The Tribune

“Racism is deep in the soil.” - Anonymous

WHITE privilege is born from the visceral certainty that white people are inherently superior as a matter of birth. God supposedly made them superior. This privilege exists in both major political parties in the US.

But the Republican Party today is the bedrock of such privilege. The historic switch came with the passage of civil rights legislation advanced by President Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat.

The passage of this legislation upended electoral politics, resulting in the exodus of Southern whites and the majority of white voters from the Democratic to the Republican Party.

The Centre for American Progress reports: “The national exit polls have broken out their survey results by racial group since 1976, and since that year, the Republican nominee for president has received, on average, 54.8 percent of the white vote, while the Democratic nominee has garnered an average of 40.6 percent.

The report continues: “The highest percentage secured by a Republican was the 66 percent won by Ronald Reagan in his landslide re-election in 1984; the lowest Democratic number was Walter Mondale’s 34 percent in that same election.

 “Jimmy Carter received the largest percentage of white votes for a Democrat with 48 percent in 1976; George HW Bush received the lowest at 41 percent in 1992 when Ross Perot ran, splitting the white vote and dropping Bush from the 60 percent white share he received in 1988.”

Democratic candidates for president consistently fail to win a majority of white voters because the Republican Party is unabashedly and proudly the greater defender of white privilege.

All racism, especially apartheid systems, is based on the belief that all members of a particular group are inferior to all members of another group, which is demonstrably untrue.

A good friend described a compelling insight which seized him during his first year of undergraduate studies in biological anthropology.

His professor, Jonathan Friedlander, noted in class: “The differences between individuals is always greater than the differences between groups.” This basic fact destroys any statement about all of the members of a particular group.

The friend observed that Friedlander’s seemingly throwaway line forever forced him to look at people as individuals instead of as members of any group with fixed characteristics. He also notes that were he the beneficiary of white privilege that he might have not been so easily inclined to accept what the professor stated.

In order to justify slavery, it was necessary to declare all people of African descent as inferior and therefore only suited to a life of servitude.

It was also necessary to declare that even one drop of African blood made the individual inferior because one could not allow any such hybrid to be regarded as equal or superior in any way.

Unfortunately, the belief system also required the hybrid to be regarded as superior within their race because of being “nearer my god to thee”.

The beneficiaries of white privilege are so certain of their superiority that they are often shocked when a black individual outperforms a white individual.

A story is retold of a black father who was stunned by the awe in which his “very dark-skinned daughter” was held when she broke US and National Collegiate Athletic Association records.

When the record was broken it shook many in attendance at the competition, who were convinced that “black people can’t swim as well as white people”. Eventually, his daughter’s record was beaten – by another a woman of African-American descent.

A Bahamian friend who lived in the United States for many years recalls at first being proud, then bemused, then disgusted when told by white Americans how well he spoke English.

The story is but another example of the conceit of white privilege, that while there may be a few exceptional black people, whites in general are inherently more intelligent, more capable, more moral and more humane than black people.

The best antidote to this conceit are men like Donald Trump, who save for his white privilege and super wealthy background, might be just another failed and not particularly intelligent huckster, with a certain feral mindset.

But in America, his outsized privilege helped to elevate him to the highest office in the land. White membership has its privileges.

It is the sort of American exceptionalism that exposes the reality show of “the land of the free and the home of the brave” built through the genocide of native peoples and the holocaust of slavery in order to ingrain and guarantee white privilege.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, also often grew exasperated by whites asking him to explain aspects of racism of which the questioners benefitted but refused to or could not see.

In a speech entitled, “The Other America”, King articulated the diabolical legacy of whites having had their knees and institutions on the necks, bodies and souls of black people from the inception of the white supremacist enterprise of the United States: “I remember the other day I was on a plane and a man starting talking with me and he said I’m sympathetic toward what you’re trying to do, but I just feel that you people don’t do enough for yourself and then he went on to say that my problem is, my concern is that I know of other ethnic groups, many of the ethnic groups that came to this country and they had problems just as negroes and yet they did the job for themselves, they lifted themselves by their own bootstraps.

“Why is it that negroes can’t do that? And I looked at him and I tried to talk as understanding as possible but I said to him, it does not help the negro for unfeeling, sensitive white people to say that other ethnic groups that came to the country maybe a hundred or a hundred and fifty years voluntarily have gotten ahead of them and he was brought here in chains involuntarily almost three hundred and fifty years ago.”

Dr King continued: “I said it doesn’t help him to be told that and then I went on to say to this gentlemen that he failed to recognise that no other ethnic group has been enslaved on American soil. Then I had to go on to say to him that you failed to realise that America made the black man’s colour a stigma.”

A good number of white people who ask for so-called explanations as to what is going on, know full well the bounty of white privilege they enjoy. The calls for explanations are oftentimes self-serving, condescending, an attempt to placate and a denial of responsibility for the attitudes and structures which dominate.

In his “The Other America” sermon, King further explained the economic legacy of black slavery: “While white America refused to do anything for the black man at this point, during that very period, the nation, through an act of Congress, was giving away millions of acres of land in the west and mid-west, which meant that it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic flaw.

“Not only did they give the land, they built land grant colleges for them to learn how to farm.

“Not only that it provided county agents to further their expertise in farming and went beyond this and came to the point of providing low interest rates for these persons so that they could mechanise their farms, and today many of these persons are being paid millions of dollars a year in federal subsidies not to farm and these are so often the very people saying to the black man that he must lift himself by his own bootstraps…

“Senator Eastland, incidentally, who says this all the time gets a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars a year, not to farm on various areas of his plantation down in Mississippi.

“And yet he feels that we must do everything for ourselves. Well that appears to me to be a kind of socialism for the rich and rugged hard individualistic capitalism for the poor.”

Racism is entrenched in the soil and soul of America. It permeates, poisons everything. From the toxic soil extend mighty trees of racist privilege with subterranean and aerial roots, enormous trunks, insidious tentacles, and “strange fruit”, of which Billie Holiday famously sang:

“Southern trees bear a strange fruit,

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

Black body swingin’, In the southern breeze.

Strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees.”