Narratives of white victimhood are the rage these days.
From Abigail Fisher v. the University of Texas to the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, from Paula Deen’s claim of being a victim of the “PC police” to a material witness’s use of the phrase “creepy-ass cracker” in the criminal trial of George Zimmerman—there has been ample effort to imagine white people as the real victims in contemporary America.
David Sirota says, “hysterical white people are all over the media screaming to whomever is listening that white people are under attack.”
Tim Wise notes this is in keeping with history. “The cult of white victimhood has long had its charter members,” he says. “Nowadays the cult has the attention of the media and a white public already anxious about changing demographics, the presence of a black president and economic insecurity.”
I call it WDD—”White Delusional Disorder.”
People suffering from WDD experience intense and wild distortions of and deviations from empirical reality. They believe white people are not benefiting from a racially stratified society. They are, instead, its true victims.
Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on a case weighing the affirmative-action policies of the University of Texas. The court punted by sending the case back to a lower court. But in doing so, it left unaddressed claims of Abigail Fisher’s victimization.
The plaintiff claimed: “There were people in my class with lower grades who weren’t in all the activities I was in, who were being accepted into UT, and the only other difference between us was the color of our skins. I was taught from the time I was a little girl that any kind of discrimination was wrong. And for an institution of higher learning to act this way makes no sense to me. What kind of example does it set for others?”
Yet court documents show that Fisher’s high school grades and SAT scores would not have qualified her for admittance to Texas’s flagship institution in Austin. Even so, she is a victim , she says. Meanwhile, the school admitted five students of color with lower scores as well as 42 white applicants whose scores were equal to or lower than Fisher’s.
Not surprisingly Fisher and her supporters have shown no concern for the 168 students of color who did not receive admission, though their scores were equal to or higher than hers. Nor have they expressed outrage at the number of students denied admittance though they presumably enrolled in costly SAT prep courses. Yet Justice Anthony Kennedy and the court’s conservative bloc failed to account for white privilege.
This was equally evident in the Supreme Court’s gutting of Sections 4 and 5 of the Voting Rights Act. During oral arguments last spring, Justice Antonin Scalia memorably described the VRA as a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.” Thus the Voting Rights Act victimizes white America. Despite claims of racial progress, and despite fantasies that the VRA is punishment for the sins of white grandfathers (it isn’t), the VRA was about protecting every person’s right to vote.
But this is the logic that governs the cult of white victimhood.
Only in America can inequality, voter suppression, and societal condemnation of racial slurs become a moment to lament white victimhood.
A couple weeks back, Melissa Harris Perry and her guests discussed the power of images, focusing on the debate as to whether or not the public should see images of Newtown violence. While recognizing the pain and difficulty for the Newtown parents, each seemed to conclude the stakes were too high and that the public needed to see the images.
Michael Skolnick called upon Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy to release the pictures. The past reveals that the sight of images has the potential to change the course of history. Amid the gun debate, the sight of young (middle-class white) children brutalized may galvanize change. Skolnick, who later noted, “Newtown changed the conversation because they were white,” highlights the power of the photographs of whiteness.
I think that for Americans, we have to see these images. This is not about politics. This is about lifting the consciousness of our nation. We have to know, yes, these were angels that went to heaven, but this was a brutal, brutal attack on children whose hands were blown off, whose faces were blown off and torsos were blown off. This is not just about glamorizing or sensationalizing what happed in Newtown. This was horror.
Yet, so much of the conversation was about the universal power of seeing evil; that viewing the horrors of gun violence, brutality, or abuse compels outrage and action. In fact, Melissa Harris-Perry started the show by highlighting the power of images to sway public opinion; pictures shape the debate, elicit emotion, and inspire action:
So it’s a tough choice. And when it comes to choosing to show the image, the slain child, it’s a decision no parent should be faced with having to make. But it is a decision that Mamie Till-Mobley did make in the case when her son Emmett Till was killed in 1955. Instead of having a reserved, low-key, private family funeral, Mamie decided to open the casket. To make the funeral a public experience. To show how killers, lynchers, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant brutalized and tortured her 14-year-old son to death. Her decision to show the world the battered body and unrecognizable face of her son Emmett served as a spark for the civil rights movement. Till’s example might lead all of us to ask Newtown parents to release those pictures. Be as brave as Mamie Till was.
