No one likes when their highly contrived and comforting myths evaporate right before the eyes.

Some of the Charlottesville Nazis, Klansmen and white supremacists have lost their jobs as teachers, police officers, customer service representatives, food servers, electricians — vocations of all types back home after being identified and exposed on national television.
Generally, the public response has been “Well, that’s what they get! After all, racists deserve about anything that happens to them once they are found out!”
But really, isn’t some of that broadly negative reaction due to how the Charlottesville bunch overwhelmingly embarrassed white America? These Nazi white supremacists looked and behaved in a way that shamed and shocked American whites because there was no wiggle room in what was seen.
White folks were unceremoniously yanked from the squishy, comfortable highly contrived post-racial colorblind dream society right into the opening scene of a riot intended to start a race war.
No one likes when their highly contrived and comforting myths evaporate right before the eyes.
One minute Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts says racism is dead, America is now colorblind and so there is no need for federal protections. Then suddenly swastika-bearing, torch carrying, assault rifle-toting good ol’ boys are on TV, marching into the heart of America.
Why is it then, that when black folks or other people of color complain of racist treatment from a boss at UPS, let’s say, or from police officers or food servers or salespeople at department stores, we’re told it’s just our imagination? We’re making too big a deal of such occurrences, the majority culture tells us.
Seems like a Nazi or a white supremacist must carry a torch or be adorned in Nazi or Klan regalia while carrying an assault rifle before any claims of racism are given even a cursory review.
I mean, where are y’all shocked white folks when your boss passes over better qualified black folks for promotions or raises? When people of color cannot crack into the high echelon of jobs in high tech, for example, where is your outrage?
After all, the racists you saw in Charlottesville were a representative sample of Americans, right? They came from around the country where they held jobs as bank managers, physicians and elite educators and administrators, didn’t they?
Some of them are, it follows, in your communities right now using their power to carry out racist behavior. Are you OK with that because they are in their everyday civilian clothes, they’re using their “inside” voices and their behavior is genteel, fluid and require too much scrutiny for any reasonable person to keep attack of?
Unarmed black people shot down by police like rabid dogs in the street? “Well, darn it, why aren’t black people more careful when they are around the police?” the majority culture asks.
The US is bombing Yemen, a small poor black country with no military, into near oblivion, at the request of Israel and Saudi Arabia. Majority culture says “Well, ISIS and Al Queda might be in Yemen trying to help Iran so we gotta step up the bombing!”
America is bombing people of color worldwide with drones and killing civilians by the thousands in the process — “collateral damage,” our annihilation becoming nothing more than a time-won euphemism. “Well, says majority culture, “we’re doing all we can, but the drones stop terrorist plots, so we are actually saving lives.”
Here in North Carolina, we marvel as our state legislature defies the order of the United States Supreme Court to draw election districts that do not exist solely to dilute black voting strength. Despite losing court battle after court battle, North Carolina stubbornly hangs onto its gerrymandered racist election districts.
My point is that while racism still has America’s neck securely trussed in a dreadful, grace-destroying hangman’s knot, white outage over it only becomes kinetic (and then only rhetorically) when racism is symbolically embarrassing to white folks and their institutions — NOT when racism quietly, methodically and systematically grinds poor people and people of color into dust each and every day not just in America but all over the world.
We can (and should) deal with the former, the statues, flags and marches meant as racism-enforcing symbolism, but the latter has the real work in it — the need to attach the rope of truth around the neck of racist policies and drag them off the pedal of legitimacy in our public lives as well as our public spaces. Liberals are complicit in the former and often terrorized of or indifferent to the imperative for the latter.
Ajamu Baraka states this well in concluding a recent piece he wrote. He states:
Trump and the alt-right have become useful diversions for white supremacist liberals and leftists who would rather fight against those superficial caricatures of racism than engage in more difficult ideological work involving real self-sacrifice — purging themselves of all racial sentimentality associated with the mythology of the place of white people, white civilization and whiteness in the world in order to pursue a course for justice that will result in the loss of white material privilege.
I differ from Baraka only in this way: I seek the extension of “white privilege” to all people. Ours is an aspirational and creative existence, meaning when life is good for all, it is not so at the loss of white folks. We need to bring forward the creative aspirational embrace of the future, free of irrational fear.
Or we’re probably all doomed.
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