This article originally
appeared in the December 2009 issue of Aspenia, the Italian journal
published by the Aspen Foundation Italy.
The
"Nigger Show"
When racism masquerades
as something else.
Don't let the virulent hatred of Obama's presidency - veiled in
"policy differences" - fool you.
Just ask someone raised around bigotry.
By Carlos Dew
'The nigger show."
I first heard this expression used to describe the Obama administration
during a visit to my hometown in East Texas during the early summer
of 2009.
I understood what
the epithet meant: Our minds are made up, the president lacks
legitimacy, and there is nothing he can do that we will support.
I was not surprised to hear such a phrase.
I grew up in the 1960s
during the ragged end of the Jim Crow era, where many of the books
in my school library were stamped Colored School, meaning they
had been brought to the white school when the town was forced
to integrate the public school system. I recall my parents had
instructed me, before my first day of elementary school, not to
sit in a chair where a black child had sat. And I remember my
sister joked that her yearbook, when it appeared at the end of
her first year of integrated high school, was in "black and
white."
The outward signs of
racism of my home state have now disappeared, but racial hatred
remains. My father and his friends still use the word nigger to
refer to all black people, and the people of my hometown don't
hesitate to spout their racist rhetoric to my face, assuming I
agree with them. I hold my tongue for the sake of having continued
access to this kind of truth. I learned long ago how not to accept
the hatred I was being taught and how to survive not having done
so. More recently, I realized that I also learned another lesson:
how to recognize racism when it masquerades as something else.
More than 40 years
after my first experiences with racism, I am thousands of miles
away in Rome, but surrounded by ghosts. Last year, I received
a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for a community
program called the Big Read, which sponsors activities to encourage
communities to come together to read and discuss a single book.
I chose Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, in part because I
thought that some of the most salient issues in the novel - racism,
classism, xenophobia, the Jim Crow era - were perhaps relevant
to an increasingly diverse, contemporary Italy.
That there is racism
in Italy is obvious to anyone who pays attention to current affairs.
In fact, during the first week of the Big Read Rome, a story in
one of Italy's national newspapers detailed the experience of
a Nigerian woman being called sporca nera (essentially, dirty
nigger) by two women she asked to stop smoking on a Roman bus.
But I never imagined
that consideration of the novel would prove so relevant to a country
that had just elected its first black president.
Ironically, until the
election of Barack Obama, my discussions of racism in the United
States seemed historical. I felt that with the passage of the
civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s, the country had turned
a corner, that the slow evaporation of overt racism was perhaps
inevitable. Now, my personal experience of Southern racism feels
current and all too familiar. A news story about the Big Read
that appeared in La Repubblica on Sept. 20 (unaware that my grant
was awarded during the Bush administration), presciently brought
Rome, Obama, To Kill a Mockingbird, and racism together in its
headline: "Obama brings antiracist book to Rome."
Jimmy Carter was lambasted
for having recently explained that the vehemence with which many
Americans resist Obama's presidency is an expression of racism.
Carter was accused of fanning the flames of racial misunderstanding
by labeling as "racist" what on the surface could be
perceived as legitimate policy differences. Like Carter, as a
white Southern man, I can see beyond the seemingly legitimate
rhetoric to discern what is festering behind much of the opposition
to Obama and to his administration's policy initiatives. I also
have access, via the racist world from which I came, direct confirmation
of the racial hatred toward Obama.
The veiled racism I
sense in the United States today is couched, in public discourse
at least, in terms that allow for plausible deniability of racist
intent. And those who resist any policy initiative from the Obama
administration engage in a scorched-earth policy that reminds
me of the self-centered white flight, the abandonment of public
schools, and the proliferation of private schools, that followed
the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate public
schools. The very people, like my own rural, working-class family
back in East Texas, who stand to gain from the efforts of the
Obama administration and the Democratic Congress are, because
of their racism, willing to oppose policies that would benefit
them the most. Their racism outweighs their own self-interest.
Unfortunately, racists
in the United States have learned one valuable lesson since the
1960s: They cannot express their racism directly. In public, they
must veil their racial hatred behind policy differences. This
obfuscation makes direct confrontation difficult. Anyone pointing
out their racist motivations runs the risk of unfairly playing
"the race card." But I know what members of my family
mean when they say - as so many said during the town hall meetings
in August - that they "want their country back." They
want it back, safely, in the hands of someone like them, a white
person. They feel that a black man has no right to be the president
of their country.
During a phone conversation
a few weeks after Obama's election, my father lamented that he
and my mother might have to stop visiting the casinos in Shreveport,
La.: Given Obama's election, "the niggers are already walking
around like they own the place. They won't even give up their
seats for white women anymore. I don't know what we're going to
do with 'em."
My students often ask
me how I managed to avoid accepting the lesson in racism offered
by my family. From the time I was 4 or 5 years old - roughly the
same age as Scout Finch, the narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird
- I recall knowing that I didn't agree with racism. More important,
my paternal grandmother provided me with the encouragement that
I could ignore what I was being taught. She provided me with the
courage to resist.
My grandmother hoped
that my father and his father represented the last generations
of the type of Southern man that had shaped her life - virulently
racist, prone to violence, proud of their ignorance, and self-defeatingly
stubborn. It was a type of Southern man that she hoped and prayed
I could avoid becoming.
However, my father
and his father were not the last of their kind; their racial hatred
has been passed on. My grandmother, if she were alive, would recognize
the same tendencies among many of the people who shout down politicians
and bring guns to public rallies. She would also see how the only
change they have made is to replace overt racist epithets with
more euphemistic language.
Rather than seeing
my home state and its racist attitudes, slowly, over time, pulled
in the direction of more acceptance, the country as a whole has
become more like the South, the racial or cultural equivalent
of what is called the Walmartization of American retail.
It might be easy to
see literature as impotent in the face of the persistence and
adaptability of racism. But I continue to believe in the transformative
potential of literature and its ability to provide an alternative
view of the world. And for children who are not lucky enough to
have grandmothers like mine, I believe that books like To Kill
a Mockingbird can provide inoculation against the virus that is
racism.
Carlos Dew is an author, professor of English literature, and
chairman of the Department of English Language and Literature
at John Cabot University in Rome.
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