To illustrate the power of image, Harris Perry and others noted how the sight of Emmett Till, beaten beyond recognition, compelled national attention and outrage, spurring the civil rights movement. In reality, it galvanized and inspired action, among African Americans. However, the sight of Till’s disfigured body didn’t produce systemic change; it didn’t lead to legislation from congress nor did it compel federal intervention. It didn’t lead to white America to look in the mirror or confront racism because it had seen its brutality. Even the acquittal of two men didn’t propel a national movement across communities demanding justice and change. Till’s death and his life, his humanity, wasn’t, to borrow from Mark Anthony Neal, “legible.” Black suffering was and continues to be “illegible” to much of white America.
Instead, Till’s death and the horrifying images impacted Black America. Much of white America continued to accept Southern apartheid. All images are not created equally; the white supremacist gaze clouded the moral, political, and cultural responses.
It is no wonder that as we look at the Till generation, as we look into the historic archives to bear witness to the impact of the lynching of Till had, we see examples of how the lynching of Till galvanized activism from within the black community. Muhammad Ali and Diane Nash, Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde and James Baldwin, Anne Moody and members Black Panther Party all spoke of the transformative impact of Till. Harvey Young describes the importance in “A New Fear Known to Me”:Emmett Till’s Influence and the Black Panther Party”
While spectacular murders of black people, both male and female, by white individuals and mobs had occurred for centuries within (and across) the United States, the Till case proved extraordinary thanks to Bradley’s concerted efforts not only to openly display her son’s bloated and misshapen corpse but also her maternal grief for the world to see. Although not recognizable as a person – much less a teenager, the face of Till, captured by a photographer and circulated via print media, promptly became a representation of the severity of racial hatred, prejudice, and violence that continued to exist in the nation. … It asserts that the killing not only encouraged a newfound self-awareness among black youth as “black” and, therefore, as being susceptible to violence, but also provided additional motivation toward the formation of political organizations like the Black Panther Party, which advocated a more aggressive pursuit of social reform than the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Till’s influence on “the Party” appears not only in the recollections of members, who were nearly the same age as Till when he was murdered, but also in the Party’s skillful use of images of injustice to raise civic awareness and mobilize a new movement for social reform, efforts to monitor the police, and establishment of community-based, social service programs which sought to create a hopeful future for new generations of black youth.
Death and its meanings is clouded and constrained by race, class, and nation; bloodshed and violence is narrated through America’s white racial frame.
The differential levels of mourning and outrage afforded to different bodies are visible throughout history. In fact, the civil rights movement used white supremacy and codified white privilege as part of its struggle to bring down the walls of Jim Crow segregation. The Freedom Rides and Freedom Summer relied on violence against white civil rights workers to compel national attention, governmental intervention, and widespread outrage. One organizer noted that, “the death of a white college student would bring on more attention to what was going on than a black college student getting it.” In other words, the reports of the beating, bombing, brutalization, or murder of African Americans didn’t elicit sufficient outrage and action; images of maimed black men and women, and those who lost their lives to white supremacist hands, did not compel mourning or calls to action. The sight of maimed white bodies, of whiteness, marked as innocence, as civility, as citizen, and as the future, provoked a differential emotional, political, and media reaction than did violence directed at black bodies. Writing about a SNCC Poster entitled “For Food . . . For Freedom,” which featured a blond haired white child, Leigh Raiford reflects on the powerful ways that SNCC used the accepted humanity of white bodies in their fight for justice:
The “for food . . . for freedom” poster also suggests SNCC’s increased awareness of the value assigned white bodies over black bodies in the estimation of U.S. liberals, a cognizance that prompted the recruitment of more than eight hundred predominantly white, predominantly northern college students for the massive voter registration efforts of Freedom Summer. James Forman and Bob Moses rightly anticipated the media attention and general sympathy that would come to bear as young white men and women experienced, if only for a few months of 1964, the same vulnerability that beleaguered African Americans in the face of white supremacist violence. The poster speaks to the precarious situation of whites dehumanized by the matrices of race and poverty.
Pictures exist in a social context; the sight of violence and death is always read through socially-produced scripts and gaze. Gun violence is profiled racially. Victims are profiled racially. Perpetrators of violence are profiled racially; communities are profiled racially. The visibility and invisibility of death perpetuates this profiling schema; it reflects the logics of racial profiling as well.
The notion that visibility of violence or death compels national outrage erases the real world context of Trayvon Martin, who has been turned into the perpetrator rather than the victim within some parts of white America (see Fox news). Look at Jordan Davis, Hadiya Pendleton, Chicago and New Orleans. What about Oscar Grant, and so many others who have died at the hands of “law enforcement” #every28hours?
