These must be desperate times for Atticus Finch wannabes (the younger saintly Atticus, not the older racist Atticus).
One Atticus clone, the Rev. James Wallis, recently visited Portland, Ore., to push his book: “America’s Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege and the Bridge to a New America.”
Wallis wants to help blacks by lecturing to whites. He will likely be as successful as the fictional Atticus Finch, who lectured to a jury about racism and then saw his presumably innocent, black client convicted by that jury. Maybe Atticus should have stuck to the facts of the case instead of bringing his self-righteousness to the cause.
I’ve read excerpts of Wallis’ book. He needs helpless black folk more than they need him.
Excerpt: “No historic presidential election, no athlete or entertainer’s success, no silent tolerance of one another is enough to create the truth and reconciliation needed to eliminate racial inequality or the presumption of guilt.”
Translation: None of black Americans’ accomplishments mean anything. As long as there is a single black American who wants something that a white American has, there is racism. As long as there is a single police officer (whatever his skin color) who looks at a black man and thinks he might fit the description of a suspect in a black-on-black crime, there is racism.
The day after I read that excerpt I attended a public meeting in northeast Portland of the Community Oversight Advisory Board, a police reform group. Three black mental health professionals gave a presentation on “Trauma-Informed Care.” Before they began, one of them said they had just received a call that a young man had been injured and was in surgery. She urged all of us to “send some positive energy” to the young man.
I immediately visualized a young black man whose injury was a gunshot wound. Wallis would call my assumption racist.
The next day I saw the young man’s picture in the news. Unfortunately, the positive energy didn’t work. Another young black man dead of a gunshot wound.
Here’s Wallis: “I am often puzzled by the question that some middle-class white people ask when they see protests about economic inequality and unequal criminal justice. The question, asked directly or indirectly, usually seems to be, ‘What do they want?’ And the ‘they’ always implies people of color. The best answer I’ve heard lately to that question came from a young black man I met in Ferguson, Missouri. He said, ‘What do I want? I want an education, a job, and a family.’”
That’s the best answer Wallis can come up with? Has he never heard of Langston Hughes?
The black poet and novelist wrote a series of tales more than six decades ago centered around a fictional character called Jesse B. Simple. A talkative, genial soul from Harlem, Simple wondered at the problems of “white folks, colored folks, and just folks… .”
In a tale called “Coffee Break,” Simple relates a conversation he had with his white boss.
“My boss keeps asking me what THE Negro want … He always says THE Negro as if there was not 50-11 different kinds of Negroes in the U.S.A. … My boss says ‘Now that you-all have got the Civil Rights Bill and the Supreme Court, Adam Powell in Congress, Ralph Bunche in the United Nations, and Leontyne Price singing in the Metropolitan Opera, plus Dr. Martin Luther King getting the Nobel Peace Prize, what more do you want? I am asking you, just what does THE Negro want?’
“ ‘I am not THE Negro,’ I says. ‘I am me.’”
This back-and-forth between Simple and his white boss goes on for a while and finally winds back to:
“‘Then what do YOU want?’ asked my boss.
“ ‘To get out of jail,’ I said.
“ ‘What jail?’
“ ‘The jail you got me in.’
“ ‘Me?’ yells my boss. ‘I have not got you in jail. Why, boy, I like you. I am a liberal. I voted for Kennedy. … I believe in integration. Now that you got it, though, what more do you want?’
“ ‘Reintegration.’ I said. … ‘That you be integrated with ME, not me with you.’”
What Simple wants is for white folk to act more like blacks, to embrace his Harlem lifestyle.
If Hughes were still alive, he and Simple could declare victory. That is what has happened to a chunk of the white, American middle-class. It has gone Harlem.
Black journalist and PBS commentator Tony Brown predicted 21 years ago what it would mean for America when the white middle-class started acting more black.
Author of “Black Lies, White Lies” published in 1995, some of Brown’s observations have proven to be prophetic:
“Many White Americans still do not realize that by allowing drugs to flourish in the Black community, they poisoned their own sons and daughters. America’s socioeconomic crisis is primarily visible as a Black predicament today, but I predict that it will be – just as drugs are today – a national dilemma within the next decade as the middle class is hit with shrinking employment due to technological displacement.”
Has President Obama invited Brown to the White House as often as he has invited Al Sharpton? I bet not. Meanwhile, Wallis has served on the White House Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships. He says all the politically acceptable things like “America’s problem with race has deep roots.”
Wallis has nurtured those deep roots, watered them regularly so they can thrive for his own purposes.
Americans are no more racist than other nationalities. We are probably less so because we are a nation of mutts. But we categorize people by race through everything from Census data to employment applications. If all Americans woke up tomorrow with the exact same skin tone, Rev. Jim Wallis wouldn’t know what to do with himself. There goes the cause.
Wallis wants us to know that from an early age, he had black friends and coworkers in Detroit, Mich.
“In the 1960s, whites from the suburbs, like me, didn’t travel at night into the city, where the African Americans lived,” he writes in order to set up a story about a black co-worker who invited him to his home for dinner.
