Tim Wise’s article “This is Your Nation on White Privilege” (http://www.redroom.com/blog/tim-wise/this-your-nation-white-privilege) sure has been making the rounds lately, hasn’t it? I’ve been sent it by three people in the past week alone. All right, since the damn thing won’t leave me in peace, I’ll take a good stab or two at it. Believe it or not, it didn’t all sit poorly with me.
The earliest section of it actually struck a chord with me. I agree that Republicans are being hypocritical in holding Sarah Palin blameless for her daughter’s premature, out-of-wedlock pregnancy; as Jon Stewart hilariously pointed out on The Daily Show a while back, this is the diametrical opposite of their reaction to, oh say, Jamie Lynn Spears’ teenaged pregnancy, for example—not to mention their usual reactions to the out-of-wedlock pregnancies of young, inner-city black women.
Bristol Palin’s brother is clearly a backcountry douche bag, as his MySpace page originally made clear. Yet he is getting away with this character flaw in ways no black youth ever could. In addition, the critical juxtaposition of Sarah Palin’s academic career and those of many academically disadvantaged black youth also rings true to me.
I’ll focus the rest of my response on the stuff I disagreed with. Virtually every criticism of Obama by conservative Republicans referenced in Mr. Wise’s article actually stems from the former’s ideology, not his race. On the whole, I don’t think Obama is getting any worse treatment than his white Democratic predecessors did in years gone by—not in the areas mentioned in Mr. Wise’s missive, in any case.
The fourth paragraph is where I begin to disagree strongly. Being an undistinguished first-term US Senator and two-term state senator with zero notable legislative accomplishments is hardly superior—as a qualification for the presidency, at any rate—to being a small-town mayor or governor of an oil-rich state. Senator Obama is untested, as untested in his own way as Governor Palin. This, mind you, hardly means he can’t be a great president; there are too many historical examples to the contrary.
“If it was good enough for the Founding Fathers, it’s good enough for me”: I’ve heard it argued that Governor Palin was referring to general references to God on government literature and in government correspondence rather than to the “under God” in the Pledge strictly. This could, of course, be quite wrong. Only an incisive follow-up question could set this record perfectly straight, so my personal jury’s still out on that one.
As for reading criminals their rights: there is actually nothing in the Constitution that says that this practice is required. Liberal judges’ belief that governments should have to perform such a practice (which also happens to be my personal policy opinion) does not mean that the Constitution actually requires it. Neither the US Constitution—nor any other legal document, for that matter—can plausibly be held to “require” something it doesn’t even mention.
I agree that all gun nuts should be perceived and treated equally, regardless of their melanin count. And advocates of excessively stifling gun-control regulations, or outright bans on gun ownership, should take a moment of pause from the little-known historical fact that the first gun control laws in the United States specifically targeted blacks, aiming to keep weapons out of their hands so as to render them defenseless against racist attacks. http://www.firearmsandliberty.com/cramer.racism.html
I seem to remember Democratic heavy hitters like James Carville relentlessly mocking Sarah Palin’s erstwhile small-town mayoralty almost a week before she ever got to speak on Obama’s community organizing experience. Democrats with glass jaws should not throw sucker punches. Moreover, Obama’s experience—according to what I’ve read so far, at least—included nothing so momentous as “fighting for the right of women to vote, or for civil rights, or the 8-hour workday, or an end to child labor” but with rather more mundane matters like removing asbestos from housing projects (not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course). As for giving women the vote, ending child labor and mandating the 8-hour workday, those struggles date back eighty years and more, long before Obama was born. They may nonetheless be fair defenses of community organizing in and of itself, but if the first viable black presidential candidate had nothing to do with them, I fail to see how they effectively lend themselves to proving the existence of white privilege in America.
I never figured many women voters would jump on the Palin bandwagon simply on account of her gender—nor should they. On the other hand, do I think her candidacy is “a step backward for women”, as some feminist pundits have been alleging? Hardly. A woman vice-president’s a woman vice-president, no matter how conservative. Moreover, even electing to the vice-presidency a woman who holds views with which most women disagree still furthers the cause of women’s advancement. It demonstrates that a woman needn’t stuff herself inside a left-wing ideological box in order to blaze a trail for her sisters in the professional world. (Think of Margaret Thatcher.) It also reinforces the principle of women’s equality with men by demonstrating that, just like men, women are entitled to their own opinions—even controversial ones—since they are, after all, fully independent individuals who can think for themselves, just like men.