When talking about photographs, we must recognize that every life is not treated equally; every person’s humanity is not seen so much so that every image will elicit action and change. As Rebecca Wanzo argues in The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling, shaming or “sentimentality” is an “insufficient means of political change.” Substantive change, especially when we are talking about the suffering and bodies that aren’t “legible” to white America, requires more than exposure. A photograph that potentially forces white American into a moral crossroad does not guarantee reaction and action toward transformation. Consciousness isn’t a natural outcome of knowledge; it’s not all about the photo. Change results from organizing and agitation. That is the true lesson from history.
Post script
After watching the George Zimmerman trial all week, and listening to a defense team along with the media portray Zimmerman as sympathetic terms; after watching the trial and listening to the demonization of Martin, and the deafening silence as it relates to the case from much of white America, it is clear to be that a picture is sadly not always worth 1000 words. A picture’s worth is very much wrapped up in the scripts of race, gender, class, innocence, criminality,
In 1852, Frederick Douglass offered the following with the “”The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro”
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.
Reading these words today, I am struck by the unfulfilled promises of America’s creed. The sham of a celebration of freedom and liberty in clear as we remember Oscar Grant, Dante Price, Amadou Diallo, Kimani Gray, Rekia Boyd, Travis Henderson, Sean Bell, Kendrac McDade, Ramarley Graham and so many others. The sham has been clear over the last week with the Zimmerman trial and the gutting of the VRA. Knowing that an African American man or woman will likely be shot by the police (#every28hours) during the course of this day, I cannot but think of the ongoing history of injustice and cruelty. Amid the celebrations of freedom is the silence and lack of mourning over lost lives from Chicago to New Orleans. As he speaks of “the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim,” I wonder how 2013 fits given rampant unemployment among communities and the systemic destruction of America’s educational system. I see a militarized border and a state that will allow voter suppression, the denial of a woman’s right to choose and global violence without any regard for the humanity and rights of all people. 4th of July is drones and racial profiling; 4th of July is subprime mortgages and the PIC; 4th of July is race to the bottom and poverty. Douglas reminds us clearly, “There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.” In the 161 years since he spoke these words, they remain all too true and all too powerful
Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men, too Ñ great enough to give frame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory….
…Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?
Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the “lame man leap as an hart.”
But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common.ÑThe rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrevocable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!
“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, 0 Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”
Fellow-citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!” To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave’s point of view. Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America.is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery Ñ the great sin and shame of America! “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse”; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.
But I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, “It is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, an denounce less; would you persuade more, and rebuke less; your cause would be much more likely to succeed.” But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia which, if committed by a black man (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment. What is this but the acknowledgment that the slave is a moral, intellectual, and responsible being? The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute books are covered with enactments forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read or to write. When you can point to any such laws in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the slave. When the dogs in your streets, when the fowls of the air, when the cattle on your hills, when the fish of the sea, and the reptiles that crawl, shall be unable to distinguish the slave from a brute, then will I argue with you that the slave is a man!
For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not astonishing that, while we are ploughing, planting, and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver and gold; that, while we are reading, writing and ciphering, acting as clerks, merchants and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators and teachers; that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hill-side, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives and children, and, above all, confessing and worshipping the Christian’s God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men!
Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? that he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for Republicans? Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to be understood? How should I look to-day, in the presence of Amercans, dividing, and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom? speaking of it relatively and positively, negatively and affirmatively. To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to your understanding. There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.
What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their mastcrs? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employment for my time and strength than such arguments would imply.
What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is passed.
At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival….
…Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented, of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. “The arm of the Lord is not shortened,” and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from “the Declaration of Independence,” the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference. The time was when such could be done. Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. But a change has now come over the affairs of mankind. Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable. The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe. It makes its pathway over and under the sea, as well as on the earth. Wind, steam, and lightning are its chartered agents. Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together. From Boston to London is now a holiday excursion. Space is comparatively annihilated. — Thoughts expressed on one side of the Atlantic are distinctly heard on the other.
The far off and almost fabulous Pacific rolls in grandeur at our feet. The Celestial Empire, the mystery of ages, is being solved. The fiat of the Almighty, “Let there be Light,” has not yet spent its force. No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light. The iron shoe, and crippled foot of China must be seen in contrast with nature. Africa must rise and put on her yet unwoven garment. ‘Ethiopia, shall, stretch. out her hand unto Ood.” In the fervent aspirations of William Lloyd Garrison, I say, and let every heart join in saying it:
God speed the year of jubilee
The wide world o’er!