My aunt Marguerite can one-up Rev. Wallis. She was a “white” woman and lived in the heart of Detroit – not the suburbs. She was born Elsie Maunders in Virgil, S.D., the oldest of 11 children (two more died in infancy). She dropped out of high school to help with the family, then later moved to Detroit, which was still the bustling motor city. She changed her name to Marguerite because she thought Elsie sounded like a cow.
After a series of clerical jobs, she ended up working in real estate. Her siblings – my mother, aunts and uncles – regarded her as uppity. She maintained little contact with them and rarely participated in family reunions. When she did, she never brought her husband.
“She’s ashamed of us,” one of my aunts said.
When the 1967 Detroit riots broke out, family concern took over, and phone calls were made. Don’t worry, Aunt Marguerite told my mother. Detroit’s a big city; it’s not all on fire. She and her husband would ride it out.
Years later I would discover that my aunt’s husband was black. He worked mostly as a piano man in various bars.
Wallis’ simplified world of white privilege and black suffering ignores the giant grey zone that many Americans live in. An education, a job, and a family — that’s what a lot of Americans, of all skin colors, want.
When Wallis was in Portland, did he even notice the white men and women camped out on the sidewalks? Or did he assume their white privilege was tucked away in their shopping carts, ready to be retrieved when they needed it?
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
Related:
People like this reverend are why Donald Trump is doing well. I say that as someone who hated Trump six months ago and now only dislike him. By November I might be ready to vote for him.
When I was in college I laughed at the idea of a silent majority. If your the majority you shouldn’t be afraid to speak up. Now I think I’m part of a seething majority. We’ve been silenced. I can’t believe you’re still writing. Thanks for asking some good questions.
I showed your comment to a friend of mine, who had challenged my assertion that Wallis was preaching to the choir.
“How do you know some members of the choir aren’t quietly seething in disagreement but afraid to speak up?” she asked.
She’s right. They might be. That you both used the word “seething” jumped out at me.
I don’t know that Trump is speaking to a seething majority. The media helped create him by censoring so many “conversations” they keep saying Americans should have. Pack journalism is as bad as ever. The media decide in advance who should say what. When somebody goes off-script, like Trump, they don’t know what to do.
Last week I heard an NPR host on “Here and Now” interviewing a minister (I believe) about Trump’s support of abortion and same-sex marriage. The minister refused to go along with the assumption that Trump had to be anti-abortion and anti-gay in order to be Republican. The NPR host sounded frustrated.
Personally, I would love to see U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas side with abortion providers in the case pending now. Nina Totenberg would probably have to seek counseling.
I’d forgotten completely about Tony Brown. Time was when I watched his show I would get upset with some of his contentions, but I am older now and live in a world gone lunatic on race. Consequently, I will listen to some of his broadcasts from back in the day. The prescience of Brown that you have noted tells me I was missing something, perhaps quite a few somethings.
I find myself thinking in explicitly racist terms in the last few years. It comes as a surprise to me, but there it is.Moreover, I don’t feel bad or guilty about it. The only reason I battle against it within myself is because it does me no earthly good. I realize that it diminishes me. All I can compare it to is being swept up by a tsunami of antipathy towards white men. I feel as if my being has been rushed through the waters of a sea I hadn’t intended to enter with no safe landfall in sight.
I read Shelby Steele’s “The New Sovereignty” in the Best American Essays of 1993. It put me on the lookout for rising black intellectuals and gave me the suspicion that that was where future American intellectual firepower was going to come from. Likewise, I found former colonial subjects to be the freshest writers in English. How the American component of that expectation has crashed to the abyss.
I have come to look at American society as being at war with itself and I am just one of many competing groups. If I decline to defend myself with all of the limited means at my disposal I deserve what I get.
I did not plan to inhabit this wretched defensive posture in late middle age, but there it is.
As a side note I used to have a good deal of respect for Nina Tottenberg. Then I saw her on television news shows and was surprised that she couldn’t think on her feet. Surprising, but no big deal as many writers can’t. However, her invariable leftist impulse or response or knee jerk even when it did injury to the facts repulsed me.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=34c_1457039912
Your suggestion that Nina Totenberg might need to seek counseling due to a SCOTUS opinion ensures I will always follow your blog. Thank you for the non-partisan work.
Matt and Larry:
Thanks for writing and for the Jesse Lee Peterson link. Peterson could probably make quick work of Teressa Raiford (who has no trouble bringing the Portland media to heel).
Tonight I heard Hillary Clinton on the radio saying, “You can’t make America great by getting rid of what made America great.”
I wonder if she includes white men. She is, after all, married to one.
Link to the Advice Goddess Blog (Amy Alkon).
It is, evidently, real:
http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2016/03/15/affirmative_act_7.html#comments
This stuff is sanctioned and encouraged at elite and cow college schools and universities.
I’d much rather it were a hoax or covert Klan-like agitation of the old “black people will come get your women.”
