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• Curious about George

Dear Al,

“(Black conservatives) still remember President George Bush repudiating Trent Lott. They know Bush is not a racist; that he’s not wearing a hood.”

Al, I picked this up off the web. I want to hear your thoughts on it.

Curious

Dear Curious,.  

Oh my dear, dearest Curious.

Are you looking to put poor me in Guantanamo? How do I respond safely to a question like this? Okay, let me answer you without answering you. Politics is not my forte. Psychology is. I work on understanding how people think … how people process information, and the likelihood of resulting behaviors given that thought sequence. So I will just tell you what I see happening from an observer’s perspective. Okay? I will take your question and widen it to offer one perspective on what’s happening now. Before I do that, let me share that any of you out there who reads this paper, is eligible to vote, and has not signed up to vote, is steeped in a level of stupidity that is absolutely incomprehensible. Now let me “safely” respond.

There seems to be one overarching and all-encompassing theme in this election — safety.  Under the “safety” umbrella I have heard themes of color framed in culture, and religion framed in culture. Culture cancels out culture, so we are left with an umbrella of safety with spokes of color and religion. How does color and religion sit under safety? To get that answer, I went back in history to see when, how, and if that marriage ever created such a furor … such passion to divide North from South, and urban from rural. If you think I’m joking, take a drive out to the country areas and note how both the leaves and the signs on the lawns change. Start to move toward the south of the country and you will notice the same. I’m not evaluating it. I’m just saying that’s what it is.

What the colonists feared, of course, was the dimly recognized challenge to their distinct status and the mental differentiation upon which it rested. For by Christianizing the Negro, by giving him even the meager crumbs of religious instruction, the colonists were making the Negro just so much more like himself. The African’s inevitable acquisition of the White settler’s language and manners was having precisely this effect. It was virtually inevitable, too, that the colonists should have abhorred the prospect that Negroes might come to resemble them. For if the Negro were like themselves, how could they enslave him? Slavery could survive only if the Negro were a man set apart; he simply had to be different if slavery had to exist. (Winthrop D. Jordan; pg. 89).

In reading that account, it occurred to me that there was something eerily familiar about it. We seem to be either revisiting familiar territory, or we never really moved off it. It just lay dormant for a while waiting for the right confluence of events.  It seems to me that what’s binding “color” and “religion” so tightly to the concept of “safety” is the perception of a loss of power, or a fear of losing power. So, as I sit on the side and observe the dance, the rhythm seems to be that of somebody who feels that they need to show somebody who’s still the boss. The message seems as much internal (within the country) as external (the country to the world). It seems, therefore, that the conversation has never really moved, historically, from one of “power.” It’s just that it has reared its head again. We seem to be focused externally (intracontinental) on a very internal (intercontinental) issue. Now, I may be way off base, but that’s why I’m sitting on the side watching the dance.

Write questions to: DearAl@hotmail.com.