I Am Not Amused

I am not amused.

I actually felt something come over me yesterday when I saw Wolf Blitzer breathing anxiously into his microphone as he wondered why the eight missionaries being held under suspicion of child trafficking violations who were released from the custody of the Haitian government yesterday were quickly spirited away from the island in a U.S. government plane.

It was as if all the inequities, all the preferential treatment, all the institutionalized racism I have been researching for a mini-series on race and perspective had come to a boil just behind my eyes. It was a sudden throbbing pressure just behind my sinus cavity that seemed to ratchet itself up a notch with every connection that popped into my head between what I was seeing on the screen about the privilege of whiteness, what I have been reading about the privilege of whiteness, and what we all already know but willfully choose to ignore that makes racial inequality at once so insidious and so apparent that rooting it out requires no less than a reworking of the very foundation of our entire social structure.

I feel as if I am listening to mad men when I hear reporters casually talk about the prior life of the murdering professor in Huntsville as if the shooting incident this same murdering professor had been involved in, a prior  incident that resulting in her having a dead brother was the kind of thing that was merely "eyebrow raising". It was a heinous incident in which the police report alone recounted so much circumstantial evidence that a first year law student at the bottom of his class could have gotten an indictment. It was a situation where the ruling of a local police chief WHO HAD DONE NO INVESTIGATION allowed the murdering professor in her prior life to simply walk out of the police station WITHOUT A CHARGE -- a textbook example of the privilege whiteness brings in America, and one my news media and the rest of the country have chosen to ignore, as if this literal "get out of jail free" card is one we all carry.

It is as if we brown skinned people have been trapped in a classroom with mad professors, a group of men and women whose sage faces house wild eyes, wild eyes that blink incessantly as these professors tap their chalk against the board, insisting that in these cases there really is no inequity, that we are seeing things, that we must not question their assertions that “2 + 2 = 5”, that “8 ÷ 2 = 3”, or that “3 × 2 =7”, even though we can see by simply counting with our fingers that these things are not true.

It is as if these professors are telling us “your fingers are lying to you”, even as we see them arrive at the same conclusion we do before they remember to add or subtract a finger to support what they’ve written on the board.

Even now, I can imagine that there are people all over America who have been harboring resentment at the way those “poor missionaries” have been treated. That there are people all over America who have already deduced from their armchairs in Whiteland that the murdering professor “needed help”, was “off her medication”, “didn’t really know what she was doing”, “probably was abused as a child” or whatever comes next on the laundry list of excuses that seem to arrive like clockwork whenever white Americans who don’t look like they came out of a trailer park commit heinous acts.

That throbbing in my head was compounded by the virtual lynch mob that has lit out after Governor David Patterson’s aide, a six foot seven inch tall black man named David Johnson who has been accused on more than one occasion of domestic violence, and was arrested over twenty years ago for selling crack cocaine to an undercover agent as a teenager. In case you don’t know what that really means, I’ll fill you in – the police didn’t arrest a future Scarface, they arrested a misdirected kid who was trying to peddle twenty or thirty dollars worth of crack rocks, the kind of drug possession charge suburban criminal lawyers where I live get thrown out every day of the week when they are levied against their prep school clients.

This is the point in the narrative, though, where those same people who are so sympathetic to the child stealers and the brother killer fall back on that shop worn racial stand in for the original "its them niggers" these days -- the label "he's just a thug" -- and start wondering why the police don’t “throw away the key” when they lock up people like this and just keep them in jail for life.

The throbbing intensified as I realized that this horror show would be on tomorrow and the next night, that it was the only show going, a perpetual stage production titled "Angels and Demons", in which I and my brownskinned brethren were destined to play the Demons, no matter how much good we might accomplish, no matter how much trouble we might avoid, while our white skinned counterparts were perennial Angels, no matter how much blood drenched their hands, no matter how many died because of their willful acts, no matter what law they broke or ignored.

The throbbing has eased a little now that I’ve written this, but I will imagine that it will return whenever I click on the next internet link or turn on the TV to hear the mad professors insist yet again that ”2 + 2 = 5”, even as we watch the blood stains dry on the hands of another Angel gone bad.

