Cobb

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October 05, 2003

Honky Pain

I recently happened upon a discussion in which some offense was taken by a white man over the term 'Angry White Guys', a variant of 'angry white males' - the term which has been in use since the beginnings of the culture wars.

I think that the dimensions of suffering here over what seems to be little more than verbal abuse and hurt feelings could depend a bit more on loosening the deterministic grip of 'white' on whitefolks.

In otherwords, can't 'angry white males' just evade the category and say - they can't mean me? I have problems with Americans who decide to feel victimized by racial rhetoric.

Another 'fair and balanced' yet provocative response might be to suggest all of the other actual reasons Angry White Males are abused rhetorically and suggest that racism might be the last reason. In otherwords, allow non-whites to play the 'asshole card': that black person who said 'ofay' is not racist, just an asshole.

Those two things said, I am perfectly willing to accept that some term like {'greybaby', 'whitey', etc} is exactly equivalent in racist meaning as 'nigger'. There is however one important distinction, that being the material consequences (apart from the psychological) of being treated like a nigger. In other words, we can all accept that whitefolks can be hurt and made to feel small by racist labels. Now what?

I think the willingness to play this rhetorical symmetry is a trap because it masks what is most important in matters of racial justice. From my perspective all of this name calling is little more than that. It allows whitefolks to have a victim status and attribute racial animus to others in the same slippery and vague way it is attributed to them. The difference in any case is the material difference between institutional racism and petty personal prejudice. But who talks about institutional racism any longer? Rush Limbaugh on the NFL? Ward Connerly on Affirmative Action? The rhetorical dimension of defenses against anti-white rhetoric is large and all-consuming, and this is the tone of racial discourse today. The very idea that something like Proposition 209 or 54 gets on the California ballot, for example, demonstrates this verbal judo.

But I think people really must ask themselves to what degree they believe their own material success depends on their ability to track through the ways and means of racist abuse. I think we will find, as uncomfortable as it may sound, that race means the same thing to day as 50 years ago.

Where does it all end? We're here already in a post-modern hell. The suffering of the many whites on the rhetorical level suffices to highlight the suffering of the few whites on a material level. This is politically sufficient to reverse white support for adjudication of the suffering of the many non-whites on the material level. It's OK to get rid of Affirmative Action because 'honky' hurts just as much as 'wetback'. It's OK to stop counting by race because racial identification (& name calling) 'hurts us all equally'.

It seems to me that this reinscribes the same kind of white citizenship that stewed the American frog in the bad old days. One has to be invested in 'white' in order to have a dog in this fight. Otherwise it's just sophistry. This is complicated and I don't want to ascribe motivations, in fact I want to see whiteness evaded or reconstructed. But it seems to me to go beyond the matters of name calling into the politics of anti-racism that deals with things like health, crime, & wealth seems too far for such whitefolks. So long as these Americans are on equal footing in the name game, everything is OK. Or is it?

Posted by mbowen at October 5, 2003 08:52 AM

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Comments

Posted by: Prometheus 6 at October 5, 2003 11:24 AM

Posted by: Cobb at October 5, 2003 12:06 PM

Posted by: Prometheus 6 at October 6, 2003 02:17 PM

Posted by: Laura Ross at January 20, 2005 09:05 PM