main tasks of the past 50 years.
I was not hatched from the shell absent of acculturation to “white”ness.
Rather than eulogize Julian Bond for his many many accomplishments, I’ll alway remember him most clearly for this one thing:
The really funny Beltway-style talk show bit he did on Saturday Night Live with Garret Morris about light-skinned blacks (Bond) being smarter than dark-skinned blacks (Morris).
I always respect people who can make fun of themselves. It’s a sign of good character.
The 37 year old Julian Bond:
Jet – May 5, 1977
In the 1990s his usual speaking fee was $3,000.
I used to hang out w/a group of NYU theater students on the Lower East Side…Garrett among them, and several others who went on to fame and fortune including Danny DeVito…in the late ’60s/early ’70s. Good folks, all. I played in the Saturday Night Live band as a sub a few times as well. Good times, they were. Freedom of thought was cherished rather than spat upon as so many…left, right, here and there (and I am including many on this website)…seem to do when someone crosses the rigid boundaries that the the PermaGov Thought Police have so throughly set up to keep the PermaFix in place.
Booman writes:
He links his “evidence” of Paul’s racism to this site: Addicting Info.
In all of my many forays into the morass of PermaGov-involved disinfo, about the only thing that I have found to keep me balanced on the side of rationality and truth is this:
If something has been said…especially repeatedly…by a given person in the national news (and if it has some bearing on his or her own success in that system) then that’s what I am going to run with. Any asshole with a few thousand dollars and maybe some connections with opposing forces can put up any goddamned thing that they want about how someone told someone else that a third person is very, very bad news.
Proof? Often lacking. Usually lacking, to be more precise. Booman is already tepidly praising the entry of our current Vice-President (formerly Senator) from MBNA into the electoral race just as he equally tepidly praised the HRC boondoggle that is apparently coming apart no matter how many millions of dollars are raised in its defense. And he is telling me that my posting of that Ron Paul quote “needs to stop!!!???”
Please.
Mediatrician, heal thyself.
AG
I can give you sources until I find one you respect or will listen to. It’s not, or should not be, controversial at all at this point.
Your “sources” suck.
They are totally partisan.
As are you,
AG
Arthur’s attempts to employ Ron Paul’s anti-racism statement as a shield are severely undermined by this source, one we can presume he trusts deeply:
http://www.ronpaul.com/on-the-issues/civil-rights-act/
“On July 3, 2004, Ron Paul was the only Congressman to vote against a bill hailing the 40th anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.”
Gilroy’s more specific statements here have made the same mistake that Ron Paul makes here:
“The Civil Rights Act of 1964 not only violated the Constitution and reduced individual liberty; it also failed to achieve its stated goals of promoting racial harmony and a color-blind society.”
There goals are not stated in the Act. The CRA was meant to protect Americans from unconstitutional restrictions of rights that were often denied them by people who put into action racist views that Ron and Rand Paul claim to abhor. In this, it contemplates a continual need to respond to those who wish to put their views of racial disharmony into practice against the rights of others. It has not been universally successful in enforcing its protections, but it has been quite successful.
Paul’s view is similar to that stated by Sen. Goldwater in 1964, “You can’t legislate morality.” This is self-evidently a preposterous position. Nearly all criminal laws set in place a piece of an enforceable moral code. Many of our laws are defenses of morality that everyone from Rand Paul to Barry Goldwater to Arthur Gilroy supports.
For example, Arthur Gilroy joins the conservative movement in his support of voter ID laws. These laws are intended to defend a moral view that he shares with Rand Paul.
you still deny he wrote those newsletters?
RIP, Mr. Bond.
And, thank you for all you did.