That link is disturbing even if the participants are just playing along for the sake of debate. No American college in 2016 would allow a debate on whether blacks should be encouraged to kill themselves or whether non-blacks should start exterminating blacks. Notice I said “non-blacks.” Whites aren’t unique in their clashes with blacks. When I lived in Southern California I saw the violence that some blacks targeted against Hispanics and Asians.
A friend of mine who looked at that link referred me to this story about anti-Semitism at Scripps College: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/03/anti-semitism-at-scripps-college.
Scripps is the private school in Claremont, Calif., that once invited George Will to speak on campus, then disinvited him after he questioned the concept of “rape culture.”
These students are so cloistered in their safe world, they have no idea how stupid they are. If Dave Chapelle or Ta-Nehisi Coates told them the Holocaust was a hoax, they would believe it.
Many years ago I was working at a university town’s co-op. Oliver Stone’s JFK film had just come out.
A young student with whom I was working carried on about a second film of the JFK murder that was hidden from the public and readily signed on to Stone’s crackpot’s gospel of conspiracy.
I realized then that an ignorance born of cultivated resentment was becoming mainstream. Bill Cosby, before he was exposed and was still America’s dad professed to believe AIDS was a white policy creation to exterminate blacks.
So, I see the problem as having two significant expressions – the willingness to believe unseen organized forces who will stick at nothing are beavering away to thwart your group and that this hidden hand is proof of your superiority. Why else would they devote so much organization to your destruction?
It tends to legitimize the attitude conveyed in the “debate” at the link.
Most have heard of the Tuskegee Experiment. Most do not know anything about it other than a secret cabal of white people infected an unknowing group of black people with a grotesque death.
The Experiment was unethical and by modern lights criminal. However, in the past such experiments were carried out on all people from soldiers (radiation, LSD, and on and on) and convicts to poor women. I don’t know that they were equally distributed demographically, but I suspect that they were, save for the rich.
Reading the article at the link below certainly gave me second thoughts about the Tuskegee practices. Indeed, I found it convincing at the time. But later I read an article elsewhere that effectively attacked most of its points.
What is most interesting about the Spiked article and the response (which I’ve not linked to) is that a confirmed and great “truth” (racist medicine)was critiqued and found wanting. Then a response to that critique was put forward. An honest person could begin to locate the truth.
Nowadays, challenging any of the popular American social truths is howled down, suppressed, or attacked with all the might of a vast right-minded media/educational/governmental collective.
http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/14972#.Vu2TuHpBxvo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL7hvXeOAKw
The link no longer works. Wonder why? It was a Belgian tourism people.
The 1:59 film shows happy random Belgians laughingly taking calls from all over the world. They are asked about guns and fighting and terrorist related stuff. The citizens laughingly respond,”No, not around here.”
I know it’s not related but the timeliness was irrepressible. Google “Call Belgium.”
Democracy, Open Borders, Multiculturalism–Pick Any Two
I take it this is what they didn’t want us to see:
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=a79_1458667891
In politics, everything is related. This morning I was listening to our friends at NPR. They love to make fun of Donald Trump (granted he is easy to make fun of). They love to remind everyone that he declared we should stop letting Muslims into the country — always forgetting to add the rest of his quote “until we figure out what the hell is going on.”
Anyway, this morning when “Here and Now” co-host Robin Young was interviewing someone about radical Muslims and the Belgium bombing, I thought I detected a note of fear in her voice, as if deep inside her brain there was a nagging uneasiness: What if Trump is right.
A few years back one of the journalistic great and wise remarked of a story that it “got the narrative right, but the facts were wrong.” Pretty much sums up the state of the art.
I made the mistake of looking in on the Willamette Week. There they are trying to destroy a new restaurant for the grief its name has caused so many (Saffron Colonial Cafe & Restaurant.)
https://soundcloud.com/thinkoutloudopb/whats-in-a-name Here is an interview from a few days ago between the owner of Saffron Colonial and the leader of protest against the restaurant. I only listened to a little of it but one of the talking points was defending the ‘Churchill Breakfast’. Perhaps a Hitler inspired meal would have a better choice for Portland because he was a Vegetarian and loved dogs.
I posted a few comments on one of the Willamette Week stories, but none were as good as your “Hitler-inspired meal.” Perfect.
Appreciate you both for your publicly objecting to this junk reportage. Most especially Pam for going around with this numskull Acker.
Indeed, I’m relieved by the general sentiment that mocks this “imperialist” dining rubbish.
Years ago a film critic employed by the WW went off on a hate America binge while reviewing the film Godzilla. He really went to town with the “Godzilla as a manifestation of Japanese anxiety in the aftermath of America’s insanely racist imperialist bombing of . . .”
Not a critique of a silly film but an unedited rant by an ill-educated kid. Apparently, WW did not have an adult or an editor. Never mind the point that the “Godzilla as a symptom of anxiety in the wake of the Atomic bombs” was fabrication made by a British journalist back when. It was repeated until it gained a bizarre legitimacy.
My point is that I quit reading the WW because it was written by ill natured and smirking children. My mistake was in revisiting the thing.