Ta-Nehisi Coates has already weighed in on the NAACP’s condemnation of racist elements within the Tea Party movement, but I thought John McWhorter‘s take was interesting as well. McWhorter, while agreeing(!) with the NAACP, writes that “a lesson America also needs to learn, especially those who read a
T-shirt and think it’s their responsibility to think of it as a direct
descendant of what got John Lewis’ head cracked on the Pettus Bridge in
Selma,” is that sometimes people will get angry at black people and ““Go there” – expressing their anger in disrespect, which when
aimed at a black person, will logically entail phraseology singling out
color.”
I don’t entirely disagree — I think race is a much bigger factor in life than McWhorter does, but I do think broadly speaking we need to distinguish between racist behavior and people actually being “racists” in the sense that they hold strong dogmatic views about the superiority of one race over another. I think there are relatively few of the latter left in America, although Tea Party spokesman Mark Williams just threaded the needle. I guess what’s interesting to me is that to the extent that someone needs to be disabused of this notion that their battle is the “direct descendant” of what the Selma marchers were fighting for, the far more urgent case is the Tea Partiers.
The past couple of years we’ve seen an elaborate culture of conservative white grievance develop around Obama’s presidency. Obama’s economic policies are “payback” against white people, the Affordable Care Act was reparations, you have Rep. Steve King of Iowa and Glenn Beck claiming Obama is a racist, and the conservative media apparatus has dedicated itself to pushing the proposition that the Obama Justice Department is racist against white people. Forget liberals thinking the effort it takes to denounce a racist t-shirt has something to do with the Civil Rights Movement, Beck proclaimed that the the DoJ’s potential investigation of the Oscar Grant killing proved that America has turned “into the 1950s overnight, except the races are reversed.” Beck has characterized the opposition to Obama as “the inheritors and the protectors of the civil rights movement,” to the point where he’s even holding an event on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.‘s “I have a Dream” speech. In what was either an act of Andy Kaufman level comedic genius or total derangement, Beck attacked Lewis for “comparing” himself to a civil rights activist. It’s not just Beck either, in the aftermath of a fight between white and black students in St. Louis, Limbaugh said “[I]n Obama’s America, the white kids now get beat up with the black
kids cheering.” Conservatives have even suggested that the juvenile epithet “teabagger” is equivalent to the n-word.
In the aftermath of the 2008 election, conservatives developed a weird kind of oppositional culture that is broadly premised on the kind of institutional racism faced by black people throughout history, while maintaining that the sole obstacle to black advancement is the very same culture of grievance they’re so desperate to imitate. My question is, when is some brave white leader going to come out and tell conservatives to let go of their culture of grievance so they can finally start to advance in society? Probably never, and I think TNC explains why–because it’s just an alibi:
Dave concedes that the NAACP has a case, but concludes that they’re wrong for making it. But they’re only wrong for making it because the broader society, evidently, believes that objecting to a call for literacy tests is, in fact, just as racist as a call for literacy tests. This inversion, this crime against sound logic, is at the heart of American white supremacy, and at the heart of a country that has nurtured white supremacy all these sad glorious years.
Conservatives like to accuse liberals of supporting social programs that help minorities out of a sense of white guilt, but the irony is that the conservative insistence that black people are “the true racists” is itself an attempt to cope with a legacy of discrimination that privileged white people at the expense of minorities. We’ve explored the social consequences of liberal white guilt, but the consequences of conservative white guilt have gone largely unexamined because of the way it manifests. While guilty white liberals seek personal redemption through identifying as liberal, guilty white conservatives seek absolution by telling themselves “the real racism” is coming from those they’re being told it’s wrong to hate. We like to think of ourselves as seeking truth, when often what we’re really seeking is comfort. It’s not surprising that in the process, we’re prone to doing things that can be absurd or even terrible.
