Note from a white man

We're not that old, "white people." That malignant thought only really enters the world with it's corollary, the racialization of slavery. Oh, there were pale, pink people before then; whole tribes and nations of us as long ago as the Romans. We've been around, but we didn't get around much before, say, the Vikings, and they weren't much for larger commonalities of identity. It wasn't until a justification was required for the ownership and exploitation of whole "new" continents in the 17th century that we cleverly came up with the systemization of pigment.

I say "we," grudgingly. By any estimation, I'm as blue-eyed and pink skinned as they come. I was a strawberry-blond before the hair went and the beard went white. I was born in the United States of American, so I was raised in  racism and hope of a better day, so... I'm a white man.

One wants to say it's nonsense. Having reached middle-age, I can only wish it were. I have lived long enough to see the tatterdemalion standard of "white supremacy" not only raised again from mire, but spread out across the wide world to places undreamed of by the Klan and the White Citizens Counsels of my earliest childhood. That the discredited fantasies of reactionary American racism should now be heard openly again in the uncivil discourse of our politics -- to say nothing of the White House itself -- is horrifying enough. That this poisonous lie should be quoted, and a sitting American President admired for his espousal of it by a small minded mass murderer on the other side of the world, makes me ashamed again of my history and ours.

In the past two years I've read more than one racist rant on the social media pages of people I know just well enough to know they are my people. They are from the places I'm from, from circumstances I recognize as all too familiar; otherwise decent people who work hard, who love their families and care for their neighbors, worship their God on Sundays and pay their taxes on time. Not all of them are even as old as I am. Some are the children of the people I knew growing up.  Some are so young they might be my grandchildren. I've read words I hadn't thought to ever hear again -- in public at least. Poor people, most of 'em, blaming even poorer people for exploiting the system that actually oppresses them all. These are white people who can count on one hand the people of color they know, just as I could in my youth, white people who are comfortable again using epithets I was embarrassed by in my grandparents' generation. These are people who may never have so much as met a Jewish person, or knowingly thanked a Muslim for so much as a menu, and these same white people now blame Jews and Muslims, immigrants and people with longer pedigrees in this country than their own for "ruining" this country. It is as if we had forgotten what it was to be ashamed.

It is as if a monster from the dark under my childhood bed should now walk straight into the light of this day and laugh that I should ever have imagined him gone.

But that's because I am a white man. Being a white man allows that forgetfulness. Others can not afford that inattention. That's what privilege is, for any of us who might wonder at that word and think it inapplicable to the poor, or the otherwise decent, to ourselves, our friends and neighbors. Privilege is the luxury of shock. It costs us nothing but thoughts and prayers.

I was raised with the ideal that I was the equal of any man. Embarrassed now by the unquestioned inequality in that statement. I remember being shocked when I first encountered "white supremacy" as an ideology to think that anyone could be thought to be inferior to a white supremacist. I am abashed to think I ever thought such ideas mere relics of our past.

Violence and hatred are as much my inheritance as white man as the kindness and charity I was actually taught by the good people who raised me. To reject racism is a duty, not a choice. To mourn the innocent is where we start, not all that they are owed. I can only work to not make being a white man any part of the definition of who I yet hope to be.

I will not say the names of these murderers. I will not dignify their brutality and their ignorance by affording them the courtesy. But neither will I allow myself to forget for a moment that they are as much a part of me as the people I love and admire.

In his poem White Houses, the great African American poet Claude McKay says:

But I possess the courage and the grace
To bear my anger proudly and unbent.

I must take his example, and bear my own anger, and my part in his. 

The Muslim prayer for the dead, the Ṣalāt al-Janāzah, as I understand it, is performed to seek pardon for the deceased and all dead Muslims. Last night I watched the faithful, all over the world, offer this prayer. I watched people all over the world, of every faith and without any, mourn for the innocents murdered in Christchurch, New Zealand. I also saw the President of the United States of America, yet again, fail to condemn "white nationalism." This was the same President praised in the killer's manifesto as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.”

As a white man and an American, I seek the pardon of  those present and absent, the young and the old, men and women, who suffer the consequences of such blind arrogance, our hubris, and our hate.
I can only hope, with the poet, to "possess the courage and the grace" to be better than we, than I, have been.

And to never forget again.