When from their galling chains set free,
Th’ oppress’d shall vilely bend the knee,
And wear the yoke of tyranny
Like brutes no more.
That year will come, and freedom’s reign,
To man his plundered rights again
Restore.
God speed the day when human blood
Shall cease to flow!
In every clime be understood,
The claims of human brotherhood,
And each return for evil, good,
Not blow for blow;
That day will come all feuds to end,
And change into a faithful friend
Each foe.
God speed the hour, the glorious hour,
When none on earth
Shall exercise a lordly power,
Nor in a tyrant’s presence cower;
But to all manhood’s stature tower,
By equal birth!
That hour will come, to each, to all,
And from his Prison-house, to thrall
Go forth.
Until that year, day, hour, arrive,
With head, and heart, and hand I’ll strive,
To break the rod, and rend the gyve,
The spoiler of his prey deprive —
So witness Heaven!
And never from my chosen post,
Whate’er the peril or the cost,
Be driven.
While little surprises me about CNN (Cable’s NON News), the sensational efforts to play off the George Zimmerman trial, to link the “N Word” to Cracker, and to situate the discussion within a discourse of “which is worse” is a testament to their failures as a network. As someone on Twitter and my colleague Rich King noted, the mere fact that CNN says Cracker but encodes the “N-word” tells us all we know, yet the conversation continues.
Despite amazing participants, the framing of the discussion, which centers whiteness (can’t have a discussion of “N word” without somehow bringing the debate back to whiteness), on false comparisons is telling! If CNN wanted to have a discussion to add depth to Zimmerman trial as it relates to Cracker but instead they wandered down the problematic road of “everyone is racist” and “everyone has their own slurs.”
Cracker has a long history; a longer history than America. Dating back at least to Shakespeare, the origins and meaning are disparate. Jelani Cobb, on NPR’s Code Switch, offers insight into its more contemporary usage:
“Cracker,” the old standby of Anglo insults was first noted in the mid 18th century, making it older than the United States itself. It was used to refer to poor whites, particularly those inhabiting the frontier regions of Maryland, Virginia and Georgia. It is suspected that it was a shortened version of “whip-cracker,” since the manual labor they did involved driving livestock with a whip (not to mention the other brutal arenas where those skills were employed.) Over the course of time it came to represent a person of lower caste or criminal disposition, (in some instances, was used in reference to bandits and other lawless folk.).
Despite this very specific history, one that locates cracker within history of white supremacy and one that position itself outside this history, some still try to connect Cracker with “N word” as part of its narrative on “white victimhood” and “double standards. Joan Walsh took up this line of argumentation in a recent post:
From Glenn Beck’s the Blaze to the Breitbots to smaller right-wing shriekers to Twitter trolls everywhere, white grievance-mongers seemed less bothered by the fact that Martin allegedly used the term, than by Jeantel saying it wasn’t a slur…. My God, don’t these people get tired of themselves? So much of the trumped-up racial upset on the right, generally, is about language: If black people can use the N-word, why can’t we? (Even Paula Deen tried to use that as self-defense at first.) Now we’re moving on to: If the N-word is racist and forbidden, words like “cracker” should be, too. But “cracker” has never had the same power to demean, or to exile, or to sting. No social order has ever been devised whereby African-Americans oppress people they deride as “crackers.”
Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker too articulated the absurdity of the comparison:
For those needing a refresher course, here are just a few reasons why cracker doesn’t compare to the N-word. Cracker has never been used routinely to:
Deny a white person a seat at a lunch counter.
Systematically deny whites the right to vote.
Deny a white person a seat near the front of a bus.
Crack the skulls of peaceful white protesters marching for equality.
Blow up a church and kill four little white girls.
Need more? Didn’t think so.
Cracker may be a pejorative in some circles. It may even be used to insult a white person. But it clearly lacks the grievous, historical freight of the other.
