When you don’t have to think about something, you generally don’t. This is the problem of privilege. White people don’t have to think about the point of view of people of color. Men don’t have to think about the point of view of women, straight people of gay or gender-variant people, wealthy of poor, free of those in prison. If your position is comfortable and safe relative to someone else’s, it takes a monumental, sustained effort to leave that comfort zone and feel someone else’s perspective without quickly falling into the easy traps of condescension, such as charitable contributions and the assigning of false consciousness, that seem compassionate on the outside but allow the giver to unconsciously maintain the same spiritually destitute perspective.
I think white America is at a turning point. Last week my white, middle-class family spent ten hours in an emergency room waiting for a doctor to see my 84-year-old wheelchair-bound father – a man who fought in World War II, worked all his life at a tedious job, supported a family, did all the things he was expected to do. He had fallen down and hit his head – a bloody mess, but all he needed was twenty stitches. We sat beside a weeping young woman who had also fallen down and whose tooth was sticking through her lip. She waited ten hours too. As did the two people with broken legs, the ambulance arrivals, and the whole annex full of children in various states of misery. None of us had any choice.
This is not a new scenario for the poor and the marginalized – I heard similar stories about the Charity Hospital emergency room when I lived in New Orleans almost twenty years ago. The waits were not as long as they are in the current health-care crisis, but the insanity of the sick and injured being compelled to wait hours for care due to purely socioeconomic factors is the same. What is politically significant is that it’s happening to white middle-class folks now.
My whole country is becoming a ghetto. Under constant surveillance, economic stress, inadequate social services, and yet this transformation is still invisible to the continuing blindness and unconscious cruelty of the remaining privileged few.
The outrage, and even the mild discomfort, of white people over the words of the Reverend Jeremiah White exemplify the unconscious ignorance of the privileged. Because it requires so much effort on the part of the listener, it’s no fun for the privileged to hear the truth from the “other” perspective. It asks you to work. Who want to work? Isn’t life all about getting the maximum return for your investment, even spiritually and intellectually? I would guess most of our economically privileged are privileged because they follow, and have probably internalized, the basic principles of maximizing returns – whether they learned it the hard way or from their parents is irrelevant. It’s an ideology, the “naturalness” of free-market individualism having been psychologized hundreds of years ago in Western “Enlightenment” thinking by our friends like Locke and Hobbes. All we have to do is look out for ourselves. There is no moral imperative to care.
I only participated in the ten-hour emergency room vigil for a few hours – I had a plane trip to pack for. I called my stepmother’s cellphone at 10 p.m. – hour six – to see if they needed me. She said no, they were already in a room now and would be taken care of any minute. When I called the next morning, she said they finally got out of the hospital at 2 a.m. For twenty stitches. Then I was taken to the airport, bound for visits to Political Science graduate programs in the Northeast, burning with rage at my father’s and the tooth-girl’s mistreatment by, and vulnerability to, a pathologically imbalanced national economy and “health care” system.
You have to understand something about my father to see the significance of this series of events. My father is the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the Golden Age of Greece. He is Plato and Galileo and John Stuart Mill. He is the triumph of reason over the dark night of religious ignorance – atheist, secular humanist, scientist, former communist, realist artist, engineer, peace activist, civil libertarian. He rails against the conservatives and still flies his flag every Fourth of July. He critiques this country and has been willing also to die for it. He flew fifty-one missions over Germany. And like the Enlightenment Man, he has had some myopia. He has “a few Black friends.” He calls women girls sometimes. He thinks gay people are superior in intelligence and creativity. (Well, ok, he got that right.) He spoils his daughters, though it looks like liberty, and lays unreachable expectations on his son, though they are always unstated. I was allowed almost absolute liberty as a child, to the degree that I have had to learn about boundaries and self-discipline the hard way, as an adult. (A problem of too much democracy?) While we are free to become whomever we please, and are praised for our progress, some invisible Platonic ideal hangs constantly over our heads: who we become is never enough. Religion and spirituality cannot be discussed. But over all, I agree with the general opinion of almost everyone who meets my father. He is a wonderful man and he must be a cool dad. Yes, he is, and I’m very proud of him.
He was diagnosed with ALS a couple of weeks ago. He kept falling down. Older people almost never contract ALS – it’s a “young man’s disease.” My dad was the picture of vitality until a few months ago, flying his airplane, walking the dog every day, proud of his health and attributing it to his positive attitude toward life. Now, all of a sudden, his brilliant mind can’t tell his muscles what to do. We are all devastated, and there is no telling how or at what speed this disease will move.
I am his seed. For my whole adult life I took the liberty to pursue happiness, as a musician, artist, and lover. While disdaining calcifying institutions, I still believed in the critical importance of education (my sister became a teacher, my brother should have several autodidactic PhD’s by now); while disdaining Western masculinist literary culture I still get misty over the Great Books (my sister is now a librarian, family gatherings always see somebody with their nose in a book); while exploring alternative spirituality and seeking intuitive feminine wisdom, this wisdom still strains against a rational humanist skepticism in my mind (my brother converted to an orthodox religion for many years, but one with a strong intellectual discursive tradition.) And though for most of my adult life I rejected political involvement and awareness in favor of “personal growth,” I am now a born-again activist looking at graduate work in Political Theory. I can’t escape Plato. Well, can any of us?
Now back to the airport.
