White Pride

There has for many years been this binary between white guilt and white pride.  As if we have to choose between the two.  First, we are guilty of so much. And I think that perhaps because of the many reason for guilt, we have tried to bury that guilt by shifting blame and claiming a pride we are unworthy of.  But I believe we can perhaps become worthy.

I'm white.

There's no denying it, disguising it, pretending to be "mixed" with any other race or ethnicity.

I am as white as they come.

Both sides of my very large family are full of white people.

I have no idea what my heritage is.  As far back as I know, which is all the way back to both of my great grandmothers, my family comes from The United States, but I don't know where from before that, and I have no idea which part of Europe anyone is from.  We throw around "Bulgarian" on one side, "Scots Irish" on the other, but no one really knows what that means.  None of us have actually ever seen Bulgaria or Scotland or Ireland.

We are all just white.

For my entire life I have been pretty comfortable in my skin.  I have always known who I am.  I have always fought for the things I believe in.  I have always been proud of myself.  And I am quite proud to be a woman.  I love having daughters who get to carry on my legacy as a strong woman fighting the patriarchy.

But it has never occurred to me to be proud to be white.

In fact, the concept of white pride is shocking to me.

I grew up in a town that was mostly white, black, and latino.  My friends from middle school on were mostly black, some latino.  My serious boyfriends were mostly black and latino.  My first husband and my current husband are both Mexican.

I look at other cultures celebrating their ethnicity with pride, and I understand where the sentiment comes from.

Black people were stolen from their land, brought to a strange, lawless land where they were separated from fellow tribe members who spoke their language, separated from their families, enslaved, raped, beaten, murdered, and told that this was all for their own good.  As time went on, children were born into slavery; it was the only life they knew.  Children were fed from pig troughs, refused an education, raped, both boys and girls, at very young ages, separated from their parents, and the cycle continued.  It is common knowledge that people with low expectations do not often do much to improve their lot in life because the odds of success seem so low.  The slave mentality should have been one of sheer subservience.

And yet, they rose up, they rebelled, they fought their masters, they ran away.  They overthrew entire governments in the caribbean islands.  They not only survived.  They thrived.  Then, when slavery was ended by white people after the civil war, mostly because they were afraid of an outright revolution that would take power and control out of white hands, very few concessions were given to free blacks, but they persisted nevertheless.  They elected black congressmen, then opened black schools, they educated themselves and their youth, they brought cases for equality to the supreme court.  They fled the south and made new lives in strange places in the north, where they were still discriminated against, still beaten, still spit on.  And they persisted.

Black people, yes black people, created the only music that is authentically American:  jazz.  Black people did that.  Black people wrote amazing works of literature, poetry, created art, led anthropological studies to preserve their culture, their story, their language.  They went on to become federal justices, found universities, establish black townships, fight in both world wars, and thrive and thrive.  Black people led the civil rights movement, which went steps further to guarantee actual equality in this country that they helped build with their blood, their bones, the lives of their children and other loved ones.

Today, black culture is easily the most replicated, most admired, most desired culture in this country.  Everyone either listens to music made by black people, reads books written by black authors, tans their skin to be darker, wants a body shaped like the stereotypical black body, wants fuller lips, wants curlier hair, we as a society crave black culture.

Sadly, we do not love black people the way we love their culture.  But that is another blog for another time.

Black people have ample reason to be proud, to raise their fists in the air as Toni Morrison wins the Nobel Prize, as Barack Obama becomes president, as Hidden Figures becomes a major motion picture.  Black people have reason to be proud that they survive yet another generation of police brutality, another decade of the prison industrial complex, another school year of inadequate funding for majority black schools.  Not only survive, thrive.  Persist.  Overcome.

And Mexicans.

Mexican people in California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico are currently hunted down by immigration officials and deported from land that is in fact Mexican land.  The land we stand on here in the west was quite literally robbed from the Mexican people through a staged war and a corrupt bargain.  Mexicans have fought in every war the United States has ever fought in, on the US side.  They have had their land stolen, their language taken from them, their families broken up, and their history co opted.  I have a friend who moved to California from Wisconsin who didn't even know California used to be Mexico.

