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David Frum once hesitated when asked a question. A former White House staffer, Frum explained that his “obvious” answer, once given, would then seem so obvious that Frum would look stupid for “stating the obvious.” I forget the specific question to Frum, but today I face a similar plight regarding racism.
Such is the lot of essayists who like the joy of sharing on matters they have just learned, even if they look joyfully silly. But nevertheless, silly or not, in his blog-essay You Should Write Blogs Steve Yeager explains that we all learn different “obvious” things at different times, and he wants us to share.
Years ago I blogged my “just learned” thought experiment: I came to realize something a hypothetical sociology professor would observe as a bystander in a biker clubhouse, something a denizen of a biker club would not consciously know. If a member entered wearing a pink T-shirt then a gazing biker would feel disturbed at such an un-biker colour, without knowing why. He would yell, “Arg, what’s that crap you’re wearing?” Not from fear of a club member looking liberated, or homosexual, but from a subconscious chain of logic:
… If we wear pink, and don’t look down on homos, then we’ll soon start seeing them as equal, and see other minorities among the straight Johns as equal too, and then see all of society as equal, and then were would we be? Without the superiority of saying we do things that straight conformists don’t have the nerve to do, that’s where. EVEN WORSE: With a new consideration for others, we would be without our “felt license” to exploit society, such as by running illegal drugs. Better to clip such a chain at the first link, saying “Arg!”
Sociologists delight in ferreting out secret norms. They know, with due respect to idealists, that not all cultures and countries, across space and time, are equal, not if by equal we mean carbon copies, CC, of each other: Virtuous Rome was not the later decadent empire, Weimar was not the later Reich. “Progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability.” (MLK)
The term “woke” started with African-Americans, according to Wikipedia. It means being awake to the existence of systemic injustice. While the “progressive” Woke persons I find on the web are nasty folk who scream and cancel, I hope to meet in real life Woke who are kind. Some good woke are so aware that they could not, in good conscience, stay upright for the playing of the US national anthem. This was during the time of a spotlight on police murdering Blacks, while various people, Woke and otherwise, were responding by saying, “Black Lives Matter!”
I remember during the occupation of Iraq seeing a T-shirt at a country music festival:
“ALL lives matter!… … except ISIS, f—k those bastards.”
Folks say that racially-based slavery is America’s “original sin.” Not living in the USA, I feel no shame that I have “no loyalty to my race.” Nothing prevents me from saying “Black lives matter” or kneeling during the anthem. One of my fellow-caucasians, Megan Rapinoe, US-born, is a women’s soccer league player who kneeled and wondered, “Where are all the other white kneelers?” In her memoir, One Life, she wrote that from becoming involved in kneeling, she came to have an insight: The same guys who believe the most in “white supremacy” are the guys most prejudiced against other minorities such as LGBTQs and disabled people.
Now I get it.
Obviously— as I guess David Frum, a fellow Canadian, would know—the shortest road to equal rights, for my American disabled friends, is by going “the long way around” by reducing their society’s belief in white supremacy: Because of a “pink T-shirt” logic chain: human rights for Group A would mean human rights for group B, and then for Blacks too.
I suppose it follows that the most bigoted would need to believe the most in “American exceptionalism,” allowing them tostay blinded to how other rich nations treat their poor and their Black, and also to help themselves refrain from examining how ALL the other rich nations have health care as a human right. My Yankee cousin’s horrible healthcare has him “dying of whiteness.” You can’t hold a man in the mud unless you get down there with him.
… …
… …
Sean Crawford
Southern Alberta,
January
2025
Footnotes:
The Martin Luther King quote is from his speech at SMU, from his Letter From https://letterfromjail.comBirmingham Jail.
With schoolboy analyses,
https://www.gradesaver.com/letter-from-birmingham-jail/study-guide/quotes/#google_vignette
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Quote from One Life, page 161:
“After reading everything I could about racial and social injustice, it became clear to me not only how deep the roots of white supremacy went, but also that it was the system from which all other inequalities came. This was a huge light bulb moment: realizing that we’re not free until we’re all free; that it wasn’t a question of protesting against racial injustice as if it were my own cause, but doing so because this was also my fight.”
The Peace Corps was started as a nice response after national dismay from the best seller The Ugly American. (Later a Marlon Brando movie)
A friend was in the Canadian equivalent, CUSO, (Canadian University Students Overseas) which was started the same year. His crew went off to help Americans in their poverty stricken hill country, country shown in the novel turned movie Winter’s Bone starring Jennifer Lawrence. Here’s a link to Roger Ebert’s sympathetic review.
For psychological obstacles to US healthcare, in the land of Winter’s Bone, see the excellent book Dying of Whiteness by physician-researcher-professor Jonathan Metzl
