I seem to think I have started to see things about white-ness in a new way. Some of it is offensive to me. All of it makes me wonder what books are out there. I normally ask here first for things like this. Google is not DailyKos.
This came up for me because of my thoughts about campaigning for Bernie Sanders in Los Angeles, something I have not contributed to beyond going to the two videoconferences, being an early Facebook group-member, and donating to the campaign. I don’t think I am a good match for doing phone work, especially because I avoid having a mobile phone. But I’ve been thinking since the first days of Bernie’s campaign about campaigning against Hillary supporters in Los Angeles as June approaches. In trying to scavenge around for insights, I ran into something like a theory of white-ness. Basically that it is a conflation of American Protestant highest values that has been connected to social courtesy and social enforcement mechanisms. The key offensive point to make is that in a sense this means white-ness is holy. For example, from within “white-ness”(TM), there is no prejudice. Any of the horrible things THOSE people have done against black people, well, that wasn’t a white thing to do. In other words, the same way conservatism cannot fail it can only be failed, white-ness got to that Holy Grail status first. In a weird way, this means The Wizard of Oz is the great American novel.
The open social exchanges and thinking that can occur within a protected cloud of white privilege are known, in America, to be filled with happy talk and happy faces. Social status, employment, and the areas where one can live and raise a family are all affected by what can seem this nonsense that goes on within the white-ness. But it actually unites many different regional and/or hyperlocal groups, when it actually suits those locals’ perceived self-interest.
I have a bunch of old diaries about how racist ideology is becoming seen to reperpetuate itself (now) within the most-black areas right before the Civil War (then). Self-conscious white supremacy had clearly been cultivated by the time of John Wilkes Booth. It is a somewhat open question how much it came up in earlier times. For one thing it has emerged that New York City had a much larger black slave population than people used to realize. Racial prejudice was not widely confessed in the preserved collections of documents that remain. Like family gatherings, one imagines hate speech was mostly done in discrete asides.
So sorry this is offensive but I truly believe that most people of other cultures around the world as well as oppressed, minority and underprivileged people in the U.S. can see all of this too. I believe this tragedy and comedy of white-ness is evident. It’s understood as a distortion of complex rivalries that make more sense on a granular level, such as families, neighborhoods, districts. Which brings me to campaigning for Bernie in L.A. A Long Beach group expressed a desire early on not to participate in what has been the mainstream ad hoc connections (with phone conferences and house parties) made between groups. This tied in with my reading Estrada’s book about Los Angeles Plaza and what made me see white(-ness). The suburban, fragmented communities that avoided Los Angeles Plaza had competing and conflicting ideas of their own about American Protestant highest values. Everybody was NOT on the same page. A white atmosphere was cultivated that allowed ecumenicalism, inclusion of Catholics, and construction of Southern California’s mosaic of impressively diverse and yet segregated urban areas. There are 88 cities incorporated in Los Angeles County. What made each one of most of them white was really distinct. It was enough of a commonality, clearly, to enforce a brutal regime of suppression, but this is America, what else is new? Los Angeles is just a very blatant, good example of effective white supremacy, yet it has also always been an easy place to choose to live and ethnically diverse.
What I really wish I could see is something that put real faces and real people, representing all that diversity, in serious substantive discussions — based in L.A. — about the differences between Hillary and Bernie. For people whose identification with white is sometimes on and sometimes off, or for people who avoid mainstreaming at the shopping center, what do the Democrats really feel are the reasons they would choose, one over the other. I would bet the concerns would help illustrate the importance of voting and that almost every policy corner would just give an opportunity to spread more accurate info about both candidates’ positions. I personally feel such an approach would really help Bernie, but I’d like to see something fair.
It should not be minority-porn trotted out to sway Dem’ GOTV. It should embody Bernie’s political revolution and discuss the choice between him and Hillary. Wow, I would looove to see that.
So that’s how I got here. Any good books on white-ness?