Mexican people make up a primary source of necessary labor in this country, and they have for over a hundred years.  In exchange they have received token periods of amnesty, temporary reprieves from persecution, and, once again, a co opting of their culture.

White people love Mexican food.  I challenge you to find a small white town without a Mexican restaurant.  We also love eating out.  We love cheap fruits and vegetables.  We love cheap labor.  All of these things are predominately provided for us by Mexican people.

Yet where is the love for the people?  We haven't passed comprehensive immigration reform for more than 11 million undocumented immigrants through two entire presidencies, yet we continue to benefit from that labor and from the millions of dollars in taxes they pay each year.  We have a tiny percentage of Mexican, or any Latino for that matter, people in congress, while celebrating a "racially diverse" congress. Spanish is the number one foreign language taught in high school as the second language requirement for college admittance, but the students who take the classes learn little to nothing.  But white people love to say "hola!"  and "gracias!"  

We have oppressed Mexican people in this country from the very beginning, down to kicking them off land they owned by law, yet they have survived.  They have thrived.  They continue to immigrate to this country and work hard, put up with our abuse, take the lowest paying jobs, and send their children to school to be educated, but also to be subjected to continued abuse.  They continue to be the most bullied kids in the US, their women are the object of hypersexualization by the media and our citizens.  Our very own governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, commented that Latina women are "very hot," apparently because they "have part of that black blood and part of that Latina blood in them."

And with all of that, Mexican people survive.  They thrive.

They are the largest minority group, and growing rapidly, in the United States, and as a result politicians have and will continue to have to pay close attention to their demands.

They produced critically acclaimed literature that continues to be studied in schools across the country at all grade levels.  Mexican people becoming increasingly interested in politics and gaining a political voice in this country.  Mexican people have discovered the secret to unity and protest, staging immigration marches and various "day without a Mexican" boycotts.  Spanish is becoming a necessity in many states in this country.  More Latinos are heading to college than ever before.

In spite of the odds.  In spite of overt and casual racism from all directions.  In spite of a system that tells them from birth that they are inferior and will never be more than servants.

Mexicans have many reasons to be proud of their heritage, of overcoming, of surviving, of thriving.

The same goes with Asians, who also have their own history of oppression at the hands of white people, going back to dear Matthew Perry telling Japan in no uncertain terms that Europe and the US would be trading with Japan whether Japan liked it or not.  Similar imperialism occurred with our Open Door Policy with China.  So, we want to come into your country, open trade ports, send missionaries to convert you to christianity, but we do not want you in our country.  Just look at the Chinese Exclusion Acts and the Japanese Gentleman's Agreement, not to mention Japanese internment during WWII.

And yet, today, Japan's economy is thriving.  China is arguably one of the most powerful countries in the world.

And in the US Asians are the fastest growing minority group, and the most successful one as well.

We can tell a similar story of Indians.

And the Native American story is perhaps the most remarkable, worthy of an entirely separate piece of writing.  The fact that there are even still Native American people alive and carrying on their history and tradition, fighting back against the US government hundreds of years after the first battle for land is in and of itself nothing short of a miracle.

Pride.  All of this perseverance is worthy of open, unabashed, vocal, fist raised in the air pride.

But whites?

What cause have we for racial pride?

I recently watched an interview with Richard Spencer, the current leader of the alt right movement (i.e. the white supremacist movement) in this country, and he had the gall to say that white people are responsible for all the great inventions throughout history.  Furthermore, he said, white people are a people of great genius and ambition.

First of all, this claim of invention is profoundly untrue to the point of obscenity.  Second of all, it is reflective of the sheer ignorance and cognitive dissonance of this white pride mentality.

The first concepts of law, agriculture, tools, surgery, and yes, civilization, came from Africa.

Arabs gave us our number system.

