Justify my outrage

I love watching Rachel Maddow. Not just because she’s not hard on the eyes and not just because she’s, well, butch enough. I love watching Rachel Maddow because she thinks and that makes me think and while I generally agree with her political position, sometimes the things I think are contrary to what I get the feeling I should be thinking as a “good liberal.”

Since I stopped getting the daily paper I’m cut off from a lot of news so I find that I need a good, heavy dose of what’s going on “out there” to stay informed. Maddow’s show gives me that. Yet, I was shocked to learn last week that the “birthers” – you know, those people who don’t believe that Obama is eligible to be President because he wasn’t born in the U.S. – are still alive and kicking. Not only are they alive and kicking, they seem to be gaining some traction.

Part and parcel of how conservative pundits are talking about the real issue – which is not Obama’s birth place or eligibility for the presidency but his race – is to latch on to the Gates arrest in Massachusetts and to Justice Sotomayor’s comments about how race plays a factor in a judge’s ability to make decisions. And it’s getting ugly. Really ugly. So ugly, in fact, that Rush Limbaugh flat out called Barack Obama an oreo – a black person who “acts white;” oreo is a charge frequently leveled by poor, supposedly more authentic, blacks at middle class blacks who do things like maintain stable family relationships and encourage their children to get good grades and go to college – on the air.

And the liberal position still is stupidly, blindly, that racism is entirely the fault of “whites.” Why do I say this? Well, mostly because I’ve been thinking about this segment from Maddow’s July 29, 2009 show where she talked to Melissa Harris-Lacewell, who is an Associate Professor of African-American studies at Princeton University, about what is fueling the race debate in America and how conservative politicos might try to tap “white outrage” over loss of racial privilege. Watch the whole segment or just watch the excerpt where Prof. Harris-Lacewell proffers her theory on the differences between the perceptions of blacks and whites in America.

What she actually said, from MSNBC’s official transcript of the show, is this:

Well, you know, if we can remember that President Obama paused in the middle of the primary race to speak in Philadelphia about the question of race in America. And he set up sort of two possibilities, black anger rooted in a history of African-American inequality and white resentment rooted in a sense of kind of a loss of racial privilege.

Now, I think in many ways it’s a very accurate assessment of sort of the ways that blacks and whites, not completely and not perfectly, but often perceive things quite differently. So I spent the month in New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina is a perfect example of this.

Everybody in the country was mad but African-Americans saw the failures of the federal government around Katrina as a race issue. White Americans who were still angry about the failures of the government saw it primarily as a bureaucratic issue rather than a race issue.

So here, you have these two groups with very different perspectives. Now, that made all the difference in being able to make policy. So I think that they’re hoping that these differences in how blacks and whites often see the world can be a perfect kind of wedge to use on health care, to use on education, to use on a wide variety of issues that, in fact, really – if we don’t fix health care, it is bad for all Americans.

My first thought was: Why are those two viewpoints – that the government’s failure to act during hurricane Katrina was racially motivated and that it was a failure of administration/process/bureaucracy – mutually exclusive? Why does it have to be one or the other? And then I had another thought. How irrational is it to blame every adverse outcome on race? So I applied a little logic to the problem.

Historically women have been oppressed by men. We’ve been denied property rights, denied full participation in our communities, denied access to money we’ve earned through our own work, denied freedom of movement, denied control over our bodies and our sexuality. We’ve been raped, beaten, and enslaved by men.

Using Prof. Harris-Lacewell’s logic, which is an extension of Barack Obama’s logic, it would be reasonable and rational for me to blame every adverse outcome for not only myself but for every other woman on the planet on sexism.

That strikes me as, well, kind of irrational.

This type of reasoning is irrational for a bunch of reasons but chief among that are these: 1) it reduces every interaction down to stereotypes, and 2) it relieves individuals of the responsibility of their actions.

And if logic dictates, which it seems to, that this position is irrational, isn’t it then safe to conclude that any position that attributes all adverse outcomes to racism just as irrational?

One of the tactics conservatives are taking in the current debate over race is to posit the minority in the discussion as the racist, and while I don’t believe that is 100% true, it’s also not 100% false either. At no point in our cultural history has anyone stood up publicly and said: No, I’m not doing [whatever “it” happens to be] because you’re [fill in a minority here]. I’m doing what I’m doing because you’re unqualified/drunk/an asshole, which would still be true if your race was different.

Or, to put it another way: how is it not racist to level a charge of racism, which is often unprovable either by direct, contemporaneous evidence or by pattern of behavior and against which there is no defense, at someone simply because you didn’t get what you wanted?

I’m not saying there is no racism, but why is no one asking how this continuing, unrelenting anger, against which there is no allowed, reasonable defense, we keep hearing about from the President and the pundits and the professors contributes to the problem? Why is no one talking about racism within the black community – the “paper bag” tests of the 1950s and 1960s, and the continued discrimination today, that kept one family friend out of the best available high school in the then segregated school system because she was too dark skinned or the prejudice against Hispanics and Asians that seems to run rampent? How are these attitudes not just as bad as white racism? And why do I get the feeling as a “good liberal” that asking this kind of question would get me branded as a racist?

I was talking this over with my aunt who works processing applications in the admissions department of a university here in DC and she told me about an application for freshman admission she’d worked with recently. On the application form is section for race which is optional. The choices on the form are Asian, Black/African American, Hispanic/Latino, Pacific Islander, White/Caucasian, and Other with a line to fill in your “other” designation. This woman, born in Washington DC in 1937, marked the box for Other and in extremely neat cursive wrote “Colored.”

How we perceive race has got to change, and race has got to become totally, completely irrelevant if we’re going to make any progress as a species. There is no other solution.