The efforts to push back at this attempt to imagine white victimhood, to reduce racism discussions to individual prejudices or slurs, to deny white privilege through noting double standards and the assault on whiteness, is nothing new. It’s central to a post civil rights discourse, which has sought to deny the structural advantages that continue to benefit white America. Tim Wise makes this clear in his piece “Revisiting a Past Essay — Honky Wanna Cracker? Examining the Myth of Reverse Racism:”
Simply put, what separates white racism from any other form and makes anti-black and brown humor more dangerous than its anti-white equivalent is the ability of the former to become lodged in the minds and perceptions of the citizenry. White perceptions are what end up counting in a white-dominated society. If whites say Indians are savages, be they “noble” or vicious, they’ll be seen in that light. If Indians say whites are mayonnaise-eating Amway salespeople, who the hell’s going to care? If anything, whites will simply turn it into a marketing opportunity. When you have the power, you can afford to be self-deprecating.
The day that someone produces a newspaper ad that reads: “Twenty honkies for sale today: good condition, best offer accepted,” or “Cracker to be lynched tonight: whistled at black woman,” then perhaps I’ll see the equivalence of these slurs with the more common type to which we’ve grown accustomed. When white churches start getting burned down by militant blacks who spray paint “Kill the honkies” on the sidewalks outside, then maybe I’ll take seriously these concerns over “reverse racism.”
So to be clear, comparing the “N-Word” to Cracker is like comparing ice cream to cardboard. Yet, both very much pivot on white supremacy. Yes, white supremacy grounds both the N-Word and Cracker. The history and origins of Cracker points to the way it seeks to normalize whiteness as middle-class, civility, and civilization. It, like White Trash (see here for great discussion), seeks to differentiate between those who are southern, those who are lower-classes, and those who don’t embody the desired inscription of whiteness. Cracker seeks to humanize white normativity. Matt Wray (cited here), writing about discourse surrounding white trash, argues:
Current stereotypes of white trash can be traced to a series of studies produced around the turn of the century by the US Eugenics Records Office… wherein the researchers sought to demonstrate scientifically, that large numbers of rural poor whites were “genetic defectives.” Typically, researchers conducted their studies by locating relatives who were either incarcerated or institutionalized and then racing their genealogies back to a “defective” source (often, but not always, a person of mixed blood) (2)
Given this history, Cracker must be understood not as anti-White per se but serving in the maintenance of white supremacy and the white power structure. It establishes a qualifier to those who are “white” who don’t embody the hegemonic vision of whiteness. It not only Others the “white poor,” furthering narratives that demonize and blame the poor across the color line, but humanizes whiteness as a category. The history of Cracker and the word itself is very much one of race, class, and caste, in which WHITES judged, policed, and categorized OTHER WHITES to determine who was truly WHITE and who was not quite WHITE. Rather than recycling the tried and trusted story of white victimization (notice how the debate about “N Word,” Cracker, Affirmative Action, the Voting Rights Act, Paula Deen, etc. always in some way comes back to a delusional sense of white victimhood), we must begin to think about the structural context, one where “whites continue to swim in preference.” Cracker isn’t simply a word or a slur but a window into America’s racial history, into white supremacy.
We have spent time discussing, debating, and arguing over Paula Deen. From print pundits to cable-news talking heads, much has been said of the TV personality’s use of the “N-Word,” her firing from the Food Network, and whether “in her heart she is a racist.”
But a closer look at the details of the civil suit brought against Deen and her Southern food empire suggests a bigger and more troubling problem than the privately held beliefs of a single person.
Paula Deen symbolizes the injustices plaguing the entire restaurant industry.
While employed by Deen’s parent company, Paula Deen Enterprises, plaintiff Lisa Jackson alleges that she was subjected and witness to racial discrimination and sexual harassment. Pornography was regularly visible in the workplace; sexist comments were commonplace. Jackson claimed that in one instance, in which she was made responsible for catering the wedding of Bubba Heirs (Deen’s brother), Deen described the style she was looking for in the following way.
Well what I would really like is a bunch of little niggers to wear long-sleeve white shirts, black shorts and black bow ties, you know in the Shirley Temple days, they used to tap dance around. Now that would be a true southern wedding, wouldn’t it? But we can’t do that because the media would be on me about that.
Deen denies the specifics, but this isn’t the only accusation made. The lawsuit claims that:
—Black employees are forbidden from using the customer bathroom; white employees are allowed to use any bathroom
—African Americans assigned to the back of the house are forbidden from going to locations where customers can see them
—Racial slurs were commonplace
The racially hostile environment depicted in the Jackson lawsuit is corroborated to an important degree by an independent inquiry into The Lady and Sons, Deen’s famed restaurant in Savannah, Georgia. An attorney for the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, a national civil-rights organization, said he discovered “evidence of systemic racial discrimination and harassment.”
