we must end white innocence: reckoning with the 2020 election
hi there.
it’s late morning on Friday, Nov 6, and i’m exhausted.
i’m sure that goes for most of us, of course. nevertheless, i think there’s value in taking our own, personal travails seriously, in accounting for the individual ways we’re struck by the moment, the world, in which we live.
so, taking a cursory inventory of my personal weariness, i find: a body weakened by a week of poor sleep and superfluous adrenaline, a mind numbed by a deluge of ballot-related updates and speculation, and a heart heavy with the un-surprise of an electoral map once again revealing a raw-red core.
no, i’ve not been surprised much this week. i know that’s easy to say, cheap even, but it’s the truth — i was very unsure of a Biden win, and i had zero confidence in the projected, hoped-for landslide of “blue.” however, i kept these misgivings mostly to myself, buffeted by the optimism of many of my (white) liberal peers and the unspoken, if slightly desperate, cultural impulse to indulge in optimism after such a bleak year (or four).
so i restricted myself to a few dubious “umms,” and “i don’t knowwwws” in response to my friends’ poll-boosting and hopeful countdowns. i don’t think i fault them, but i do grieve the hollowness of the story that their hope implied — that narrative that Trump was an aberration, a fluke, and that 2020 would herald a much-awaited correction, an awakening from a nightmare into a more equitable, sane “normal.”
but equity and sanity have always been at odds with at least one core tenet of this country: the myth of whiteness. now, i know some of you are buckling, backing away from me already — for some, it seems unsophisticated, and unfair, to say this election was “a race thing.” and i assure you, i’m listening, and reading the other “takes” too — i recognize the economic and socio-cultural and religious arguments as well.
in fact, those issues were all a part of my misgivings — i’m more familiar with them than many of the folks who surround me here in New York. i’ve lived in “Red States,” spent roughly twelve years in conservative, suburban, Evangelical Midwest territory, where “the sanctity of marriage” (homophobia) was a key issue and neighbors proudly displayed lawn signs depicting aborted fetuses. i was raised by two Republicans (one an immigrant and a brown man, no less), fed abstinence-only and anti-science teachings at a conservative religious school, and was repeatedly told that “the poor” were only impoverished because they lacked the will to work.
these constellation of issues were cited by my white family and neighbors for their unwavering support of the Republican party — many of them were actually proud announce themselves as “one issue voters,” — the issue most frequently being abortion, taxes, or “national security.”
and, you’ll note, race is not mentioned here. if the issue of race came up at all, they’d say they had “no problem” with “African Americans” but would probably admit that “something had to be done about immigration” — and of course, crime.
does the absence of obvious racial motivation acquit them (or us)? as we know, there are plenty of Republicans who claimed to be voting for Trump not because of his racist rhetoric, but in spite of it. what to make of folks — mostly white, but not exclusively — who chose to support him for “personal,” apparently race-neutral reasons, such as increasing their 401K or his promise to “bring back jobs” allegedly been sent abroad? i.e., is it possible to have it both ways, to “hold your nose” and support a racist demagogue for personal reasons, while privately believing yourself to be innocent of his more repugnant policies?
in the past few weeks, i spent hours on the phone with voters in swing states, and few of them were willing to talk about race at all, or Covid for that matter — they focused on taxes, guns, and religion, with a smattering of xenophobia. but their chosen silence, too, is telling.
i will briefly break down a few thoughts on this, and then leave you with the words of someone far wiser and more eloquent than i.
firstly: there must be no underestimating the reality of racism and racial backlash in this country. there should be no room whatsoever anymore for denial that some people — many people — in the United States truly believe that this country belongs first and foremost to the “white race.” it shouldn’t have taken Donald Trump, or the Muslim Ban, or Charlottesville, or family separation, or George Floyd, to expose this — every year, every month, every day, white supremacy has been brought to bear on the lives of Black and brown and Indigenous lives, in broad daylight. some white folks really do hate — and fear — the thought of sharing “their” country with anyone who they deem outside their sanctified community.
