A History of Liberal White Racism

[RainDog]

158. smart thinking

I think this quote really gets to what is "problematic" for people - they just want to see the parts of history that make them feel better, not the parts that teach them about the realities of politics - as in, strange bedfellows - MLK's dad used the political system to help get MLK released from jail, in Birmingham, where his very life was in danger - in prison. So MLK's dad wondered, from his influential pulpit, about the possible problem of "Catholicism" and the vote for Kennedy.

Kennedy was on the phone immediately afterward and got MLK out of jail - and MLK's dad went on to support Kennedy. Do I think MLK's dad was anti-Catholic? no. But I think he was in a situation where he could use his influence to make something happen, and he did.

This "strange bedfellows" issue is part of political life. FDR and southern whites were both "progressives" according to the understanding of this, politically, at the time. Southern white progressives were also overwhelmingly racist, or they were willing to play to white southern racism.

If the New Deal is ours, so is Theodore Bilbo. Acknowledging this part of our history wounds us. Class interests, in the liberal mind, has always been seen as the great uniter. And yet we see for whole stretches of our history race not simply race trumping class, but race effectively functioning as class.

Does it mean that the New Deal was worthless? No. Is the point that Roosevelt was a covert anti-black bigot? Nope. But it is part of our history. And it is as important to acknowledge this--just as, when the history of marriage equality is written, it will be important to acknowledge the Democratic Party's "evolution."

I've said things here about the south that have riled people - but I've said them as someone who grew up in the south and, sort of, rejected it because the history made me so angry. I didn't want that to be part of the history of people who, no doubt, included relatives of mine from the past.

The only way, or one of the few, bar-be-que is another... I can approach southern culture without anger is through African Americans who I know whose families were also from the south. I've had an interesting experience in the recent past - a friend who's African American, whose family is from the south, who didn't have the negatives toward certain aspects of white culture in the south that I did.. and we talked about things from his perspective. Another friend, the same sort of situation, once told me that blacks didn't want to be angry with whites - they just wanted to be friends and neighbors, not enemies - because I had said something about how I would be angry if I were African American in regard to this or that. They both taught me something about a "grace of spirit" - tho one is an atheist and the other is definitely not - but they taught me about seeing and hearing without anger because I didn't want to be associated with things I thought were "bad."

History is complex - I think that's the ultimate point Coates is getting at. I'm like you - I don't have nostalgia for the past (tho I am interested in history and artifacts). I don't want to forget the compromises that were made, tho, often at the expense of African Americans in this nation because, again, as Coates says, race has functioned as a class system, especially in the south, and especially as a way to align white interests when they don't align via class.

People want to keep this reality invisible.