He found that Deen and her managers regularly referred one black cook as “my little monkey.” According to one current and two former employees, Deen pays and promotes black and white workers differently. Deen also “preferred white and light-skinned blacks” to work with customers while “darker-skinned blacks were relegated to ‘back-of-the-house operations.'”
The issue, said Rainbow PUSH attorney Robert Patillo in an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, isn’t Deen’s racist worldview. The issue is the potential for a powerful individual’s racist worldview to manifest itself into discriminatory workplace policies. A black worker threatened to report the restaurant to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and was told: “You don’t have any civil rights here.” Other workers also feared retaliation.
I am angry; I am angry at how Trayvon Martin is being portrayed in this court; I am outraged by the disrespect directed at him within the news. I am saddened that the defense seems based on racial stereotypes and racist appeals rather than facts. I am outraged that the defense seems to be: he’s black. Not surprising given that facts we know.
Can you imagine a defense attorney standing before the court and showing pictures of your white child in an effort to demonize and victim blame? What do you think the reaction would be if an attorney or a news station consistently put out images of guns, smoke, marijuana and other photos that sought to turn your child into a “thug” who deserved it. What do you think the reaction would be from white America?
Can you imagine the outcry if dozens of white youths were being gunned down by police and security guards in a matter of months?
Can you imagine the extensive political discussions; the media stories that would saturate the airwaves?
If a white youth was killed on the way to buying skittles for a friend, would he be recast as the assailant; as a person to hate
Can you imagine Fox News or any number of newspapers reporting about a school suspension for one of the victims or doctoring pictures in an attempt to make these victims less sympathetic?
Can you imagine a person holding up a sign calling these victims “thugs” and “hoodlums.” Just think about the media frenzy, the concern from politicians, and the national horror every time a school shooting happens in suburbia or every time a White woman goes missing…can you imagine if women routinely went missing from your community and the news and police department simply couldn’t be bothered?
This isn’t simply a trial about George Zimmerman and justice for Trayvon; it is trial about who’s life matters; who is entitled to justice. It’s a trial about race in America
I want you to close your eyes for a second, and imagine that your son or daughter, sister or brother, granddaughter or grandson, ventured to the corner store for some Skittles and tea but never returned? Can you imagine if Peter or Jan was gunned down right around the corner from your house and the police didn’t notify you right away? Can you imagine if little Cindy or Bobby sat in the morgue for days as you searched to find out what happened them? Can you even imagine the police letting the perpetrator go or the news media remaining silent? Can you even fathom learning about background and drug tests on your child? Can you imagine the news media demonizing your child, blaming your child for his own death?
I have listened to Don West for many hours (or many minutes) and have to say I am not surprised. In the 4 long hours, he continued the defense strategy to dehumanize, mock, and disrespect Trayvon Martin, and his family. With this statement he showed little concern for the black community and the nation as a whole, playing the racism card with precision.
Trayvon Martin was killed; he lost his life. His parents, family, and friends are devastated. Their lives have been changed forever.
Yet, he starts with a joke: “Knock knock. Who’s there? George Zimmerman. George Zimmerman who? Good, you’re on the jury,” Really, levity? Can you imagine the outrage had he made a joke at a trial involving the killing of a white youth; probably not which tell us everything we need to know about this case and a society that consistently doesn’t show itself not to value black life.
Can you imagine of Johnnie Cochran opened America’s last trial of century with a knock knock joke? In a country where racial profiling, stop and frisk, and #every28hours are almost daily realities; your attempt at levity is yet another moment of disrespect. His “joke” is causing a lot of anger and pain. It is yet another example where black life is pushed into the background; where black pain and trauma is neither seen nor felt. Can you feel his parents pain; is it “legible.”
But that is no concern of the defense since it thinks George is the true victim. That is what we have been told today; that George was victim of Trayvon, armed with “sidewalk,” on that fateful night. While Trayvon lost his life, the defense wants to paint POOR Georgie as the victim. This version seems to be as much of a fantasy as other nursery rhymes.
While Trayvon parents lost their child, their future, they want us to feel sorry for George because he is depressed, because he gained weight, and because his life has forever changed. Trayvon life was ended; George Zimmerman is not a victim, he is the defendant.