Still breathing through my anger and frustration over the emergency room, I went as calmly as I could through the security check. They told me I couldn’t bring my bottle of water through, so I went back outside to drink it. Coming through the second time, I guess someone read my rage; though it had gone through fine the first time, this time a belligerent, clearly ex- (or wanna-be-) military security guard carried my suitcase around a corner and came back with a baggie full of my shampoo, lotion, and deodorant. He asked me scoldingly if I knew what a ziplock bag was. I calmly told him yes. He told me condescendingly that he wasn’t going to trouble me with the very important security reasons, but that from now on I needed to put my little shampoos and lotions in one, and that my deodorant bar was over the liquid limit and he was doing me a favor to let me keep it. He talked to me as if I were a misbehaving child.
Marilyn Frye calls this the “double bind” – when you are enraged over your treatment, but showing that rage can get you in worse trouble. So you are forced to put on a happy face. A shit-eating grin. It’s a familiar feeling for folks of color. Look at the trouble Reverend White has gotten Barack into just by letting out some of that rage, years ago. It’s also familiar to women. How do you keep from looking like a “hysterical” (from the word for uterus) bitch when you finally blow your top at being treated like a child?
I got about halfway from the security checkpoint to my gate, and I just let it out. I started making animal retching noises like a Black woman at her son’s funeral. Then I fell on my knees sobbing for my violation by that security officer, for my country, for the Home of the Brave crippled by stupefying fear, for the way it treats its veterans (my dad told the hospital orderly about the “fifty-one missions over Germany” as he was helped out of the car. I think it helped get him into triage early, but he still had to wait as long as everyone else for actual care. Which is really only fair, in a boneheaded Aristotelian way.) I doubled over my suitcase and wept for the people in emergency rooms all over the country, for the mothers in Iraq, and for the Fathers who thought that this nation could stand for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. For the Father who was poisoned 2,400 years ago for trying to show us what justice is, only to have his ideas co-opted and misread by generations of selfish and pusillanimous elites. I cried for the mothers of children sent off as chattel slaves to the prisons of the Land of the Free. I wept for our betrayal.
I am America. My Fathers’ child.
My hope is that when a white woman can fall down screaming a mother’s grief all alone in an airport while a nervous crowd looks on, that maybe a corner has been turned. If we couldn’t hear the wailing of the African, American Indian, Filipino, Hispanic, Iraqi, German, Japanese, Jewish, Vietnamese mamas, and all the others all over this continent and elsewhere, if we couldn’t hear the wailing of the Earth for the stripping of her forests and the undignified mass enslavement and slaughter of her animals, maybe we can hear the wail of a formerly-privileged, now-we’re-not-so-sure, middle-class-and-falling white woman.
With a strange mixture of joy and a heavy heart, I’m bundling up and going off to Canada this fall to study democratic theory from outside of the U.S. They have more money to offer me – I can live comfortably and give my mind to my studies rather than having to work, and scrimp, and read heavy theory while malnourished and stressed-out. As I prepare for this major move, I’m thinking of all the international students I’ve seen pass through the University of Arizona, here from war-torn, exploited, poverty-stricken countries, happy for the opportunity to study comfortably in the richest country in the world, but always with a subtle sadness behind their eyes for a faraway people and home. When I traded my Canadian twenty for U.S. nineteen dollars and fifteen cents for my return trip, I felt a loss of more than eighty-five cents. I’m thinking of Richard Wright making it through grade school on greens and a piece of white bread for dinner – no lunch. I’m thinking of the War on the Poor taking lives by martial law in my other home of New Orleans, and leaving wounded lying in the park up the street from my current home in Tucson. I’m thinking of my friends and family under the stress of increasing police surveillance, the skyrocketing price of gasoline and bread, diminishing salaries and wages, and of the mysterious lightness of my steps along the frozen streets of Toronto. I pray I don’t lose my edge. Because I’m doing this for my country: for all those I leave behind, and for all those to be born, and for the cultureless culture that no other culture can imitate.
This has gotten rather long. I was supposed to be writing another paper. In fact, this was going to be a piece about the Reverend White uproar. Well, suffice it to say that I agree with Cornel West: we have indeed become a “blues nation.” Even the white middle class is feeling the boot heel on its throat. The words of Reverend White and Barack Obama’s graceful and moving response to the “scandal,” and the economic stress and biopolitical security state we are now all faced with, are an opportunity for us white folks to look at the truth, step up to a more compassionate worldview, and make this a more loving country. I think we need nothing short of a miracle in the United States right now to save any semblance of democracy, and that electing Barack would be the first step toward us creating that miracle. We are the miracle. Of course, I would support Hillary too, and pray she could pull off that health care plan (but preferably from Congress.) But if McCain gets in, I’ll set up camp for you all in Toronto, ok? Because that would be a wrap for the U.S. Work for the Democrats and Greens, in Congress and in your own states. Please. And turn off your TVs – it will only drain you.
PS for my homies:
If my father’s health takes a turn for the worse soon, I will defer grad school for a year. Otherwise, I’ll be leaving this summer, with my family’s blessing, to do the work my dad groomed me for. (Oh well. Screw psychology. We do become our parents to some degree – just hopefully the better parts of them, augmented.) Yes, of course I’ll still do music, silly! Maybe more, now that I don’t have to hold down two part-time jobs. With some difficulty I’ve chosen the amazingly huge, diverse and excellent Political Theory program at the University of Toronto over the small, intimate, and surprisingly cool Social, Political, Ethical and Legal Philosophy program at SUNY Binghamton. I made fast friends with the folks at Binghamton and I’m sad to decline their offer, but there are friends to be made in Toronto too, and I find my heart is more in Political Theory than Philosophy. And the resources at U Toronto are unbelievable. I hope to be involved with the new Centre for Ethics, among other things. And the law school looks really good too. Anyway, I’ll be back to visit, and back to stay someday. I love you all. Come say hi before I go, ok? Or at least come to the party – July 12 or 13, tba.