Trump is only the most recent, highest-appointed embodiment of this truth.
his rise to, and retention of, power are the direct result of the ways he has played explicitly, relentlessly, on this basest of notes.
but then there are many more (including many of my white relatives) who truly believe themselves to be living free of racism, and may even disavow it, yet remain unconvinced that racial justice warrants their concern. they may have ties to law enforcement, or to religious traditions that dictate a conservative stance, or perhaps, like much of my family in the Midwest, a pride in their bootstraps-style work ethic that makes them resistant to the idea that the government should ever have a hand in taking care of (“giving handouts to”) anyone.
in the end, they voted for Trump because, well, they could afford to. they weren’t racist, they’d argue, they just weren’t persuaded that the danger Trump posed to some (read: Black/brown/Indigenous, poor, immigrant, queer, women, people with disabilities, non-Christian, uninsured, etc) outweighed what they personally stood to gain. or perhaps they were simply uncomfortable with change, and privileged enough to be content with the status quo.
in our hyper-capitalist society, the vote itself becomes “market driven,”
the ballot a currency spent
on the politician or party
that advertises the most personal,
individual gain.
tough as it may sound, i’d argue that this is racist, too. i pose that the choice to disregard, ignore, dismiss, or prolong the dignity and safety of others — particularly those outside the halo of whiteness — amounts very often to the same violent impact of any explicit racial “hatred.”
and as we watch the election results, we see that this form of racism — or white supremacy — is still alive and well. it is active, mobilized. it is powerful because of its clarity and simplicity of purpose.
this is where i am struck again by the irony that one of the most common forms of praise cited by Trump supporters is that “he tells it like it is.”
of course he doesn’t. not at all — the Washington Post has recorded 25,000 falsehoods uttered by the president during his time in office (an average of 50 a day). and i won’t even get into the very dangerous, disgraceful undermining of the democratic process that he’s put on blast in recent days.
but he does something arguably more powerful than truth-telling: he spins stories that feel like the truth his followers want to believe, tailored to match the exact tenors of certain voters’ anxieties and yearnings. he tells them that their sense of dissatisfaction, rather than being the result of the betrayal of capitalism or the false promises of patriarchy, is actually the fault of some “other” — usually a foreign-born or darker-skinned (or queer or female) enemy. he gives permission to feel angry, and a precise target for that anger. he says this anger is not only justified but righteous — it is patriotism, this desire to beat back the tides of change or to cling to privilege at the expense of others. this is what he encompasses in his catch-all promise to “Make America Great Again” — with little sacrifice or self-examination required, and a sense of heroism to boot.
i am reminded how James Baldwin, always so compassionate and so incisive at once, described the power of the same, alluring white myth to his nephew, back in 1962:
“They (white people) are in effect still trapped in a history which they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men.”
Trump’s is a seductive but profoundly immature offering, ultimately destructive to us all — even those he claims to lift up. (as Baldwin put it, Black people aren’t the only ones being killed by racism — “we are only the ones who are dying fastest.”)
yet so many still default to this belief system because, at the end of the day, confronting any other truth about ourselves would mean the total undoing of the current order. it would feel like chaos (mobs? rioting?). it would feel, for many, like a loss of “their” country as they knew it, a slipping away of identity that is predicated on superiority, competition, and masculine strength. it would mean a new division of power and dignity, an uncomfortable diversity of voices to replace the brittle old narrative of meritocracy and exceptionalism that masks so much injustice today.
it would mean growing up,
a loss of innocence,
an owning of our sins.
and we all want to believe the best about ourselves, don’t we?
even those among us who are doing the messy, unending work of reconciling ourselves to the racist systems at work in our worlds and in ourselves — the desire to blunt the truth, or to confront it only partially, will remain the great temptation for white/privileged America.
and this may be all the more true if Biden does win — if we’re not forced to contend with the grotesqueries of Trump’s outright racism, it will be all the more easy to believe we’ve transcended it. at the very least, we are at risk of losing the urgency that stoked so much inspiring, important work these last four years.
if the allure of Trump’s story is a return to glory, Biden’s message — a return to “normal” — contains its own, subtle danger. such a desire, understandable though it is, obscures that fact that “normal” has always been lethal, unjust, and “insane” for so many.
for Baldwin, true progress would require white Americans to free themselves from the burden of whiteness, to let go of their myth of innocence, to own the facts of racial oppression in this country in order to begin moving past it. and he was far from convinced that it would happen, even among those who had read the right books or even spoke the right words:
“Many [white people] indeed know better,
but as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know.
To act is to be committed and to be committed is to be in danger.”
if nothing else can be said, after four years of Trump, and this summer of tragedy and protest, many white folks do at least know better. and, for all the disappointments of this past week, the amount of clear-eyed, mature reckoning i’ve seen among white friends and online does give me hope that some more, perhaps many more, may answer Baldwin’s call. in the meantime, there are other wins to celebrate, from the elections of the Cori Bush to Sarah McBride — as we remember that history hinges just as much on smaller, human choices than the macro-level swings of fate.
i’ll leave you with Baldwin’s call now, signing off this Friday afternoon with the future, as always, unknown — and with at least some power, as always, in our hands.
“Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long possessed that he is set free — he has set himself free — for higher dreams, for greater privileges.”
Sarah
