Waiting for White Magical Thinking
25th September 2017
Like the great majority of American white people of earlier eras, slaveholder Thomas Jefferson and abolitionist Abraham Lincoln held the belief that (a) blacks probably could not hack it as free men in modern society and (b) white people would never tolerate them as equals, in any event.
Martin Luther King, Thurgood Marshall, and the rest of the leadership of the civil rights movement had no illusions about immediately converting the great mass of angry/terrified white Southerners to the cause of equality so they always pitched their words and deeds to a larger national white audience.
What white people thought about black people largely controlled and constrained the lives of the latter for most of our history. One the perverse, unexpected consequences of that fact is the increasingly weird, magical thinking that what white people think still controls and constrains black lives.
This is key. Until black people quit thinking that their lives rotate around what white people think, things will never improve.
When a African-American cop (working under a African-American police chief) in a city where white supremacists in power are about as common as unicorns (Milwaukee) shot Sylville Smith, an armed African-American suspect who aimed a weapon at pursuing police, there was a three-day riot and a relative of the fallen suspect said “white people are the devil.”
Which is as delusional as the Nazi fantasy that the Jews were responsible for everything wrong in the world.
Similarly, in Baltimore, Freddie Gray was killed in a negligent fashion in a police van with an African-American police driver after an arrest by three African-American and three white officers who worked under a African-American police chief responsible to a African-American mayor and majority African-American city council in a country where civil rights complaints were referred to a African-American US Attorney General appointed by a African-American President. Yet for many, the incident was somehow about white racism.
The whole ‘intersectionality’ excuse is just another way of saying ‘whatever happens, white people are to blame, even if they weren’t even involved’.
White people actually have constrained and deformed black lives in the modern era but not from malignant racism so much as spectacularly bad social welfare policies designed by white liberals. Our national policies destroyed family life, natural social ties, and solid childhood formation. These programs have had the net effect of fostering crime, poverty, and substance-abuse and thus made clashes with law enforcement vastly more common.
White liberals also found various ideological means to crush substantive academic achievement just in case the deformative process of atomization was not sufficiently harmful.
For the majority of African-Americans who are not part of the poverty culture, white liberals also found a way to undermine their place in society with “affirmative action.” The previous presumption that an African-American with a professional degree is probably at least as good if not better than most whites because of what he or she had to overcome has been replaced with the nagging suspicion that he or she may be in that position only because of affirmative action.
There are white people against which black people have a legitimate beef, but it’s the white people who are allegedly on their side.