So, Andrew Sullivan is posting about the “We Love America, We Just Hate the President and Most of the People who Live Here” rally in Washington D. C. today and he says,
I certainly think pent-up anger at Bush (which partisanship and religious devotion meant they could never vent) is a part of this; but the fact of a non-white, non-Southern effective president should not be discounted.
Now, if I’m understanding his overall theme, I think he’s got this completely backwards. This is mostly about the fact of a non-white, non-Southern effective president, but I’m interested in this idea that it’s also in part pent up anger at Bush that could not be vented for cultural reasons.
Because I really want to buy this, not just about Bush, but that this is a way that Whiteness works in the United States–that Whiteness is always about taking justified anger and feelings that white people have and unleashing it on the wrong targets.
It makes sense to me, that you could look at what white people are upset about other people doing or being and get a glimpse of the ways that Whiteness has fucked them over, but which they are culturally prevented from articulating.
You can see this in the South, which is primarily right-to-work, I think, with how people’s anxieties about job security are displaced onto illegal immigrants who are “stealing” jobs that “rightfully” belong to white people. The anxiety should be directed at the bosses, but, for a lot of cultural reasons, it can’t be.
And I have this sneaking suspicion that, if you were to listen closely to the stories white Southerners who want to fly their Confederate battle flags without being taken as racist are telling, I think what you hear is a struggle to deal with something they are culturally prevented from articulating.
Take Renee’s post on Thomas Jefferson. In it, she says, “It was widely suggested within his own life time that he kept a light skinned negro concubine. You see, Sally was 3/4 white and was described as a handsome light skinned woman with long dark hair in one of the few known descriptions of her.” Not only that, but Sally was Jefferson’s wife’s half-sister and there was, supposedly, a striking family resemblance.
This, I think, is the part of slavery that Whiteness cannot face. Not that this was something white people did to strangers, people white people barely considered human. But that this was something white people did to their own family members and knew it.
Your father could sell your brother away from you. Your husband could take up with your sister and sell your nieces and nephews. You could encourage your husband to sell your childrens’ siblings. You could, as an adult, rape the woman who breast-fed you as a baby.
The familial depravity that was a feature of how we did slavery in the U.S. is and has become unspeakable.
But how could it be spoken in a region where grown people still call their fathers “Daddy”?
Wait… I call my father Daddy… I think I missed the memo. How does that relate to misplaced White Southern angst?
Aunt B, I’ve been musing about these things too… and I wondered if so much of the hostility towards Obama and the attendant focus on KENYA KENYA KENYA by southern white birthers, is an overall unarticulated sentiment that he unfairly AVOIDED this American racial/familial drama you describe…and therefore is not an authentic American black man. Translation: Who does he think he is? We’ll show him who’s in charge. Etc.
This is why he’s so uppity; obviously, he didn’t get the memo from daddy. His daddy wasn’t southern.
It’s like a rumbling underneath the surface, particularly evident in the focus on Kenya… the whole gestalt seems like anger that he avoided the race-crucible that is the fabric of American history. The (white) south sees this as some kind of fundamental disrespect, sorta like bypassing the center of town for the suburbs, if you will.
Obama drove past them, and they are pissed about it. Ignore us? No you won’t, watch this…
Just some ideas. What do you think?
You make EXCELLENT points, especially about Sally Hemmings and President Barack Obama.
I think the reason some people choose to focus their anger on illegal immigrants is because its easier to target them and possibly do harm to them than it is to target their ex or possibly future employers.
A lot of people who were strong supporters of Bush in southern regions were poor and did not attain very high education levels. There were suffering and were justifiably frustrated about the economy, the war, and all of our country’s problems but projected their anger at Bush, his policies and its consequences on groups of people who were equally and justifiably upset about and at the same things who had nothing to do with causing the problems.
This, and a note that a large subset of “what cannot be spoken” is a “what cannot be thought”. The south is rife with thought police armored in righteousness and armed with white privilege and the tradition of dominance.
Cultural reasons??!
The entire point of “Right To Work” laws is that the workers are subject to arbitrary firing, at any time, for any cause, with no recourse.
In a ‘one-factory’ town speaking out against the bosses is a one way ticket to starvation.
This is the tenthers cherished dreams of 50 little tyrannies, forced on this country by slaveholders in 1787, writ large.
It’s no surprise that the swath of ‘no-rights-for-workers’ states closely aligns with the confederacy…the entrenched power stuctures in those states is still battling to keep their slaves down on the farm.
This is a power structure that’s been maintained by the threat and frequent use of violence and intimidation for centuries.
That’s not culture…it’s tyranny.
What people who cite that ‘Heritage, Not Hate’ line is that the South seceded from the Union and fought a civil war to keep on enslaving my ancestors.
There’s no sugar coating that fact, but the Southern apologists keep trying.
This is from the March 21, 1861 Savannah, GA speech of Alexander Stephens, the Vice President of the Confederacy.
Kind of makes it clear what type of nation Confederate soldiers gave their lives fighting for and it’s easy to see why the Confederate battle flag was appropriated as a symbol for the Klan and die hard segregationists..
I also point out that Nazi Germany’s flag doesn’t fly over German soil any more, and neither does the rising sun with rays flag the Japanese used during World War II.
The South lost the Civil War, but unfortunately the United States is still dealing with the poisonous aftermath almost 150 years later of the destructive ideas they pimped on behalf of the slaveowners.
The Civil War WAS about slavery, and the Southern Declarations of Secession make that quite clear.
http://transgriot.blogspot.com/2009/06/civil-war-was-about-slavery.html
This is such a powerful piece of writing.
I think you are right about the aversion to thinking about the intimacy of the slavery problem, it’s incredibly upsetting to imagine using someone you love that way. I mean, love is probably not the right word here, slavery and loving being pretty far apart, but clearly there were these one sided emotional relationships set up to serve only one person’s needs, and that’s just a nasty, nasty piece of work.
You’re right BruceJ
The North may have won the Civil War, but a lot of the crap the South fought for still unfortunately seeped into the nation’s consciousness.
One of the cars I have seen with a “Heritage Not Hate” confederate flag also had a sticker that said “If we knew they were going to cause this much trouble, we would have picked our own damn cotton.”
I think that just about says it all.