All politicians are at least somewhat cynical in their behavior over time. It’s almost impossible to be politically successful without it. As for insinuations that Obama is corrupt, they are a product of his having come up through Chicago machine politics as he has (not merely “knowing some folks from the old-line political machines in Chicago”). These insinuations are not a product of Obama’s race. The corrupt Chicago ward machines are generally controlled by whites, as they have been for more than a century. That doesn’t diminish their corruption—and wouldn’t make Obama any less corrupt, were he a white man—in conservatives’ eyes.
I agree that Republicans who associate with far-right Christian pastors should be subject to as much opprobrium as Obama was for his association with Jeremiah Wright. But to describe the latter’s sermons as merely “talking about the history of racism and its effect on black people” is facile and dishonest. For instance, I can hardly give anyone wrong—whether they are white or black, liberal or conservative—for being repulsed by Wright’s moronic and grotesquely paranoid claim that the AIDS virus was invented by the US government to kill black people. And Wright did not merely “note that terrorist attacks are often the result of U.S. foreign policy”; he went beyond that to suggest that America deserved the attacks of September 11th as a result. (That’s what “chickens coming home to roost” means, FYI.) So the 3,000 innocent American civilians who died on that tragic day deserved it, because of the vagaries (and admitted flaws) of their government’s foreign policy? Neither Wright’s nor Obama’s blackness is enough to explain white Americans’ disgust with this insinuation.
It’s true that Bush got away with his “regular guy” image waaayyyyy too easily—especially with populist conservatives—considering his very blue-blooded pedigree. But as I understand it, it wasn’t “being black, going to a prestigious prep school, then Occidental College , then Columbia , and then to Harvard Law” that made conservatives accuse Obama of “looking down on regular folks”. What brought this criticism down on Obama was his comment about working-class white Americans clinging to their guns, religion and xenophobia out of bitterness at their economic plight. (Mind you, I myself never much faulted him for making that comment, for I’ve always felt there was a powerful element of truth to it—call me an elitist, too, if you will.)
As for Obama’s and McCain’s relative academic records: being a brilliant scholar hardly automatically qualifies a candidate for the presidency. You can be bright and academically accomplished and still screw up big time as president. Don’t take it from me—take it from JFK, with his foul-up of the Bay of Pigs invasion or his embroilment of the military in the Vietnam War. You can also lack a college degree altogether and still make a damn good president. Just ask Harry Truman.
McCain’s jokey jingle about bombing Iran was damned stupid, no doubt about it. Yet Ronald Reagan 1984 joke about “outlawing Russia forever” and “beginning bombing in five minutes” didn’t stop him from drastically speeding up the Soviet Union’s demise. And Obama’s proposal to meet, without preconditions, the leaders of a host of hostile, repressive rogue states, all in his first year in office, regardless of whether or not he is bargaining from a position of strength, does smack of dangerous naïveté and immaturity. This is a product of his liberal worldview and ideology—not his race.
Obama is accused of ducking questions for two main reasons. First, he does sometimes duck them, like all politicians do. (Did any of you really fall for that bullshit he told Rick Warren about the question of when human beings begin to have rights being “above his pay grade”? Because it’s sure as hell not above mine.) Second of all, he’s a liberal, and so of course conservative pundits and campaign strategists will call him out every time he does duck a question, just as liberal pundits and campaigners (rightly) do to conservative candidates. A white Democratic candidate would have been accused of evasiveness—or any other political shortcoming—by Republicans just as much as Obama has been. Or have Democrats already forgotten all about poor John “flip flop” Kerry, Michael “tank commander” Dukakis, Walter “let’s raise taxes” Mondale or Jimmy “malaise” Carter?
It can be plausibly argued that being tortured by communist jailers for five years is a greater burden and a harsher experience than anything Obama has ever gone through, given his relatively peaceful childhood and privileged higher education at such august institutions as Columbia and Harvard. I don’t necessarily agree with this argument, but I find it one deserving of serious consideration. What does seem clear to me is the fact that whatever racism Obama has experienced has certainly not substantially obstructed his pathway to success in life. Suffice to say that no Ivy League-trained lawyer, US Senator and presidential candidate can plausibly claim to have been the victim of insurmountable racism.
White privilege is not the “only” thing that could allow a putative ally of George W. Bush to become president. Voters’ ignorance of political issues, widespread belief that McCain would govern differently than Bush (based on his heterodox track record over the past several decades), and any number of other factors play into it. But of course, that doesn’t make for hardly as catchy or as entertaining an article as blaming all of the electoral hurdles Obama faces on white privilege.
An overestimation of the power of white privilege, in short, is arguably as big a problem as white privilege itself.
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