THE BIG WHITE LIE*

This has never been a "white" country

All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.

Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the World and Me

 

I’ve been exposed to America’s racial paradigm for three-quarters of a century; what I write here is based on what I’ve lived and what I’ve learned from reading history in works other than official classroom texts. As the PBS documentary Race: The Power of an Illusion explains, “Race has no genetic basis.” Instead, it “is a powerful social idea that gives people different access to opportunities and resources.” However, scientific data means nothing in the presence of this powerful social imperative.

The murders of Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Michael Brown are high-profile examples of how racism permeates American society. These murders rekindle the fear that I, and most parents of black male children, live with daily. We know that at any moment some person (police officer, random gun-toter) could see your child’s black maleness as a threat that has to be eradicated. And numerous precedents have taught these would-be “guardians” they will not be punished for these murders. These cases remind us yet again that some things haven’t changed in the last 150 years. In 1857 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sanford that blacks “have no rights which the white man is bound to respect . . . .”

It has been dismaying, although not surprising, to see racism’s ugly head spinning wildly after Barack Obama was elected President of the United States. Having our first black president seems to have unhinged a sizable number of Americans, most visibly those in the Tea/Republican Party, but thankfully they are not the majority. These people are outraged at having a black man in the White House and, in addition to insulting the president in every possible way they can think of, they are passing and pushing for laws to take us back in time, to their “glory” days. Apparently they’re longing for the time when people who were not white and male couldn’t vote, let alone run for president. To achieve that end they are erecting new barriers to the right to vote, especially for black and brown folks. This is one step back to the days they long for when only propertied white males had voting rights. 

For these disturbed Americans, President Obama’s election has concretized the warning that Patrick Buchanan has been issuing for years, most specifically in his book, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. “Third world” is his euphemism for people who are not white. That title, and the mythology of a white America that so many want to return to, represent the Big White Lie. 

THE ONLY INVASION

The only “invasion” of America has been by whites—people who looked like Buchanan. This has never been a white country. There were no whites (i.e., Europeans) here when the first immigrants showed up uninvited, but were welcomed. Then these immigrant Europeans utilized their more efficient weaponry to invade and occupy the land, systematically displacing or killing the indigenous people. They succeeded in taking control, but the original inhabitants they dubbed “Indians” survive and continue to have a presence, however marginalized, in their ancestral homeland.

Europeans had been engaged in the capture and sale of Africans for more than a century when they “discovered” the New World. So it was a no-brainer in 1619 to bring Africans across the Atlantic to do the back-breaking work of developing "their" new country and making the most of the land’s resources. Europeans held the reins of power, but the country was not “white” because the original inhabitants were still present, and the number of Africans was rapidly increasing, especially in the South, where much of the slave labor was concentrated. In what was to become the United States, immigrants from Europe gradually set aside their disdain for each other—muting regional prejudices and national differences—to become “white”and thereby establish a cohesive group superiority over the “nonwhites” in their midst. The population of “colored” people expanded exponentially as white males took advantage of their power to rape the “inferior” women. The offspring of these legitimate rapes further diminished the percentage of whites. 

In 1848 the Treaty of GuadalupeHidalgo placed a significant portion of Mexico (including what are now the states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and part of Colorado and Texas) and Mexicans within the United States, increasing the number of “colored” citizens in America yet again. 

The suffusion continued with the importation of Chinese laborers to build the Transcontinental Railroad completed in 1869. Then the U.S. acquired Puerto Rico (there are more Puerto Ricans in this country than in Puerto Rico) the Philippines, and Guam after defeating Spain in the 1898 Spanish-American War. 

American imperialism brought along other “nonwhite territories” like Samoa, the Virgin Islands, Alaska and Hawaii, the latter two admitted as the 49th and 50th states in 1959. The “nonwhite” people living in these territories are all Americans, although they are not allowed to vote in national elections, or the U.S. Congress. (Washington, DC occupies the same dubious distinction, except they can now vote for the POTUS.) U. S. military incursions in Southeast Asia and the Middle East have spurred refugees and immigrants from these non-European areas to settle here and more are coming. The term “nonwhite” is itself the perfect indicator of the assumed supremacy of whiteness. 

Now that the national stew is nicely spiced and these people of color are exercising power, a number of whites are hysterically digging in their heels in a desire to “take their country back.” Fear of becoming a “minority” in “their” country is what built the fence on the Mexican border, toughened immigration restrictions, and increased deportations. 

Their rage for more prisons had long been fueled by a desire to re-enslave blacks—African- and Hispanic-Americans make up approximately 25 percent of the nation’s population, yet they constitute more than half of those incarcerated in the country’s prisons. Now, however, the hungry and rapacious privatized prison industry is gobbling up poor whites as well. (In 1998 an Atlantic article stated, “The United States now imprisons more people than any other country in the world—perhaps half a million more than Communist China.” And the numbers have increased since that article was written.)

What these frightened folk don’t realize is that their hysteria is much too late. Dragging their heels will only create deep ruts. It’s inevitable, people of color will be the majority, and soon. Not because of any “invasion” as Buchanan and others want us to believe. Rather, this demographic shift is a result of long-standing official U.S. policies and imperialist practices that created a racial paradigm in the United States dating back to the first European immigrants. 

Award-winning writer John Edgar Wideman described a racial paradigm as “a vision of humankind and society based on the premise that not all people are created equal and some are born with the right to exploit others.” And this is how it operates in this country that purports to be a democracy.

With the media’s constant barrage of statistics, African Americans are not allowed to forget that we are regarded as not measuring up to the white standard. That makes it easier for officials and others to see African Americans as disposable. For many years we were the defective ethnic group, but as their numbers increase, the alarmists are now focusing on Hispanic Americans. Since 2001, people from the Middle East, or those who look like they could be from that area, have been added to the list of suspects. 

Racism is integral to who Americans are, to what the U. S. has been since its inception and still is. Yet, only in recent months have some tentatively acknowledged its existence, while most are still in denial. What is never mentioned, or hardly even alluded to, is that despite their status as the standard to which everyone else is compared, some whites feel the full measure of their inadequacies until reminded that at least they are not black/Hispanic/foreign, at which time they can swell with pride. 

Many government officials, political leaders, media, pundits and others continue to invoke the Big White Lie because that lie helps them maintain control over those who have no power aside from what their skin color supposedly confers. 

*adapted from the essay of the same title in the collection, Not All Poor People Are Black and Other Things We Need to Think More About.