A Whiter Shade of White, Part II

Larry Coburn and Hugh Thompson, two members of three-man helicopter crew who received
medals for rescuing Vietnamese civilians and reporting US Army atrocities at Mai Lai.
 (Glenn Andreotta, third crew member, awarded posthumously) 
I once had a college professor who on the day the news broke about the Mai Lai massacre stood before our class and told us how much he hated his "pink skin".  As it became clear through the rest of the class, that was his way of taking racial ownership of the atrocity American soldiers had committed in their wholesale slaughter of Vietnamese civilians.  It was my first experience with self-loathing of any kind, though my higher education would soon introduce me to a broad display of the behavior--famously self-loathing Jews who anglicized their names; blacks who invested in skin lighteners and  hair straighteners; closeted gays who made a flamboyant display of their homophobia. I once worked with a woman of quite obvious Mexican descent who would tell everyone upon their first meeting that her family was from Spain. So, again, my favorite Springsteen line comes to mind: "But it's a sad man, my friend, who's livin' in his own skin and can't stand the company." 

There is a powerful scene in the grossly under-appreciated 2014 film Belle, where the mulatto offspring of a slave and a white man of privilege sits in front of her mirror tearing at her own skin. Following the deaths of her mother and father, Belle is raised by her father's wealthy relatives. They are mostly accepting, kind, and loving towards her, but as prisoners of the British class system in the 18th century they can't allow her to join them at the dinner table whenever they have guests--because it's just not done. Early on in her development, Belle blames this discrimination on her skin color rather than the perverse class system. Such imprinting of self-loathing on young, innocent minds, I believe, is the worst outcome of biological prejudice aimed at both race and gender. Like many of my sex and race--through fortune beyond my making--I've never been much in danger of suffering from it, for which I'm grateful. I don't believe my old college professor suffered from it either. My assessment of his avowed self-loathing from all these decades away is that it was an intellectual exercise...more an act of liberal vanity than a cry of psychic pain. And truth be told, there's as much white privilege involved in identifying with the plight of the racially oppressed as being indifferent to it because in the end most white folks usually have the option of walking away.

It's not that white self-loathing cannot be genuine. We know that there are white boys and girls raised in black or hispanic neighborhoods who develop the same inferiority complexes generally associated with minority youth vis-à-vis their relationships with whites…shame of their skin...their hair…their speech…their background and culture. All of which only goes to underscore how much self-loathing is a socialization process, both for those who foist it on others and those who suffer from it. 

In A Whiter Shade of White, Part I, I wrote about what I call a "new, entitled strain of bigotry". Sadly most bigotry is handed down from generation to generation. Some bigotry, however, grows fresh out of sudden traumatizing incidents or slow simmering resentments. The new entitled bigotry is a product of that simmering process. There's a touch of the old "mad as hell, not gonna take it any more" vibe to it. It's practiced by folks of varying races--even white--and aimed at the white race because somewhat of a consensus has formed that the entire white race has had too fee and easy a ride for too long as regards being on the dirty end of the racial discrimination stick. As the Asian-American told Joan Walsh (see Part 1) in explaining why he was excluding whites from a "do-gooder" group he was forming: "We’ve been excluded for so long — they should know how it feels.”


I fully admit to being baffled by this from both a practical and moral standpoint. As I've said before, the enormous, never-ending fight for social justice would seem to call for as vast an alliance as possible (and sometimes allies come from the most unexpected places). Marginalizing or (as is now the vogue) demonizing would-be allies is a loser's strategy. What's more, it's completely at odds with the ultimate goal--how can you work toward a cooperative and interdependent society if to get there your marching orders are to expel everyone not as pure in thought, word, and deed as you are? As to the immoral component of this exclusionary strategy, there's more than a bit of bullying and guilt by association involved. As with Joan Walsh's Asian-American associate, the "they" he believes who deserve a lesson in how it feels are clearly not those who have asserted white privilege to keep others down and out. They're the ones already sensitive enough to enlist in the fight against discrimination, but because they share some kind of biological distinction with some who have discriminated, they're deemed too tainted for the cause. Abusing your friends and refusing to discriminate between them and your real enemies screams of impotency.
Throughout March 2015--which I've come to call White Hysteria Month for the raft of blanket condemnations of the white race as a whole, without perspective or fairness--I've read more than a few expressions of white liberal guilt. From the manufactured outrage over the "too white" Academy Awards to the deeply troubling evidence of institutional racism in Ferguson, Missouri, there's been a reverberating echo of my old college professor's lament, "I hate my pink skin." There's not just an expectation but a demand that every white person acknowledge complicity in every act of race-based nastiness. We're all Cliven Bundy, they say…we're all George Zimmerman…we're all SAE frat boys and their house mother. The racism implied in that expectation is lost in the righteous fervor of those who hold it. To say all Muslims must "own" beheadings in the desert, or all African-Americans must own black-on-black gang killings in the cities, or all whites must own gross racial injustice in Missouri is bigotry plain and simple. It's the bigotry of those uncomfortable in their own skin and out to make everyone else uncomfortable in theirs. 

And to take shame and blame for various bad acts because they were committed by people of the same skin color is nonsensical and offensive. As it would have been for my old professor on the day Hugh Thompson and Larry Coburn received their medals for heroism at Mai Lai if he had been inspired to declare his love for his pink skin. A racial crime is a crime against basic human decency; a racial triumph is a human triumph. Allegiance to bad or good is not a matter of biological distinction, it's a matter of moral distinction.