In the Light of Memoirs, Part 2: Terror
Yesterday there were Republican Presidential primaries in Alabama and Mississippi.
Public Policy Polling reported two days ago that 45% of Alabama Republicans think President Obama is a Muslim, and 52% of Mississippi Republicans think so too.
These days the word "Muslim" can be a fearful insult, suggesting a person who hates U. S. citizens and will strike without warning. To some, the word conjures an image of the Two Towers in flames. It terrifies them.
Some pundits have said that calling President Obama a Muslim is a way to "Other" him—to hint that he is not a real American, that he is an outsider.
Good point. Yet this insight of "Othering" does not cut deeply enough to explain the abysmal depth of people's fears. There is more here to be seen.
This presumed Other can be not only "outside" us but also uncannily close to home. The light of my memoir about my family and its slaveholding ancestors, Into the Briar Patch, reveals a connection between the alarming "Muslim" and the closest-to-home "inside" story that our country has—slavery.
Slavery provoked its own profound terrors, right in this country. They were at least equal to our current fears of militant Islamic terrorists.
During our three centuries of slavery, white Southerners lived in perpetual dread of lethal slave uprisings. Their anxiety deepened, decade after decade, until the outbreak of the Civil War. Whites imagined, with good reason, that slaves would organize, procure weapons, and kill their masters to gain freedom. (White Afrikaaners during apartheid also feared being slaughtered in their beds by rebellious kaffirs.)
This profound fear arose structurally, from the knowledge that chattel slavery was a man-made institutional evil. Enslaved persons will naturally come to hate their enslavers, and they will yearn for freedom—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—even if it means violence. This truth is enshrined in our Declaration of Independence. Whites who nervously relied on "good masters" to pacify Southern slaves could still not escape frequent news of slave rebellions, from Stono to John Brown. Such news traveled fast.
Out of these centuries of deeply engrained white panic, a terrible stereotype was invented: The Black Beast, the ultimate enraged and rebellious slave. He is preternaturally strong. He is filled with unquenchable hatred, especially hatred of whites. He strikes without warning. He has no mercy. He is as ruthless as Al Qaeda, but closer to home and more frightening.
[Perhaps this mythical Beast also personifies the savage injustices that whites suspected they had inflicted upon generations of African-Americans. There are centuries of buried and guilty memory to consider here. The enduring savagery of the dominant race would place the Other exactly at home. The Beast would then be a good example of whites' psychological projection upon blacks.]
In my family there are still old stories about this stereotypical and mythical Black Beast. The names vary, but the figure is the same. In a short story written by my mother at college, the Beast vaults across the store counter one night and slits the white salesclerk's throat. "He'd just as soon kill you as look at you," my family would say with a shiver. "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman, a Senator from South Carolina in the early 1900s who admitted to disenfranchising negroes, lectured Congress with the image of a hypothetical "black fiend" who raped pure white women.
So when people call President Obama a "Muslim," the implied relation to Al Qaeda may be only superficial. After all, everyone knows that President Obama has had Osama bin Laden killed. The foundational reason for the "Muslim" tag probably lies deeper. People's fears could well tap into a longstanding stereotype, the ultimate horror of slavery and its aftermath, the Black Beast.
Obama is our first black President. In how many ways is that difficult?
It's no wonder that President Obama rarely expresses anger. He would want to avoid resembling the enraged black man of historical myth.
To the adults of my childhood, the worst kind of traitor was a white person bent upon "stirring up the blacks" and reaping the whirlwind of their rage. Southern whites thought that kind of uprising would bring Armageddon.
As I traveled in the South before the 2008 election, whites told me they were afraid that if Obama were elected, the country would have a "race war." A President Obama, they thought, would surely favor blacks over whites and even set them loose upon whites. He would bring about that long-feared uprising of blacks.
So today, white Republicans of Alabama and Mississippi are calling President Obama a "Muslim." But that's only the latest chapter in our long national history of race.
Old injustices, old hatreds, and old terrors keep coming around again. The new threat is the old threat reconstituted. History keeps us in its grip.
