Yet again, I’m going to be fashionably late getting this out, but it’s been sticking in my craw for a little while now, so here goes nothing.
For all the attention paid to the back-and-forth over healthcare, our ongoing difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan, an economy that’s still apparently built on feet of clay, and a myriad of other issues, the one thing that’s really beginning to piss me off is the lack of anything resembling intelligent debate coming from the Right. It isn’t as though the proposals currently being floated to resolve any of these problems are so perfect as to not need, or deserve, thorough debate. But what we’ve gotten instead is more smoke than substance. Rather than disrupting, trying to pre-empt, or attempting to shut down, the debate, I would much sooner see something approaching concrete and realistic proposals.
What we’ve gotten instead is… this: Glenn Beck informing people that “Obama has a hatred of white people, of white culture.”
The question is, what “white culture”? I think it’s idiotic to talk about a singular, monolithic “white culture” in the same way I think it’s pretty dumb to put a Jesse Jackson or an Al Sharpton out front as a “black leader.” For all the complaints from the right about multiculturalism, the plain truth is that the United States has, from its earliest times, been multicultural. It isn’t just differences in skin color that create identity; even people who self-identify as Americans without any kind of hyphenated modifier being involved will generally acknowledge that they’re not rooted in some nebulous white-ness, but in a specific set of identifiers. Their ancestry comes from Ireland, Poland, Germany, what-have-you, and while people leave the physical geography behind them, they invariably bring something of the psychological geography—language, cuisine, customs, folkways—with them when they emigrate.
So “culture” is a slippery, constantly shifting, thing. The immigrant may displace some of the “old” that they brought with them with some of the “new” with which they find themselves surrounded, but it goes both ways; assimilation is never so straightforward that, like the Borg in Star Trek, “resistance is futile” and everyone looks, thinks, and acts the same. The immigrants usually also give back, changing the society in ways that are no less profound for being more subtle on the surface. Our language, our politics, and ways of thinking, have all been changed by the influx of new blood, generation after generation.
On the other hand, let’s look at who keeps bringing this up: Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and others of that ilk. If this sounds at all familiar, it’s at least in part because we’ve been here before. There’s an impulse that’s reared its ugly head, in America and elsewhere, in years past that’s concerned itself with racial and cultural “purity.” It’s disingenuous at least in part because America isn’t the only “melting pot” society out there, only the most thorough. Germany in the 1930’s (and again more recently with the influx of migrant labor), the United States from roughly 1880-1924 (the first great wave of immigration, shut down by legislation in the 1920’s) and again more recently, France, and a host of other countries, have had to deal with racism, anti-semitism, and xenophobia as they’ve coped with new additions to their societies.
The other reason this sounds familiar is because some voices—the CSA, Aryan Nation, and others on the far, far right—have kept up a steady drumbeat of this crap since the 1930’s. They don’t see America for what it is, but instead as what they’d rather it’d be. No dogs, no blacks, no Irish, as the signs used to say. They’ve defined culture as a narrow set of identifiers—fundamentalist Protestantism, “racial purity” (read: no intermarriage or other associations with “outsiders”), and above all, white skin—and cannot come to grips with a society whose advances have, in large part, left them in the dust.
Hybridization and diversity work the same in culture as they do in biology; there’s a vitality and adaptability at work that’s largely absent in a more homogeneous population. We’ve seen periods of unrest at various times in history when societies have undergone big transitions—from the law and order of the Roman Empire to the chaos of the Dark Ages, for instance, or the wrenching changes as Western society transitioned from agrarianism to industrialism in the industrial revolution—and the present transition (which, if we wanted, we could term a transition from isolation/segregation to integration and social justice) is proving to be no different. What remains in question is how widespread the birth pains will be, and how else they will manifest in the broader culture. One thing is already clear, though; the arc of history, as it’s currently unfolding, presents itself as a threat to a shrinking number of people who refuse to give up the privelage that they’ve held in society up to this point. The irony is that for all the talk of preferences and affirmative action, they want to be the last to surrender the very preferences they once conferred upon themselves. This has the potential to get ugly, and the words and actions of Beck (and others of his ilk) suggest they see profit in ugliness.
I reserve the right to call bullshit when I see it; this is one of the occasions on which I choose to exercise that right, and more occasions will no doubt present themselves in days to come. With so much at stake, that’s more than a bit of a shame.