If You Believe This, Then You Are . . .
It is tragically too easy to get caught up with the issue of race.
Racism, of course, is real:
it is horrible
It is horrible in every face it makes
Yes, racism is easy to capture — a true outrage, a systematic problem that has plagued humanity, and that far too many people take way too seriously, both the oppressed and oppressors. The only people who really care about race are those who have a problem with the idea in the first place, seeing one another as oppressors.
Of course racism remains a serious problem, seeking some superficial claim to difference, deciding inside your head nothing other than the perverted reasoning that something is wrong with another person’s face. All such prejudice follows the same track
Racism, being such a deservedly sensitive issue, one which draws on deep emotion and boiling rage, is easily used to distract people, can be exploited in our looking-for-a-reason world by barking and repeating slogans over issues that will never be resolved.
Young protesters sometimes seek the complete eradication of another person’s way of thinking
.
Thinking evil, considering hatred and violence and every other manifestation of the worst we could all possibly be, is never going to go away. People’s superficial hatred is so easy to understand, a solution to all the answers about all the things whichever group of people never liked about others. When I was teaching units on race — I don’t know, 10th grade got To Kill a Mockingbird and The Bluest Eye, 11th The Piano Lesson and Huck Finn, 12th struggling through Invisible Man or some fancy Jimmy Baldwin — English class, teaching the classics as a backdrop into the study of race — when I was teaching the disappointingly few interested high school students at big, terrible schools in North Philadelphia, I remember a motto I would inevitably proclaim: “Racism is cheap. Get to know someone. You’ll find a much better reason to hate them.”
And yet the superficial simplicity, the base holy wars over liberation and freedom
they go beyond such simplicity, this hatred. It is ideological, a war on the nature of who’s way of living is going to be. Kings and Queens are the way of the past — emperors, sultans, pharaohs. They are not a sincere political force these days, the idea of royalty and divine spirituality, even the popes, those holy kings, is in deep decline.
We live in the age of the strongman:
And we can go on and on without bothering to footnote Donald Trump. Donald Trump is hardly relevant, except as a messianic figure to several right wing cults, suddenly flaccid, awaiting their next new messiah to inspire them to try, try again.
But the point has little to do with these dictators, with the monsters of social and political humanity seeking to gain control over people and subjugate them to their will. What it really involves is our difference of belief. Beliefs about politics. Belief about social order. What we think about humanity, about the price of oil, about war, about who is the enemy or what children should learn or whether things are fair and for whom and for what and why and how did we get here and who’s fault is it and who should we blame and I don’t care because they don’t care and I hate them because they hate me, and I think I think I think that all those people I hate hated me first so I am justified and what they believe is wrong wrong wrong!, and I am the only one who’s right and how dare they — how dare they! — how dare they presume to think something is over me.
And this is the point. Race is only part of the problem, a clear cut and understandable prejudice that everyone on any side can get behind whichever shuddering solution they find. We can see it. We can certainly feel it. We hear it in the air and experience it day after day after day. I mean, for those who rage over the idea of ‘affirmative action,’ a once revolutionary idea seeking to try to make up for injustice, injustice that has scared our humanity since long before civilization was founded, we can understand more than two sides of the issue.
On one hand, the disgraceful lack of funding and interest in minority existence serves hundreds of years of leaving people behind; leaving them illiterate, ignorant, forced to live on their desperate hopes and wit. These were sometimes brilliant people oppressed and never given a chance, generation after generation, the high flown ideas and ambitions of so many crushed before they were ever even given the opportunity to form. This oppression, this horrible cruelty was clearly intentional (systematic), an extension of the antebellum era’s enforced illiteracy of slaves, crushing them until they didn’t even understand what rebellion could mean.
Then again, the other side, those privileged white folks angry that some black dude took their job purely on the merits of race . . . let’s be honest, all right? Sometimes . . . there have certainly been times when this is bullshit. Take college admission, say to Harvard. Some black kid is a wonderful student. His test scores are high, his grades immaculate. Let’s say s/he has an idea what they want to do with life, but are undecided. Then you take your white kid, grades every bit as immaculate, test scores perhaps a little higher, their life’s ambitions already declared if not decided. And then let’s say that the black kid gets in solely on the merit of their race. We can understand the white student and their parents being resentful. We can also relate to the dejected triumph plenty of these brilliant black students might feel, fully aware that their chief merit of acceptance was the color of their skin. I am not saying that such a concept doesn’t have historical merit, because it clearly does. But meeting unfairness with retroactive unfairness is the solution for nothing.
It is ideology that is the chief prejudice of human history, regardless of the simple observation that often such hatred is prefaced on the way that people look. The US Civil War, while surrounded by the issue of slavery, was finally about belief in a certain way of life. In the South they resented the incursion of what they deemed and eventually declared were outsiders looking to destroy their “way of life.” The slaves, to them, property, were often looked upon with both affection and subjugating cruelty. The slaves, to them, were high flown property, signals that the masters had made something of themselves in the world. They resented less the idea of freedom for their slaves than someone forcing them to do as they say (the irony is dripping with blood).
On the Northern side, at least outside of the economic consideration of Northern corporate minds, the idea of freedom was finally reduced to the obvious group of people, the truly tortured and oppressed, and would disregard the ordinary white hayseed of the south, never a slave owner, just desperate for work in a world where employment was disgracefully free. And yet it should remain apparent that plenty of people in power simply did not care. They didn’t care about slaves. They didn’t care about struggling white folks. They did not care about unity or reconciliation. They certainly didn’t care about the idea of freedom. All they cared about was that other people thought differently than themselves and that made other people their enemies.
Now of course historical hindsight gives us the obvious answer as to who was right and who was wrong, and there are certainly many issues where the answer to such questions are obvious.
But not all of them.
And this brings us back around to where we started:
It is too easy to get caught up on the idea of race, on the vibrant past of cruelty and horror over how the strong have treated the weak. It is too easy to simplify our moral problems into superficiality, no matter how many heroes and villains strive their whole lives to fight such wars. No, the real battle deals with a difference of opinion, race merely a shade of the broken record that has caused every war in our bloody history. Thinking differently, a honking siren of a red flag, helps to divide us deeper, divide us more profoundly than the basic evasion that we are different from each other in some way or another.
Rejecting opposition beliefs as invalid, and declaring such thinking as the enemy of progress, this is where all bias and bigotry and prejudice and hatred resides, in that same black hole, in the same terminal nightmare of lingering apocalypse, of the death of humanity. It is something worth considering, as we move on and allow our own bias of the biases which oppress us to form a tilted version of the world, yet another hatred, spiraling out of control.
