“Once affected or conjured up, it reminds one of a pudgy man, wearing a tie that may well have fit him when he was fifty pounds lighter, but which now cuts off somewhere above his navel and makes him look like an idiot.” – Tim Wise, Of National Lies and Racial America
The right-wing outrage about Judge Sotomayor is the kind of thing that used to freak me out, as did paranoid rantings like Frank Gaffney’s jib-jabber about “our first Muslim president.” There are a great many white folks in this country with chips on their shoulders the size of Toyota Tundras, armed with a sense of entitlement and Remington shotguns. So as a bicoastal libertarian socialist, these types naturally make me grab for the oh-shit bar. Moreso even than my left-wing comrades, pale males like these are fond of revolutionary rhetoric – and seem much more likely to carry it out. Urban radicals are too broke to afford firearms, and they have to take the bus to the barricades.
The truth of the matter is, though, outrage is cheap, like box wine, and just as intoxicating. And it’s ludicrous, in this case; as Wise continues:
Indignation doesn’t work for most whites, because having remained sanguine about, silent during, indeed often supportive of so much injustice over the years in this country–the theft of native land and genocide of indigenous persons, and the enslavement of Africans being only two of the best examples–we are just a bit late to get into the game of moral rectitude. And once we enter it, our efforts at righteousness tend to fail the test of sincerity.
However, I think there’s reasons to see hope in white outrage. First off, America is headed inexorably toward being a mestizo nation. As Nezua points out, as much as the ruling system will add more black and brown (and female) faces in an attempt to hold onto power, this country is going to look very different in a generation. Not only our ethnic makeup, though (and I remember how struck I was, when I got back to the Mainland in 2004, by the fact that you hear Spanish everywhere), but also our position in the world is going to undergo massive, epochal change. America on the way down is going to look hella different than America on the way up.
I’m not saying that there’s not going to be real danger for individuals over the next bunch of years. Some of these people are definitely going to go crazy. But I’m less worried about a Turner Diaries-style fascist uprising than I once was. For one thing: they lazy. For another: they may have the guns (for now) but we got the numbers.
“And by “we,” I mean the world.“
