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May 30, 2017

America's Embrace of Willful Ignorance

By Dr. Lenore Daniels

This is a short essay on intolerance. More specifically, willingness of American citizens to accept ignorance as a way of being. This makes for a intolerable atmosphere where violence lives unimpeded.

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These new great men are great because of what makes them similar to the mass --a kind of crude common sense, brutality, and lack of culture. The handling of affairs may make then admirably cunning and remarkably good at the practice of politics. But to maintain their prestige and power, they must also maintain their lack of culture and brutality. They must remain primitives.

Jean Guehenno, Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944: Collaboration, Resistance, and Daily Life in Occupied Paris

Dark blue signs appeared on so many lawns. Trump/Pence.

"I just grab them by"." "When you're a star, they let you do it."

As I rode pass one lawn after and another, I thought those signs could have read: Whites Only!

Here, in Trump's Kenosha, otherwise known as America's Kenosha, I sit on a seat in the front of the bus. I walk on whatever side of the street suits me. I shop or eat at any store or restaurant downtown. Whites speak to me, and I speak to them. While the calendar indicates this is 2017, I am sure Rosa Parks would be familiar with the status quo here in the heartland of America. In other words, she would recognize white supremacy not only in the war chants of Richard Spencer and his ilk. But more important, Rosa would recognize the way Black Americans are still expected to inhabit a certain place and to do so in a certain way so as to acknowledge allegiance to the supremacy of whiteness.

When I saw all those "Trump/Pence" signs, I recalled those first few weeks when I arrived at a new campus and a new state. I had taught for over ten years by this time. A white colleague and I stood in a hallway at the university here watching predominantly white students walking to and from their classes. They are unsophisticated. I heard her in this noisy hallway, but I did not ask for an explanation. Instead, I felt as if I were miles away from her and these students. I looked closer at the students. They did not see me! I was somewhere where these young white people did not see me! And when they did, they looked down at the top of my head. Lessons from home mattered! Soon I realized the phrase referenced what was no longer contained as something local. After September 11, 2001, when the narrative of the patriotic full-fledged American made my critical critique of American politics and culture suspect and anti-American that same colleague informed me that I "didn't fit it." And this phenomena was neither local or personal either.

Creating a space for the normalization of white supremacy has been the objective of neo-liberalism's "diversity" schemes. The product of a liberal imagination fearful of losing political and economic gains, these diversity programs serve to legitimize an acceptable method for determining what guise white supremacy should adopt, particularly at American institutions of higher education. The diversity scheme is no more than re-imagined white spaces, with a few good, carefully selected, Blacks, who, in turn, understand and accept their position as the minority in the space that whites only controlled. While the one hand whitewashed progress, the other blackened the space were political policies incarcerated and impoverished the unfortunate Blacks for whom "diversity" programming was never intended to recognize as anything but the Other, that is, the "criminal."

I have not owned a television for over ten years now and rarely watched it when I did. But, in recent months, I have viewed few 1970s American television programming on DVD. Black America is present and alive! For example, in the Columbo series (1971-1978), when Lt. Columbo arrives at a crime scene, he is seen asking Black law enforcement important question. Black reporters ask him important questions. Look in the background! Black doctors, nurses, patients, and visitors pass Columbo in the hospital halls. Blacks are present as doctors in McMillan and Wife (1971-1977) or as patients in M.A.S.H (1972-1983). We are shoppers and pedestrians walking or driving on the streets of San Francisco or we are the administrative assistants in New York offices. Matter-of-fact! Unapologetic! Even in the white films, such as All the President's Men, (1976), we are not the criminal or the drug user but the natural-wearing clerk Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, portraying the Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, ask for indexed information at the Library of Congress, no less!

Maybe it was "just a fashion."

By 1983, in The Big Chill, star actors in a seriously all-white Hollywood production muse about whether or not it was all just fashionable. The it refers to their time perhaps marching against the Vietnam War or marching for the Black Civil Rights. Was it all just fashion? Rather than educate, the film entertains at the expense of those referred to as the criminal, the "guilty."

Set in a spacious mansion in the South, the characters (a successful businessman and his wife, a doctor, a lawyer, a television actor, a People m agazine journalist, and an "outsider") are alumni of the University of Michigan. One of their friends from the college committed suicide, even though it appears as if he might have been a "scientific genius"--doing "what the hell," "welfare" work! What a "wasted" life! "He didn't know what to do." Maybe Alex died for most us "a long time ago?" The outsider's observation hits a collective nerve: " Oh, Nick, give me a break!"

What has happened to you! What is wrong with you!

The friends never answer the first question: was it all just fashionable? In fact, the question is dropped as soon as the lawyer informs her friends that she had to escape her clients: she had no idea they would be so "guilty." "Who did you think your clients would be?" To which another responds: "Huey and Bobby!"

Yes, it had been idealistic! Make sure to get that message across! Now the characters have grown up. They established "priorities." Families and careers! Concern about the plight of others is not one of those "priorities." Unless you happen to be an odd balls still teacher "those Harlem kids."

Alex's suicide just cannot be understood! If the doctor or the lawyer or the actor tries to discuss Alex, the subject is changed. The changing of the subject becomes habitual.

