History

And 33 since the first Gulf War. What was it all about?

American democracy hangs in the balance while dogmatic centrists complain about extremism on “both sides.”

The U.S. has a long history of electoral corruption. But the last half-century has seen mostly clean elections. Are we about to return to the bad old days?

If even the Mormon Church can’t convince more than a third of its loyal followers to get the vaccine or mask up, you no something bigger is going on.

White Americans get a lot of things wrong about race.  And I’m not just talking about white supremacists.  Or people bitter about the supposedly undue attention, sympathy, and “breaks” that minorities receive, insisting “real” racism was a problem only in the past, because Civil Rights “fixed” it and anyone complaining about racism is just looking for an unfair edge in America’s level, color-blind playing field.  Or even those who simply minimize and downplay the existence racism. Rather, I’m talking about the small majority of whites who recognize that racism remains a big problem in America.  They often get it wrong.  How? Many of them think that race is primarily about black and brown people.  It’s not.  The fact is, racism is primarily about white people. Minorities suffer the effects of racism, and we must acknowledge and work to end that; however, you cannot cure an infection by simply placing a band-aid over the sore.  You must clean out the wound thoroughly, surgically if need be, disinfect it, and then attack the infection at its root with antibiotics.  In the old days it might have meant cutting off an appendage or limb.  Similarly, racism won’t end or even be substantially reduced by strictly focusing on the suffering of its victims and making amends.  Those are important and necessary first steps, but they don’t get at the core of the problem.  Minority suffering is racism’s result, but racism is caused by what white people think and do. Yes, white people should empathizing with black and brown people (with all human beings, really) and it is vitally important that whites listen to minority voices.  However, ending or substantially reducing racism will not come about until white people talk to each other and sort themselves out.  Because racism is a white problem.

Planned to publish this essay on Monday, but changed my mind at the last minute. So much for prophecy. Here’s my essay about the U.S. coming apart under Trump, as I wrote it before the Capitol riot, only one line added since.

During the 1990s, having a black president seemed so impossilbe that some people, including many African Americans, jokingly referred to President Bill Clinton as the first “black president.”  The threshold Clinton had passed to achieve this honorary moniker? He seemed comfortable around black people.  That’s all it took. Because an actual black president was so inconceivable that a white president finally treating African Americans as regular people seemed as close as America would get any time soon. In 1998, Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison brought Clinton’s unofficial title to national attention with a New Yorker essay aimed at discrediting the impeachment proceedings against him.  One of Morrison’s rhetorical devices was to check off all the boxes in which Clinton displayed “almost every trope of blackness,” including being raised in a working class, single-parent household, and loving fast food. By 2003, the idea of a black president was still outlandish enough that it served as common comedic fodder.  Chris Rock starred in the film Head of State, a fantasy comedy in which Chicago Alderman Mays Gilliam becomes a fluke president.  And Dave Chappelle portrayed an over the top African American version of President George Bush in a Chapelle Show sketch.  The skit’s running joke was how outrageous and “unpresidential” it would be to have a black chief executive. This was a recurring theme for Chapelle.  Years earlier in his stand up routine he had joked about how the first black president would probably be murdered in office.  But Chapelle was willing to be that first black president because he had a plan to minimize the threat.  He would have a Mexican vice president for “insurance.” “You could shoot me if you want, but you’re just gonna open the border up.” But then came Barack Obama in 2008.  And 2012.  And very likely again in 2016 if not for the constitutional two-term limit.  And just last week it was announced that California Senator Kamala Harris will be Joe Biden’s running mate.  Biden is currently favored to defeat Donald Trump, so Harris is likely to become the first black vice president, and eventually a Democratic presidential front runner in either 2024 or 2028. 2020 feels very far removed from the days when the idea of a black president seemed ludicrously funny, and when one could see shades of blackness in a white president because he was a saxophone-playing Southerner, and was enduring public attacks for sexual indiscretions (the real point of Morrison’s essay). Yet are we really so far away from those turn-of-the-twenty-first century ideas about race in America? Or are white Americans now recognizing that Obama’s election signaled no fundamental change in race relations aside from their own self-congratulatory refusal to still consider race important?