The primary religion white people practice, christianity was brought to them by, you guessed it, a Jewish man.

The Chinese gave us concepts of civil service and the mechanical clock.

In fact, it is pretty settled truth that if not for the aid and assistance of Native Americans, the first European settlers would have all died off or disappeared the way of the Roanoke colony.

And in the modern day people of color have made numerous contributions to math and science.  I am not going to provide the myriad links to prove this as the research is incredibly easy to find for anyone with an 8th grade education.

So, what do we white people have to be proud of, as a race?

I'll tell you what:  war.  Yes, most of the greatest empires of all time have been created and maintained by white people.  The Roman Empire took over most of the known world.  Napoleon followed up by almost covering as much ground as the Romans.  And Hitler had almost conquered all of Europe and had ventured into Africa by the time he was put down.

We are great at bloodshed.  At sheer brute force. At killing mindlessly.  At taking what is not ours from people who have a legitimate claim to it and calling it "destiny," "progress," or, my favorite, "superiority."

We are also great at enslaving and oppressing, again, through sheer force and might.  We steal, we rape, we maim, we cut, we carve, we invent things like guns, atomic bombs, and hydrogen bombs to perpetrate mass killings to clear the way for our superior race.

Sure, we started the scientific revolution and the agricultural revolution, we started the enlightenment.  But what did we do with it?  And on whose backs?

We then, as a race, as an ethnicity, as a culture, flip the entirety of history on its head and teach our children in school about the greatness of white people and the savagery of the people we conquered.  Black savages raping white women.  Native American savages scalping innocent white frontiersmen and women.  Mexican thugs and rapists.  Muslim terrorists.

When the reality is that we, white people are responsible for the majority of raping, scalping, killing, and terrorizing.

This is not to say that white people don't have our own heroes.  We should certainly be proud of our Susan B Anthonys, our John Browns, our Newton Knights, people who genuinely fought for equality for all people.

But we don't focus on those people in history.  We focus on the oppressors, and we glorify them.

No, as a race, right now, we don't have any reason for cultural pride.

But maybe our day has come.

Maybe we can join our brothers and sisters of color and raise our voices with theirs.  We can fight for equality for all.  White people can use all the power we have gotten through bloodshed and war, through cunning and deception, through implementing systems that have ensured our progress and success at the expense of people of color and we can help to tear those systems down.  We can use our privilege to enact real democracy, not democracy for the wealthy whites.  We can use our skin color to shield people of color from brutality and murder.  We can bear witness to outright racism in the form of police brutality, the prison industrial complex, the school to prison pipeline, the exploitation of undocumented immigrants, and we can talk about them, call them out, all the time, we can join our local ACLU chapters, we can elect people who run on equality, we can identity people in the criminal justice system who fight for equality and put them into power, keep them in power, and we can identify the criminals in the criminal justice system, narcissistic cops, racist judges and prosecutors, for profit prisons, and take them out of power.  The biggest mistake the founding fathers made was placing the people in power.  The smartest thing the people who have power have done is keep us divided and uneducated.

So now is our time. White people can educate ourselves and take up the power alongside our  brothers and sisters of color and build a country we can be proud of.  White people can be proud of saying, "after you."  We can be proud of spreading the word amongst ourselves that the divisions we imagine among the races in this country are by design to keep us separated.  White people can be proud of recognizing that most of us are at the mercy of wealthy elite white people who have thrown us some crumbs and told us that people of color are trying to take those crumbs from us.  Distraction. We can toss their crumbs in their face and refuse to take the bait.

We can let go of white flight, we can truly integrate our schools and pay teachers well to educate our children.  In fact, we can encourage people of color to become educators, so children will see teachers of all skin colors.  We can teach real world history, teach children the accomplishments of the many people of color.  We can teach children to be proud of the human race.

Then, once we let go of our need for comfort and racial superiority, we can be proud.

Until then, we should shut the hell up and get the hell out of the way of progress.  A progress for which people will someday be proud.