Claiming The Chinese

I returned a phone call to my buddy on the way home yesterday while I was in the car.

We chit chatted a bit. “Dude,” I said, “I thought you were at the office late because you were working. Is that a TV I hear?”

“I’m just watching the news. I’ve gotta wait on my IT guy to get finished. Oh – I know what it was I called you about. There was this Chinese guy on TV a little while ago, complaining about the price of gas. He said ‘it’s the Americans who are keeping the price so high, driving all those big cars and trucks all the time.”

“What sense does that make? There are more Chinese than there are Americans. China is about to become the biggest consumer market in the world.”

“That’s what I was getting to – this guy was at a gas station, standing beside his Mercedes S550, watching a guy fill his tank. And he says we’ve got big cars? He had on some expensive shades, some nice khakis – you know, like the guys in our neighborhood wear. The way he was standing, his body language and all, he could have been one of my damn neighbors.”

“Sounds like that Indian chick I had a class with in college. You know the one I’m talking about, she was kind of skinny, with a bob hairstyle. She always wore a Polo shirt with the collar turned up. Khaki shorts and K-Swiss sneakers with white socks. You never caught her in anything else. She wouldn’t even give me the time of day.”

“There you go again. Every woman wasn’t trying to check you out-“

“No, no, she was too skinny for me. But we had at least one class together. I saw her every day. What I couldn’t figure out was how an Indian as brown as her could will herself to be white. I mean, she was dark. Came back from spring break looking like Vijay Singh. But the way she walked, the sorority she was in - she would hide behind those damn aviator shades and act like she fit right in with the white girls.”

“I know what you mean. This Chinese guy, looking at him – something was wrong with that picture, man. The world…the world is turning upside down.”

“Not really. Think about all the other people who came here as a minority and became white later. Look at the Irish.”

“Yeah. You’re right. The Italians did it too. My partner, he’s Italian. His father is almost as dark as me if he gets some sun. I guess they all got in here and hurried to marry somebody paler than them.”

I thought of the irony of our conversation – my buddy’s own West Indian heritage has produced features that are vaguely Indian, and his wife is most definitely paler than him. “The Asians are trying to do the same thing now.”

“What do you mean, trying? They’re already doing it,” my buddy said. “I mean, if I was in charge of being white, I’d claim the Chinese. The white man’s numbers are getting low, now that all the other imports want to revert back to their original tribes.”

“You sound like Dave Chappelle with that “Racial Draft” skit he did on his show. I think the South Africans have beat the U.S. to the punch - they've decided that the Chinese are black.” I had to laugh at myself as I shared this tidbit that I'd picked up from internet earlier, a racial mind bender I'd come across in the middle of my lunch break.

“I’m serious. You watch, the Chinese are going to be the newest addition to the white race. I mean, look at the numbers – it’ll keep them in the majority forever.”

“This election is going to have us looking at race in a whole new way in this country.” I laughed again as I hung up, but the uneasy sentiments behind our crude commentary showed that the concerns about the uncertainty of change were as real for blacks as they were for whites.

The press is already splitting Barack Obama in two - dissecting his background, questioning his allegiance he has to black Americans, spinning theories about what it means to be a black man with a white mother - basically, they are inventing psychological dilemmas for Obama he has already come to terms with long ago.

Whether America wants to deal with it or not, the illusory tenets of whiteness have shaped the policies and practices of our nation for just about all our existence. Even now, as the nation gingerly experiments with the idea of a large scale diversification of our viewpoints, it is discovering that a lot of the minority views are in opposition to the version of living the mainstream of America tends to follow.

This reluctance, even among those who consider themselves to be open-minded and fair, to accept Barack Obama’s candidacy as a fully legitimate outcome of “all men are created equal”, is in a lot of ways a signal of the unease many of our neighbors and coworkers and friends are feeling right now, an unease that is caused by the specter of self-examination. It is not black America, though, that will be under the microscope this fall – it is the limitations and failings of white America that will be called into question as the country examines what this candidacy really makes us see in ourselves.