Needless to say, Black Americans do not make an appearance in The Big Chill. No Black even appears in the background. There is a friendly police who, we are told, has kept the house from being burglarized more than once! Maybe there were Black friends at Michigan when it might or might not have been fashionable to have Black friends. Whatever disturbed Alex enough for him to take his life may be linked to the absence of Blacks among the group of friends. And in the film! But not one actor is assigned to utter a profound statement regarding this absence. As the late critic Roger Ebert noted, the film's ending provides no resolution. And worse, it suggests that the friends (that is, white liberals in general) made a mistake "back in the day." The Blacks ("scum"?) never deserved the support, morally or otherwise, from white America! I suspect this message was intentional.

Of course, the "outsider," who, like Alex, was merely a surrogate outsider, is invited in. There are opportunities for him to re-join the family of American winners. He accepts, and all ends well for the newest generation of the American white liberal class.

During this era of "the big chill," I returned to the university to work on a master's degree in English/creative writing. I remember a professor, formally my graduate adviser, in class, look my way when he first informs the class about his stocks. Yes, stocks! This was a graduate-level course in the English department of a major, predominantly white university in Illinois, and the white male professor made a point thereafter to "educate" us about the progress of his stocks on the Market. This was the 1980s. It was all over by then! Reagan and family values was in! And Black Americans were not all in the family !

Jordan Peele's 2017 film, Get Out, captures what it is like when you are Black and, suddenly begin to feel unsettled, surrounded by people whose practice of whiteness is as deplorable, committed for "your own good." Rather matter-of-fact, of violence! Good violence ! Violence that weaves in, ever so smoothly, with the fabric of any American flag waving proudly from porches of the "Forgotten."

In the past forty years, the white liberal class could have vigorously struggled in solidarity against white supremacy, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and corporatism; instead, it has become a recognizable characteristic of the class to reminisce on past involvement with the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-War Movement while playing the either or game in hopes of remaining on top.

And now Trump, and this narrative of the "Forgotten"? I can only echo Guehenno: only a "clever" writer could have come up with such an "excellent serial," requiring the "faculty for forgetfulness"--an "instinctive violence" in and of itself ( Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944).

Do Americans really want to know?

I think the majority of Americans, white as well as Black, do not.

I am seeing car stickers that read: "I'm Proud to Be A Deplorable!" I went online and discovered that anyone can purchase T-shirts that read: "I am a deplorable and I'm proud." It is a free country. When you are a star, the world just lets you do it!

But somewhere if you wear a hoodie while Black or wear a T-shirt with the words "Black Lives Matter" while Black, you could be suspected of a conspiracy to terrorize Americans. It could happen that you are shot. You could lose your life if you, too, decide to express yourself without the benefit of being white. It is profitable and therefore acceptable to rap or play football while Black rather than to think and thus challenge the normalization of white supremacy. The only expression of Black lives that corporations value is that which makes America great--Again! Because fear believes in waging war in seven, now, seven Arab nations. It believes in the death penalty. It believes no safety nets should be made available for the poor and homeless. Fear believes the deportation and separation of Black and Brown families will bring about safety and peace. Fear, too, is contagious; it drives victims of white supremacy to seek relief in a mythical future that promises to defy death! In the end, fear de-legitimizes the right to exist of anyone who thinks outside the framework of ideology and dogma, and that in turn, makes it easier for the deplorable to become, once again, normalized. Humanity is here because liberals have done well at repressing resistance and embracing willful ignorance.

It is less painful for white Americans to discuss fascism and the Holocaust--until you remind America that Nazis studied the US enslavement of Blacks.

There is a passage in historian Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017) that reminds me of our yesterday or is it our today ? Snyder is discussing the year 1933, the year in which Stalin's starvation campaigns were at their peak, and, in Germany, the Nazi Party has just come into power.

At first, Snyder explains, the Nazis try to "organize a boycott" against Jewish business. It does not work. But when the Nazis begin to practice marking these businesses "Jewish" and others "Aryan," when they did this, painting the windows of the shops with these markers, it affected "the way Germans thought about household economics," writes Snyder. "A shop marked 'Jewish' had no future." Next on the Nazis' agenda is death!

Why are we surprised climate change deniers exist, let alone are attempting to control the destiny of life on the planet?

American foreign and domestic policies, its social and cultural posture is all about the creation of adversaries. And why? So no one will notice that fascism is here! But w e never learn. To many Americans, learning is the peculiar behavior of the "enemy." It is the "devil's work." The idea of learning (reading history, reading anything other than the Bible) is a threat to a way of life that (as they see it) makes them unique! "Exceptional!" "American!" "Christian!"

Human thought has produced a repertoire of knowledge to enable further generations of humans to evolve and, in the process, to make the most of our existence in this universe. But some of us choose to dwell in darkness. This is a strange reality we find ourselves in, once again, when great men, awarded seats of power, waste no time ordering the markings that divide citizens within while acknowledging the value of dictatorships without. And once again, Americans are embracing willful ignorance as if it were life itself!



Authors Bio:

Activist, writer, American Modern Literature, Cultural Theory, PhD.


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