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"Personal debasement is not easy for white people (especially for white men) … The comfort of being 'naturally better than,' of not having to struggle or demand civil treatment, is hard to give up," Toni Morrison said in "Mourning for Whiteness."
"So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble," she continued.
Morrison, one of my favorite writers, was singularly focused on the odd conundrum of the American experiment. The myths it told itself and the world were (and are) convincing, albeit amid a bloody backdrop, strewn with the broken bodies of the Indigenous, blacks, and the colored, more broadly.
Freedom, and being considered a "legitimate" American, has always been enjoyed by the landed, white gentry, particularly white and male and Christian, at the deliberate and violent exclusion and expense of everyone else.
America has always been good and great. Really? The cost of this myth, this white innocence, is high indeed. People of color have always paid the price for the preservation of white power: the genocidal land theft from the Indigenous was simply called "expansion;" slavery was deemed morally acceptable by the government; Jim Crow, a nascent and violent reiteration of slavery, was considered a perfect compromise.
Put another way, for many white Americans, the retelling of the history of the United States is a sin of omission. One year, I watched a Fox News show (apologies), where four-star generals extolled the inherent virtues of America. They recounted a long list of our great nation's great deeds: its battling tyranny during World War II, its containment of the former Soviet Union, etc.
These learned and high-ranking men left out, of course, the millions slaughtered and enslaved before and after the nation's founding; they forgot the war crimes committed in that smoking cicatrix of Vietnam and Cambodia; they failed to remember how black servicemen, decorated veterans from WWII who fought for freedom abroad, were met with discrimination and murder at home, often hanged in their dress military uniforms for good measure. America, the beautiful indeed.
It then should come as no surprise that nearly 80 percent of all American domestic terrorism is perpetuated by far right, anti-government, white nationalists and supremacists bent on creating a white, ethno-state, washing away the dirt of black and brown and yellow and red people, who, willingly or not, built the country and polished it to a lustrous sheen.
Something's wrong with Johnny; the white boy's not right. And how could he be? To be fair, something is wrong with Wu, Taka, and Jun as well. Recently, a young Japanese man burned dozens of his colleagues to death because of work dissatisfaction.
In Korea, men murder women simply because the women reject their sexual advances. Chinese men have gone on stabbing rampages at preschools, and random mass stabbings have occurred in Japan as well. A Norwegian gunman killed over 70 teenagers because Europe was becoming too brown.
In New Zealand, over 50 Muslims were killed by a young white man angry of the brown invasion. Dozens were killed in back to back mass shootings in America by young, disaffected white men; one, allegedly, for far right reasons, the other for reasons yet unknown.
Violence and mass murder aren't new to the world or American history. Whole black cities were burned down and gutted by white men angry because said city was prosperous. Blacks and Mexicans and the Indegineous were routinely hunted, tortured, and lynched by white, Christian men because it was fun to do and it was on a Sunday.
(Sundays were particularly popular, where white Christians would have lynching parties after church with their children to watch. Just a summer picnic, you see, where after the extrajudicial hanging, people would cut off the body parts of the poor black soul for a souvenir). America the wonderful.
In the end, you cannot build societies off of the ruins of another, and/or the ruination of other people, and expect there not to be consequences. White men have been entitled and privy to the largesse of wealth and glory the American empire promises for the few and the fortunate.
The terrorizing of anyone not white sustains that system, and any inkling that equality is afoot, that white men may have to actually work to earn their way, results in spasms of carnage. White supremacist racism is a slow cancer, an addiction that kills the perpetrator and the host.
Only because the evil is televised are we finally noticing. Perhaps America will concede racism has worn out its utility, and throw it, and all other attendant ideologies, on the trash heap of history. Here's hoping.
Deauwand Myers (deauwand@hotmail.com) holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory, and is an English professor outside Seoul.
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