Happy Fascist 4th!

Rumination on our history

"What white people have to do," said writer James Baldwin during a 1963 television program, "is try to find out in their hearts why it was necessary for them to have a nigger in the first place, because I'm not a nigger, I'm a man. But if you think I'm a nigger, it means you need him."

(An aside: I have purposefully chosen to leave Baldwin's use of the racial slur in tact; the master wordsmith chose it, and because of my profound reverence for this man and his linguistic skill, I don't dare defang it for the sake of liberal piety.)

Some years ago, living in Arizona, far from the more liberal and multi-cultural enclaves of New York and Washington, D.C., surrounded by swarms of white midwesterners, a theory about racism in America bubbled within my mind. All of these people around me, the brittle blonds and the Crossfitting bros, didn't have an identity, any cultural depth. In the affluent town of Scottsdale, white people lived in plywood palaces, drove to Costco, fell into the Internet, and met at brunch to boast about their kids' achievements or grouse about the time it took to get their RH cloud sofa. In smaller Arizona towns, like the tragically misnamed Superior, the white folks there lived in trailers with trash in the yard, shopped at the dollar store to get by, fell into the Internet, attended an evangelical church, and drove dozens of miles a day to work in areas where they couldn't afford to live. Neither of these is an identity and, worse yet, neither of these are the foundation of a self. I began to see that white people didn't feel a part of anything, and in their envy of Black culture or Hispanic culture or whatever else, they overreached and tried to throttle it.

Baldwin continues, "The question you've got to ask yourself, the white population has got to ask itself, North and South because it's one country and for a Negro there is no difference between North and South – it's just a difference in the way they castrate you...If I'm not the nigger here, and if you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you have to find out why."

I grew up in the midst of standard, upwardly mobile, middle-class racism. Jokes were made. Purses were held more tightly. Car doors locked. Idiot assertions espoused. At six, my best friends were the Black kids who lived across the street ("They're probably just hiding out in there," my father and stepmother said, the assumption, among many, being that Black people couldn't afford our neighborhood). At the start of second grade, I was pulled from the public school down the block, stuffed into a uniform, and sent to Catholic school. I have a memory from that early age of a suspicion in my mind: my parents didn't want me hanging out with Black kids, and that’s why I had to leave my friends and go to a new school. I can’t recall why I thought that, or how a second-grader comes to this conclusion, but the recollection is clear forty years later.

The generations immediately preceding mine needed someone below them in order to goose-step onto the highways of America, paved with Fool's Gold. Black people fit the bill. The Italians, when they first got here, weren't seen as white by other Americans and often got in trouble for doing business with and fraternizing with Black people, and by "got in trouble" I mean lynched. Italians were crooks, they were dirty, they were backwards, dumb, lazy, superstitious, of dubious morals. In time, when they started getting a foothold, many fell into that favorite American pasttime – stepping on someone's else throat to get a few inches up the ladder to nowhere.

America demands of her denizens their total subjection. The waves of immigrants in the 19th and 20th centuries sacrificed generations on the altar of assimilation in order to achieve their status. Voices were toned down. Accents disappeared or melded to become the southern accent, which shares similarities with lower class British vernacular. Foods were bled of regional qualities in order to feed the bland American palate (Did General Tso really eat this crap?). Local costume from the old country was traded for a proletariat uniform of productivity – factories, mines, construction sites. Europeans who came here left their dead behind, abandoned the trees that had watched over their children for two hundred years, were torn from that patch of green by the creek where you could always find the perfect balm for an upset stomach; gone were the old ways, the old language, the old food – only the yearning remained, only a phantom pain endured by their descendants who'd never been to the motherland.

And without this connection, without a sense of heritage, an animus was born towards Black people. White people invented their opposite in order to create a perverse sense of belonging; we can unite in hatred for the other. Like modern masculinity, which is carved from the cast-offs of the feminine, manhood an act of defiance against and hatred for women, so, too, whiteness is patched from the frayed shreds of itself, using the Black person as a model on which to hoist this weak, composite identity above the heap of its inheritance.

About the struggle of Black Americans to find a place in the United States, Baldwin said, "I cannot accept the proposition that the four-hundred-year travail of the American Negro should result merely in his attainment of the present level of American civilization." This was the Faustian bargain Europeans made with America, and look where it left us: choked by the noose we wove for somebody else.

So when white people invent this reviled personage, they bind in fetters what they revile in themselves. Our helplessness. Our weakness. The roots we've betrayed to get ahead. Far better to enslave and act out our fantasies of power in a world that, because of economics, class, even the simple fact of disease and death, has power over us, and this, dear reader, is where we return to the Black Madonna. She always has the upper hand, because none of us are at the helm of this world. We might wield autocratic power at some point in our lives, whether that's in the family home or in the halls of government, but, ultimately, time ruins us all. Enfeebled by the passage of years, the CEO, the senator, the monarch, the matriarch who runs a tight ship, all end up eating mashed potatoes and wearing a panty liner. Despite the facelifts, the cold plunges, the manic completion of crosswords; regardless of the weight training, the kegels in the car, the organic Mediterranean diet; though we research longevity in high-level labs, classify aging as a "disease," spend millions on new technological ways to cheat death, nothing last forever. Things change. Potency fades. Everything dies. The Dark Mother is this change, is the passage of minutes and eons, and no matter how much white people hope to overcome the forces arrayed against them, they're always going to lose and to darkness, of all things. After all, Kali's name means Time, and as She marches over the battlefield of the world swallowing armies whole, Her belly is hollow – Time is never satiate.

Baldwin closes out his thoughts regarding the character that whites have thrust upon Black people by saying, "If...you the white people invented him, then you've got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that – whether or not it is able to ask that question."

I don't know that we'll ever dare. I have no faith that this nation is able to lave the soil of its blood-drenched history without the destruction of itself. We've denied, delayed, and diddled too long. We always had our chances, but the original sin of this nation, of the United States, is slavery. (The original sin of European contact with the western hemisphere was genocide.) We've tangled ourselves too tightly in depravity. We can't just pull at the skein with a gentle hand; I'm afraid, like Alexander, we'll have to cut through the Gordian knot of our national iniquity.

The Black Madonna offers various forces of transformation to each person, each family, each community, each country. The slow decay of compost, so warm the muck steams in its decomposition, over time turns what seemed mere garbage into earthy gold to nourish the fields and all those who feast from them. Then there's the wrath of the forest fire, more and more apocalyptic these days; in minutes, the blast consumes everything in its path, indiscriminate in judgment, taking all – the good, the bad, the innocent, and the damned. What's left is a moonscape, charred remains of animals smoking into a singed sky. In time, the flowers come, and the small plants, and the grasses – a bird appears, a beetle, a snake. After decades and decades, a wood starts to rise. Another series of lives start to flourish. As humanity stood at various crossroads of ecological calamity and then walked the primrose-lined lane in favor of the rocky descent into the vale, so, too, white people and their structures of power have chosen the easy over the good. The Black Madonna is Our Lady of Natural Consequences. Whatever happens next in the fight for justice, I fear we've lost our compost window. I guess it's the fire this time.

And if you haven’t watched the famous debate between Baldwin and, who Gore Vidal called a “crypto-Nazi,” William F. Buckley, Jr., do put down Instagram, TikTok, and other assorted trash, and be dazzled.