As the date of Glenn Beck’s event to allegedly recapture the Civil Rights Movement to its true purposes nears, I am reminded of one of his early comments about Barack Obama: Obama, Beck said, “has a deep-seated hatred for white people, or the white culture.”
Aside from the obvious stupidity of the comment–Obama has made his way in white-dominated America remarkably well for someone who hates it–I was immediately struck by the notion of “white culture.” Being me, I wondered, what, exactly, is “white culture”?
I think I know what Beck meant by it: WASPs. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The people who settled the American colonies and created American government and set in motion those forces like religiosity, capitalism, an at least rhetorical focus on individual values and rights, and sense of self-governance, both political and personal, that constitutes the stereotypical story of America. The story most of us of sufficient age learned before “60s radicals” had the temerity to point out that those colonists abused Native Americans while many held slaves; that America incarcerated people like the Japanese in WWII for very little reason; that class and opportunity are far more tightly linked than the mythology of the American dream wishes to admit. I think he probably wants Americans to acknowledge the remarkable and good things about our history, not just focus on the bad.
And, frankly, he has a BIT of a point. (Bet you never thought I’d write that!) I regularly ask my students questions about history and politics–it’s sort of my job, after all–and I am quite struck at how easily they find it to articulate the critique of American policies and histories without understanding the context: even in they were immoral and wrong, why did slaveholders think it was proper? Why did McCarthyism make sense to lots of Americans who, in fact, were not coerced or frightened into compliance. Without understanding the context, critique, however much I might agree with it, is essentially empty.
But: white culture? Hmm. For much of American history, Catholics were discriminated against in employment and immigration–as of course, were Jews. Race and religion were intertwined; there is, for example, substantial research on the question of how Irish Catholics became “white” in America. Prohibition was in part a reaction on the part of WASPs, who drank little alcohol, to the mass immigration of central Europeans, especially beer-drinking (and brewing) Germans, to the US in late 1800s. (You know: Busch, Pabst, Anheuser … ). Much of the legacy of white people in America has not been just their savage treatment of African and Native Americans–it has been their savage treatment of other white people.
In more modern terms: is “white culture” Sarah Palin’s or Bill Maher’s? Is it hunting wolves from helicopters or hunting prescriptions for medical marijuana? Most Americans live in suburbs and never go out into the country–much less go hunting. Yet most Americans have this sense that somehow, someday they will take to the roads and become Jack Kerouac … who probably wouldn’t like Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck. (He might not like Bill Maher either, for all I know.)
Beck’s attempt to restore the Civil Rights Movement to its “true” roots is, in the end, an act of nostalgia. And, like all acts of nostalgia, it’s based on a fantasy of “how things used to be.” And, like all acts of nostalgia, it is self-limiting: one has to buy into the fantasy for the act to make sense. For everyone else, it’s quaint.
So let me conclude with a piece of advice for those who find Beck’s event this weekend, on the date and spot of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech: smile like you do when you see “The Olde Curiosity Shoppe.” It’s an attempt to evoke something that never was, and never will be. If you just walk by, it will fade into memory. Until someone decides it was a remarkable moment in time and offers another fantasy of nostalgia for followers to get wrapped up in!
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