RAQs of rasx(): “Why do you refer to your youth as that ‘young white liberal’?”
Since you and I are not standing on the naked girders of a high-rise building under construction in the 1920s, throwing red-hot rivets at each other, my tendency is to be symbolic in my speech and writing. This has been going on with me since elementary school—in spite of my working-class background. Unfortunately, people who casually describe themselves as “Americans”—no-nonsense Americans—meat-and-potatoes Americans—find this tendency coming from me irritating. Experience informs me that they think I am “pretending” to be so difficult to understand and they are impatiently waiting for me to “act normal.” The sad irony is that me “acting normal” is, well, acting. To me, “acting” normal is acting like a Norman. What? Viking helmet? I digress…
So, what is quite confusing to a properly-assimilated American is to refer to my younger self as a ‘young white liberal.’ This container holds the same intellectual achievements listed in the wikipedia.org definition of the “east coast liberal” or even the questionable stuff in “Liberalism in the United States.”
Properly assimilated Americans are materialistic—and “white” refers to race—and the political concept of “race” translates into physical human characteristics. Referring to me as “white” literally makes no sense, as the bluest eyes can see that I do not “look white.” There is no point in discussing anything further on behalf of these people so let’s move on to address the other people who immediately see that my words are not literal. Now it gets interesting…
The first barrier separating you from understanding my “convoluted” and “indirect” answer to this question requires getting past my assertion that this white liberalism characterizes my youth. The danger here (for me) is my pointed implication that white liberalism is something that can be transcended through a maturation process. This can be quite insulting. I think I just lost the opportunity to get that mobile phone number from the coffee-colored woman with the expensive chinois curls. What’s worse is my reckless, hierarchical assertion that white conservatism is inferior to white liberalism. I think I just lost a six-figure software development job from the coffee-colored woman’s boss who makes persistent, subtle (and legal) sexual advances toward her. I could spend several more paragraphs trying to “defend” the position in this paragraph but let me not bother. Experience with prejudice informs me that merely having this discussion in a public place has me tried and executed for crimes I did not commit. I go to jail and the boss gets another super-fine girlfriend “of color”—you know that “opposites” attract, right?
So, since I’m already “guilty,” let me compress my view down to this: Justice Clarence Thomas is a political white conservative with a self-proclaimed “black perspective” and Justice Thurgood Marshall was a political white liberal with a prominent “Negro perspective.” Here in the rasx() context, Thurgood Marshall beats Clarence Thomas on so many levels. But, simultaneously, my assertion is that Thurgood Marshall does not represent the best that ‘we’ can do as a people. Name your “civil rights” hero: none of them to me represent the best ‘we’ can do as a people.
However, the suggestion has been that the leaders of the “civil rights” era represent ‘our’ singular moment in the sun. This is based on the violent assertion that the problems of the “civil rights” movement are solved. To me, this is a missionary position. Missionary systems in commerce, the church and the state conspire to remove children “of color” from their ethnic home (abstract and literal) and place them in an educational system that teaches them that the phrase “of color” is an acceptable phrase for casual conversation—and the actual names and other words of their ethnicity are made to be inappropriate and uninteresting. African consciousness is no bigger than a bucket of fried chicken delivered from a food processing corporation owned by Europeans? Fighting for civil rights allowed ‘us’ to merge into “the mainstream”—and this is ‘our’ final destination?
The mental model of “the mainstream” is as real to me as Santa Claus. And almost every American kid back in the day believed in Santa Claus. What is even sadder is the “white” imagination computer that loads a syllogism of extremism that essentially says that since I don’t believe in Santa Claus, I must hate Christmas and I want to kill elves. What is even more evil would be to perpetuate a lie like I want to “take away happiness” from children—because the limits of this imagination computer define one and only one way to make children happy—through Santa Claus. These dreams of my murderous rage and cruelty to children are a form of childish self flattery to me. Anyway, how can I kill something that does not exist?
My priority is to inform young people “of color” that Santa Claus does not exist and that they should become interested in the scientific and mathematical appropriateness of their so-called ethnicity for the sake of their health and happiness. What? Math? Happiness? All humans have a responsibility to understand their indigenous consciousness based on the surviving artifacts of the indigenous people. My assertion of this responsibility is biased because African indigenous consciousness has rewards that exceed whatever some chubby old dude brings down the chimney. These rewards, priorities and responsibilities take away too much precious time from chasing around elves with a hammer. These words are the result of maturity, emerging from a youth dominated by white liberal missionary thoughts of “advanced western civilization” eager to spread “love” and “kindness” around the world—oftentimes being cruel with military precision in order to be kind.
You are still kicking it with Santa Claus? You don’t want to lose your presents? Well he does have great toys—but the toy bill is coming… You don’t get something for nothing—this is an Inconvenient Truth. In the mean time, since you are keeping it real with fiction, let me tell you about these aliens from a fictional alien world with fictional advanced technology. They have landed on the Earth in these space-time ships called ‘empires.’ They roam in and out of the earth stealing its natural resources. Does that sound like interesting science fiction to you?
Maybe “the mainstream” in my story is the conduit through which the resources are sucked out of the Earth? The punch line of my nasty, adult story is that these ‘aliens’ are actually human but they refuse to accept the knowledge that they are from the earth. For them, to accept this means falling from “great” heights. But these “lofty” places are falling anyway… Don’t like my hokey story? Okay, then watch Rabbit-Proof Fence—only a complete idiot preparing to catch red-hot rivets from the 1920s in the year 2007 can’t see that any child raised in captivity of the missionary system portrayed in this movie will turn out as a fine white liberal. Yes, the movie is definitely a white liberal movie but the cute little elves that made it are quite talented. One should never be too old to watch cartoons.
By the way, for the record: Rabbit-Proof Fence is in my personal DVD collection. It is one of the few movies in the history of film that explicitly dramatizes the pseudo science and deliberate premeditated strategy behind separating females “of color” from males “of color” in order to breed the color out of the conquered indigenous people. This color casting in films and other entertainments usually goes unspoken in an extremely successful attempt to allow the worldwide audience to assume that there is a “natural order” based on melanin content. What is an interesting psychological effect (that is probably erroneously and ironically dismissed as pseudo science) is that children growing up observing this use of skin color assimilate this aesthetic and behave accordingly. Yes, “love” knows no color but there are billions of dollars being spent every day to influence your buying and loving decisions.