I have heard that “we are all Trayvon Martin,” yet we are not Trayvon Martin – and we never could be. White America is never suspicious. White America can walk to the store without fear of being hunted down. White America can count on justice and a nation grieving at the loss of White life. We aren’t Trayvon Martin, we are George Zimmerman: presumed innocent until proven innocent. If we were all Trayvon Martin, if the jury and the judge, the media and society as a whole, was Trayvon Martin, we wouldn’t have been subjected to the joke, forced to listen to more lamenting of George the victim, and most certain forced to sit through another effort turn Trayvon into the assailant. I hope that you, a jury, clearly not of Trayvon’s peers, can see behind the white colored glasses to see this vicious defense strategy in our march toward justice.
The defense strategy to dehumanize Trayvon, to paint him as a gangsta who deserved to be killed, is reprehensible. It is beyond the pale. I hope we see that; I hope we denounce that here and everywhere. The decision to make a joke at this trial is sad reminder of what’s a stake here: justice and saying Trayvon’s life matters. If it does, lets take a stand for justice. Let us stand together to life up Trayvon in the name of equal justice building toward the fulfillment of our freedom dreams.
In a week where the Supreme Court of the United States concluded that diversity isn’t a compelling issue, where this same group of justices decided that voting discrimination was no longer an issue worthy of governmental oversight, you have the potential to say “no.”
No to the perpetuation of racist stereotypes;
No to the pandering to white racism;
No to a society that rarely sees or hears black suffering.
Yes to justice;
No to hatred;
Yes to a future, no to a racist past.
With disenfranchisement making a sad return, spaces of change and justice are becoming and more scarce within these halls. The power to lead us on a different path sits not just with you but those of us who must organize, who must demand justice for Tryavon, for Rekia, for Jordan, for those being pushed out of school and into prisons, and for those being denied the right to vote from D.C. to Mississippi. Yes, this is 1 case but it is a moment where we can open up the windows justice toward a new tomorrow.
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This piece includes previously published material from Ebony.com
The summer of 2013 has mirrored the summer of 2012 or 2011 in many ways, especially as it relates to the assault on women’s bodies. Enacting countless pieces of legislation and working overtime to silence critical voices, the GOP and their faux news allies have continued their march backwards toward a retrenchment of patriarchy and misogyny.
During a recent segment on MSNBC, Dr. Salamishah Tillet spoke out about the continued war on women from the GOP. She provided an important historic context for understanding the “abortion debate” and more importantly the GOP’s assault on women:
So I think that there’s a kind of moral panic, a fear of the end of whiteness that we’ve been seeing a long time and I think Obama’s ascension as president kind of symbolizes to a certain degree and I think that this is why one response to that sense that there is a decreasing white majority in the country and that women’s bodies and white women’s bodies, in particular, are obviously a crucial way of reproducing whiteness, white supremacy, white privilege.
She points to the sad truth of history. From Eugenics to forced sterilization, from America’s immigration policies to slavery, the connections between reproduction, systemic efforts to control women’s bodies, and race are clear. American as apple pie.
In the aftermath of the 2008 election of Barack Obama, in light of Census reports about demographic shifts that point to end of white majority, and media accounts on how “Most Babies Born in America Are Not White” there is a growing unease or anxiety from segments of white America.
Context matters – that was Dr. Tillet’s message.
Fears about lost power and privilege, and anxiety about becoming “the minority” are wrapped up in discussions about birth rates and population size. To ignore this context when discussing abortion is myopic and short-sided – FOXish. And that is exactly what happened shortly after Dr. Tillet’s appearance last weekend. Bill O’Reilly took to the airwaves to denounce Dr. Tillet’s comments as a racist attack on whites. He offered the following “assessment:”
If you oppose late term abortion and you’re white, you might be supporting white supremacy.
An amazing display of bigotry and insensitivity to the abortion issue.
An incredible display of racial hatred on national television.
If you oppose late term abortion and you’re white, you might be supporting white supremacy.
Clearly, the “F” in Fox stands for failure, because O’Reilly, Megyn Kelley and others continuously demonstrated poor reading or listening comprehension skills. I can only imagine the historiography in O’Reilly’s books.
Notwithstanding the systematic mischaracterization of Dr. Tillet’s analysis, O’Reilly fails to account for the anxiety and fear resulting from “not enough white babies.” Instead he denies this reality, and not surprisingly FACTS. Because for Fox, the “F” is silent when talking about facts, leaving us with a channel that merely acts or pretends to be a source of news. This is why rather than engaging Dr. Tillet’s analysis, O’Reilly chose a path defined by bullying, disengagement, distortions, and an overall dismissal of the real issue at hand: white anxiety and its impact on the abortion debate.
