Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [45]
A New Breed of Racism
That does not mean, however, that racism is dead. It has simply mutated. Amy Ansell, a professor of sociology at Bard College, writes of “a new breed of racism” that has been carefully sanitized. The new breed avoids overt hostility and notions of racial superiority, focusing instead on “the alleged threat blacks pose—either because of their mere presence or because of their demand for ‘special privileges’—to the economic, sociopolitical, and cultural vitality of the dominant (white) society.” Ansell observes that the new breed of racism has adopted “the vocabulary of equal opportunity, color blindness, race neutrality, and, above all, individualism and individual rights.”10
Of course the individual rights that concern the new racists are those of white people. They argue that affirmative action policies discriminate against whites, especially white men. They complain that federal social programs like welfare and health care “redistribute” resources to noncitizens (read, Latinos) and the undeserving poor (read, African Americans). They fret that “American” culture is being diluted and that white populations are being overwhelmed by minority population growth and waves of immigration. The new breed of racism has retained the “us versus them” mythology of the old breed, but it has transformed “them” from inferior brutes to privileged cheaters and trespassers who have been taking advantage of and oppressing “us.” In other words, the new breed of racists practices persecution politics.
To be clear, not every objection to affirmative action, welfare, immigration, and so on is founded on persecution paranoia. There are reasonable cases to be made against any of these policies. Affirmative action is particularly troublesome because it is by nature discriminatory. Over the years, the courts have carved a torturous legal path that rejects numerical race quotas but permits consideration of race for the sake of promoting diversity. The dissenting Supreme Court justices and many of their supporters who call for complete race neutrality are not paranoid racists.
But it’s usually quite easy to distinguish reasonable opposition from fear-mongering persecution politics. Just look for us-versus-them rhetoric and self-righteous squawking about civil liberties from people who show little enthusiasm for racial equality except when they believe that their dear “European Americans” are threatened. Code words like special privileges and reverse racism are dead giveaways. The new racism is not a principled objection to excesses of the civil rights movement but a distorted imitation of it, a dark two-dimensional shadow that mimics the movement’s profile and gestures.
The Fightin’ Little Judge
The founding father of the new racism was not a Republican but a Southern Democrat named George Wallace. Alabamans called him the Fightin’ Little Judge because of his prowess as a bantamweight boxer in his youth. He looked the part. With heavy eyebrows made for glowering, a robust jaw made for jutting, and thick, dark hair made for Brylcreeming, Wallace could easily have starred in an old Hollywood boxing flick. As a federal judge in the 1950s, Wallace developed a reputation for fairness and tolerance—relative to the norms of Alabama at the time—and the NAACP endorsed his first gubernatorial campaign in 1958. But after his KKK-backed opponent trounced him in the race, Wallace confided to an aide, “I was outniggered by John Patterson. And I’ll tell you here and now, I will never be outniggered again.”11
Wallace kept his word. In his second campaign for governor in 1962, he made “segregation forever” the centerpiece of his political strategy. When a dismayed supporter asked him why, Wallace explained, “You know, I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about niggers, and they stomped the floor.”12 Sure enough, white Alabamans adored the new George Wallace and elected him governor