White America's Greatest Delusion: "They Do Not Know It and They Do Not Want to Know It."

[gollygee]

http://www.alternet.org/white-americas-greatest-delusion-they-do-not-know-it-and-they-do-not-want-know-it

It is bad enough that much of white America sees fit to lecture black people about the proper response to police brutality, economic devastation and perpetual marginality, having ourselves rarely been the targets of any of these. It is bad enough that we deign to instruct black people whose lives we have not lived, whose terrors we have not faced, and whose gauntlets we have not run, about violence; this, even as we enjoy the national bounty over which we currently claim possession solely as a result of violence. I beg to remind you, George Washington was not a practitioner of passive resistance. Neither the early colonists nor the nation's founders fit within the Gandhian tradition. There were no sit-ins at King George's palace, no horseback freedom rides to affect change. There were just guns, lots and lots of guns.

We are here because of blood, and mostly that of others; here because of our insatiable and rapacious desire to take by force the land and labor of those others. We are the last people on Earth with a right to ruminate upon the superior morality of peaceful protest. We have never believed in it and rarely practiced it. Rather, we have always taken what we desire, and when denied it we have turned to means utterly genocidal to make it so.

(snip)

On the other hand, it is undeniably true that when it comes to our political anger and frustration (as contrasted with that brought on by alcohol and athletics) we white folks are pretty good at not torching our own communities. This is mostly because we are too busy eviscerating the communities of others---those against whom our anger is aimed. In Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Panama, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Manila, and on down the line.

When you have the power you can take out your hatreds and frustrations directly upon the bodies of others. This is what we have done, not only in the above mentioned examples but right here at home. The so-called ghetto was created and not accidentally. It was designed as a virtual holding pen---a concentration camp were we to insist upon honest language---within which impoverished persons of color would be contained. It was created by generations of housing discrimination, which limited where its residents could live. It was created by decade after decade of white riots against black people whenever they would move into white neighborhoods. It was created by deindustrialization and the flight of good-paying manufacturing jobs overseas.

[postulater]

1. One of my ancestors came to New York during the Irish starvation.

A wife and new baby trying to get out of Dodge.

They came to America. Within two months he was shipped off to Mexico to fight in the War there.

Gone from the victim of British greed to a pawn of American imperialism.

He survived four years of the war despite contracting hepatitis which he ultimately died from. Then he took a land grant in payment for his service and settled in the Wisconsin woods. Died in the poor house after a stint in Mendota State Hospital for the insane.

Life is complex sometimes.

[gollygee]

2. Irish Americans were able to assimilate into the white dominate culture

But African Americans have never been able to.

http://peacefulschoolsinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/peace_and_harmony_manual.pdf

Ironically, Irish Catholics came to this country as an oppressed race yet quickly learned that to succeed they had to in turn oppress their closest social class competitors, free Northern blacks. Back home these "native Irish or papists" suffered something very similar to American slavery under English Penal Laws. Yet, despite their revolutionary roots as an oppressed group fighting for freedom and rights, and despite consistent pleas from the great Catholic emancipator, Daniel O'Connell, to support the abolitionists, the newly arrived Irish-Americans judged that the best way of gaining acceptance as good citizens and to counter the Nativist movement was to cooperate in the continued oppression of African Americans. Ironically, at the same time they were collaborating with the dominant culture to block abolition, they were garnering support from among Southern, slaveholding democrats for Repeal of the oppressive English Act of the Union back home. Some even convinced themselves that abolition was an English plot to weaken this country.


(snip)

Once the Irish secured themselves in those jobs, they made sure blacks were kept out. They realized that as long as they continued to work alongside blacks, they would be considered no different. Later, as Irish became prominent in the labor movement, African Americans were excluded from participation. In fact, one of the primary themes of How the Irish Became White is the way in which left labor historians, such as the highly acclaimed Herbert Gutman, have not paid sufficient attention to the problem of race in the development of the labor movement.

And so, we have the tragic story of how one oppressed "race," Irish Catholics, learned how to collaborate in the oppression of another "race," Africans in America, in order to secure their place in the white republic. Becoming white meant losing their greenness, i.e., their Irish cultural heritage and the legacy of oppression and discrimination back home. Imagine if the Irish had remained green after their arrival and formed an alliance with their fellow oppressed co-workers, the free blacks of the North. Imagine if they had chosen to include their black brothers and sisters in the union movement to wage a class battle against the dominant white culture which ruthlessly pitted them against one another.

[postulater]

8. Thanks for the link. I will read it later.

I see it specifically mentions Irish Catholics. I wonder about the Protestants.

My family never discussed our heritage, I had only one grandmother and one aunt besides my parents growing up. Most of what I know has been from tracking the information down myself.

All my family was in Wisconsin since the 1850s when it was pretty much wilderness. They cut trees and built cabins and farmed. I think they were not involved in either the union movement nor had much contact with African Americans, though some of them did fight in the Civil War for the Union.

And one of my mother's family was an O'Connell from the region where Daniel O'Connell was from. In seventh grade she showed me the family tree she had made when she was a child, so learning about Daniel O'Connell was my first exposure to oppression. (It was a special treat when I took her to Ireland and walked down O'Connell Street with her, getting her photo at the statue of O'Connell, then seeing the bullet holes in the wall of the Post Office building still there from the Revolution.)

[Buzz Clik]

3. Another lecture for white people.

I won't read this one.

[kwassa]

5. Do you ever read any of them?

Just askin'.

[Buzz Clik]

6. I read the first ten or so.

Do you agree with the underlying themes of each of these screeds that all white people act the same way?

[kwassa]

7. I don't think that is the underlying theme.

Clearly, not all white people act the same way, or are racist. Many are anti-racist

All whites do benefit, however, from the historical privileges afforded whites.

[Buzz Clik]

9. Yep.

[Omar4Dems]

12. I think you're mentioned in the article.

[Buzz Clik]

13. That's true, but not by name:

We are here because of blood, and mostly that of others

I'm "others."

And you're welcome.

[gollygee]

15. Then why do you reply?

There is lots of stuff posted at DU that doesn't interest me. I just don't open the threads.

[seveneyes]

4. We are not a monolith

This particular sand castle was built in the mind of the author of this guilt trip.

[malaise]

10. Just the truth

Good read - rec

[FLPanhandle]

11. I am an individual not some common thinking white borg

All these generic simpleton articles about "how all black people behave and think" followed by all these articles about "how all white people behave and think." As if neither set is made up of independent thinking human beings.

They are all bullshit.

[gollygee]

14. You didn't read the "much of" part I guess

#notallwhitepeople

[carolinayellowdog]

16. "White America" is oblivious all right, but there is a continuum on the willful aspect

Every place I've lived in my adult life has had a white population in the 50-75% range, with high levels of black elected officials. Around here, to be oblivious to the long history of racial oppression requires a great deal of willful blindness. But there are vast stretches of the country where whites constitute 98-100% of the population, and yet their attitudes can be just as horribly racist as any redneck around here. I'm inclined to cut them a little more slack than the local racists, because maybe they're not so much willfully ignorant as JUST PLAIN ignorant. I just heard an interview with the third grade teacher who conducted the blue eyes vs. brown eyes experiment back in the 1960s that resulted in a followup documentary film. The town in Iowa where this occurred was 100% white at the time. Those kids are now in their 50s and say that the experiment caused a life-changing shift of perspective. But there are thousands of other all-white towns that never had a Jane Elliott teaching the blue eyes and brown eyes what it is like to be part of a despised minority.