Maybe he doesn’t watch his own network. In 2006, John Gibson made clear the connection between race (white anxiety), demographics, and reproduction:
Do your duty. Make more babies. That’s a lesson drawn out of two interesting stories over the last couple of days.
First, a story yesterday that half of the kids in this country under five years old are minorities. By far, the greatest number are Hispanic. You know what that means? Twenty-five years and the majority of the population is Hispanic. Why is that? Well, Hispanics are having more kids than others. Notably, the ones Hispanics call “gabachos” — white people — are having fewer.
Now, in this country, European ancestry people, white people, are having kids at the rate that does sustain the population. It grows a bit. That compares to Europe where the birth rate is in the negative zone. They are not having enough babies to sustain their population. Consequently, they are inviting in more and more immigrants every year to take care of things and those immigrants are having way more babies than the native population, hence Eurabia.
Why aren’t they having babies? Because babies get in the way of a prosperous and comfortable modern life. Peanut butter fingerprints on the leather seats in the BMW. The Euros are particular — in particular can’t be bothered with kids. Underscore that second point….
To put it bluntly, we need more babies. Forget about that zero population growth stuff that my poor generation was misled on. Why is this important? Because civilizations need population to survive. So far, we are doing our part here in America but Hispanics can’t carry the whole load. The rest of you, get busy. Make babies, or put another way — a slogan for our times: “procreation not recreation.”
Misery loves company. In the aftermath of reports about death of whites exceeding its birthrate, Pat Buchannan penned a panic induced treatise on the end of civilization
In demographic terms, more white Americans died in 2012 than were born. Never before — not during the Civil War bloodletting, not during the influenza epidemic after World War I, not during the Great Depression and birth dearth of the 1930s — has this happened?
In ethnic terms, it means that Americans whose forebears came from Great Britain, Ireland and Germany, Southern and Eastern Europe — the European tribes of North America — have begun to die.
The demographic winter of white America is at hand, even as it began years ago for the native-born of old Europe.
Such feelings are widespread. Erin Gloria Ryan, at Jezeel, highlights the anger, disappointment, and outrage resulting from reports about the number of non-white babies:
Readers of Fox Nation, that reliable bastion of whackadoodlery, rated the story of the nonwhite birth rate surpassing the white birth rate as “Scary.” And commenters are frightened, but resigned. One said, “It was bound to happen.. with anchor babies and pay raises for more chillrin…” Others, who clearly still don’t understand the concept of “structural racism” having nothing to do with sheer numbers and everything to do with power, wondered if they’d get special consideration for entering “government school” now. You know, like all those Mexican children of undocumented farm workers who are applying for admission to Harvard, unseating deserving white applicants. Another said, “Not hard to believe. Los Angeles in the 1970’s was overwhelmingly white. Now it’s overwhelmingly latino. The latinos took over. Just look at the school demographics. That pretty much tells the story. This country is slowly being returned to Mexico with the help of politicians.” Hard to argue with that!
Over at the Washington Post, one commenter can’t wait to cash in on anticipated white minority status: “I’m been trying to get my white college age sons recognized as a minority at their college, because they are a minority – white – male – and enrolled in college — but the institution laughs at me and says I am misinformed. My grandchildren and great grandchildren will have to work very hard to organize in order to be recognized as a minority, and I believe this needs to be jump started ASAP in order to protect their rights.”
While O’Reilly and Leslie Marshall (the “liberal” who discussed Dr. Tillet’s appearance) want to locate these viewpoints as those of “extremists and skinheads,” they are central to American history; they are evident within a myriad of contemporary spaces, from FOX to the GOP. The truth hurts (there clearly is no “T” in Fox).
But why bother with truth when you can just be a bully. Yes, I said it. Bill O’Reilly is a bully. Why else would he put Dr. Tillet’s picture on the screen several times but to arouse his audience? To spark vitriol; to intimidate. Does it surprise anyone that she received hundreds of hateful messages? With a huge platform, Billy and his faux news minions are a threat to democracy and substantive conversations. That is neither a controversial statement nor anything new, but a threat nonetheless. Fox being Fox cannot be a defense.
The combination of miss characterizations – LIES – and their play to emotionality, white resentment (their race card), and ignorance are all essential to the playbook of a bully – a dangerous bully. One can only hope that by 2014, we see an end to the GOP’s assault on women, and faux news assault on reason, facts, and honest debate. Sadly, I am not holding my breath for either.
Dr. David J Leonard 