A while back, a person whom I respect and believe to be fair-minded and tolerant, stopped me in my tracks for a moment with an unexpected question:
“Don’t you think you may be approaching self-flagellation when it comes to the race issue?”
It wasn’t a question I had not been asked before, although previously my views as a white man on the subject of race were described as “white guilt.”
I can’t remember my response, and doubt it was an effective argument because, to be honest, I was caught off-guard.
But, it’s a fair question, I suppose, and demands a thoughtful response.
Do I talk too much of race, attribute too many of our state’s problems with race, find racial undertones in policies and politics that do not expressly raise the issue?
After all, this person pointed out, while there are no doubt many white people who are racist, there are also many blacks who are consumed with their own bigotry toward the white population.
I won’t deny that, but I will make one important distinction. Of two groups, whose historical narrative, passed down through their generations, details example and example of racial injustice, sometimes in its most brutal form? Who is more likely have experienced racism in innumerable, perhaps subtle ways? Who is more likely to have had their character, morals, culture called into question?
Bigotry is an ugly, destructive force, regardless of race. Black bigotry is every bit as corrosive and indefensible has any other form and cannot be justified on the grounds that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. In truth, it is good for neither.
The two forms differ in one important aspect here in Mississippi, at least.
Black bigotry, for all its wrongs, is not generally adorned with power, at least not in Mississippi. It is not in a position to hold the other race accountable beyond an appeal to conscience or shame. Yet white people do not feel the burden of black bigotry in anything close to approaching the degree in which white bigotry affects blacks.
Recently, when a white person made reference to the infamous “N-word” on a Facebook post, he questioned why, as a white person, he was not permitted to use that word while, according to him, that word is exchanged routinely when blacks talk to other blacks.
He didn’t realize it, of course, but he was making a powerful statement about who controls the narrative, who determines what is right and wrong, whose views really matter.
The truth is, even today, blacks are accountable in a way that whites are not. We sit in judgment over what blacks say to each other and how they express themselves in a multitude of other ways — clothes, music, culture, beliefs.
And when blacks have the temerity to question some of the things whites embrace, it is often viewed as an attack. There is no better example than the state flag.
There probably aren’t a 1,000 state flags flying over private property in the entire state, yet white folks, at least those who can actually do something about it, defend the flag as if their lives depended on whether or not the flag they’ve never bothered to fly on their own flagpoles fly over our state-owned buildings.
The flag never meant squat to them, until those offended by its Confederate imagery had the nerve to demand its removal. There’s a word for that. It’s called spite.
Our state has been unnecessarily divided over race pretty much from the start. For the majority of that time, we have languished. We have long been among the poorest, least educated, least healthy of states. Yet on those rare occasions when race is not front and center, Mississippi has done some amazing things. When we are guided by what the “majority” prefers rather than what works best for all, we handicap ourselves in a profound way.
When whites used majority-rule as a way to impose their will, it’s wrong. Barabbas won the popular vote, too, you might recall. So, no, I am not impressed with that argument.
Maybe I’m an overly sensitive to the corrosive nature of racism. Maybe I believe it matters more than it actually does and influences our state’s present and future more than it does.
But given the choice between self-flagellation and indifference, I’ll err on the side of the former.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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