Badges of servitude.

There's no particular merit to this guest op-ed by an emeritus professor from a Minnesota Catholic college. It's a comfortably-retired white leftist doing a rote "confession" of his own racism in order to lambaste a white conservative for being an even bigger racist. 

By the way, the racism confessed by the professor was voting for Bill Clinton, who implemented "welfare reform" (scare quotes in original).

 

It also has the lumpy prose style and hectoring condescension one expects from a member of the American liberal arts professoriate.

But it is helpful as a type that one frequently sees these days: a white person of means confesses privilege in order to broad-brush every melanin-deficient American as also racist. And said racists need to start making sacrifices--starting with the ones he despises over there. 

How brave. He risked a lot of affirmation from his friends and neighbors for that one. Oh, sure--I'm certain he got a lot of nasty grams, but he already loathed that kind of cracker anyway.

The worst part of it is how much this professed Christian hand-waves away 15.7 million people [before coronavirus, so the number is rocketing up] living in poverty--including 4.2 million children--because of their skin color.

These preening posers do this Every. Single. Damn. Time.

Well, yes, the white poor may be experiencing declining life expectancy from suicide, opiods, alcoholism and other "deaths of despair," but they, too, have "White Privilege." 

"Sure, you might be living in Tyvek-and-plywood-reinforced huts in rural America, you can't afford college, your unskilled job opportunities have been outsourced to the developing world, coronavirus is plunging the economy into Great Depression 2.0 and you had to bury a couple of family members because of fentanyl, but chin up--at least you're still a racist."

Presto! They disappear into the undifferentiated mass of "whiteness," so you can safely ignore--and even despise--them.

Neat trick.

Yes, WP describes a real, negative social phenomenon which black Americans are forced to confront.

But the phrase is--with necessary crudeness--the shittiest formulation for it. And when it is deployed by economically and socially-privileged whites like Nelson-Pallmeyer--and always with an insouciant "sure, there are poor whites, BUUUUUT..."-- one is entitled to think that the speaker's concern about people of color is secondary to a more pressing concern for separating himself from other kinds of whites. Who are conveniently lumped together regardless of status for the purposes of levying a harsh judgment.

There's this word used to describe people who judge groups by skin color...it's on the tip of my tongue....

So why don't we reformulate the problem into a phrase that doesn't make millions of suffering poor people "privileged" bigots promoted to villain status because of said skin color?

The framers of the post-War civil rights amendments were aware that black Americans--slave and free--had borne and continued to bear what they called "the badges of servitude." These "badges" are racist conditions, worn as a consequence of skin color, that have to be confronted by our African-descended brothers and sisters. The badges interfere with earning a living, commerce, housing and the like.

The Civil Rights Act of 1866 was directed at such badges and conditions. And while it took an obscene amount of time, the Supreme Court recognized all were still with us, thanks to the malign victory of Jim Crow and de facto segregation outside of the South, and were still targeted by the Act. 

And yes, fellow Union men, functional segregation was a thing in the land of the Bluebellies. The companion case to Shelley v. Kraemer, which struck down racially-restrictive covenants to sell property in 1947, was McGhee v. Sipes. And McGhee arose in...Detroit.

[Aside alert: dogged white abolitionists frequently stripped out these kinds of restrictive covenants from the property they owned. One such man was Sebuel Conant, a 19th Century Detroit abolitionist who owned a prime stretch of land in Motown. He ensured that the property he owned had no such covenants. Not surprisingly, what became known as Conant Gardens became an attractive, prosperous neighborhood for black Detroiters in the 20th Century.]

Long story short: I am fully aware that racism is still a thing in our society. Much diminished, thankfully--but still real. But couching it in terms of "white privilege" or "whiteness" or the Kafka Trap that is "white fragility" is not just wrong, it's corrosive. Such terms are just no-cost status markers for higher-status whites to smile for the camera as they verbally slap lower-status ones.

Acknowledging that the badges of servitude are still borne by some of the American family makes more sense, and is in line with our history. 

And I recognize that genuine historical knowledge in America is rare enough to be a super power. But the sources of our national regeneration and healing can be found in an honest appraisal of our past, both good and bad. There is wisdom there as well as folly--if we want to reach for it.