BENEATH THE SPIN * ERIC L. WATTREE
Playing the Race Card on a Conservative Friend
Tom,
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I try to avoid bringing race into discussions on issues other than when race is the issue itself, because it becomes a distraction. But in this case, race is the thousand pound gorilla beating his chest in the corner that no one wants to acknowledge, so I'm going to broach the issue. I don't anticipate it being a problem, because we’re close enough not to have to tiptoe around issues with one another. So I’m just going to be candid and drop the race card on you on this one.
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It is absolutely unbelievable that I can send an educated man like yourself - a scientist, no less - an article that's thoroughly documented and filled with irrefutable facts, and then have you come back at me with a bunch of conservative rantings, speculation, wishful thinking, and over-the-top fear mongering. I simply don’t get it. You’re much too intelligent a man to even entertain some of the nonsense that you send me, much less, disseminate it. But I have a theory - cognitive dissonance. So I'd Like you to hear me out, here.
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First, I know for a fact that you’re not a virulent racist, so let's get that out the way.
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One of the reasons that I value your friendship so much is because I’ve never forgotten the time that a group of your conservative friends tried to use the tag team approach to overwhelm me. We didn't even know each other then. At first you were supporting them, but when they couldn’t handle me one-on-one, they came together and tried to pile-on. Once you recognized what they were doing, you forgot all about race, and the conservative philosophy that you shared with them, and we fought back-to-back like two Marines fighting off the enemy in combat - and you brought passion to that fight. You argued the progressive point of view as effectively as I could. That’s something that you can’t fake, and your passion was one of the reasons that we won. We exhausted them, so they lost the will to fight.
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I’ll never forget that day. That’s why I take the time to listen to you more patiently than I do any other conservative I know. That’s also why I don’t call you and curse you out over some of the crazy conservative crap that you send me. I just kind of fluff it off, and tell Rita, "Well, Tom’s in his zone again." So again, my point is, I know you’re not a racist.
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But that said, that’s far from saying that we don’t all harbor subconscious ideas and attitudes that bring comfort to our reality. This is true of all of us, including myself. Even though I know that people are just people, and I always try to be sensible and objective, as a musician, if I come across a White sax player who can out-play me, in spite of myself, there’s something deep inside of me that seriously resents it, because all of my life I’ve been taught that Black people are suppose to have more "soul" than White folks. Intellectually, I know that’s not always true - and I’ve had the fallacy of that flawed logic painfully demonstrated to me on several occasions. Nevertheless, in my heart, I still want to believe it, because that’s what I’ve been conditioned to believe, and it serves to bestow a "special" status upon me as a Black musician that brings me comfort and pride. But unfortunately, Phil Woods didn't get the memo, and therefore, he feels no abiding need to accommodate my fantasy. That's exactly what's going on with Barack Obama and the GOP.
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Obama feels absolutely no obligation to accommodate ultraconservative delusions of superiority. He is, who he is, but they simply refuse to accept that reality. Regardless to how hard they try to reconfigure truth, Obama is, and always will be, their intellectual superior. That reality cannot be changed, and it cannot be denied, so they might as well accept it.
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I've experienced the same thing as a writer. Since many White people have embraced the myth that Black people are not supposed to be either literate, or thoughtful, I'm often nitpicked to death by White writers - "Wouldn't it have been better if you'd put a semicolon there instead of a dash?" Some - and it invariably seems to be those who are most insecure - seem to have an irresistible urge to cast me in the role of "protégé with potential," even though in many cases I'm much better at what we do than they are. But casting me in that role brings them comfort. But the fact is, regardless to how much they nitpick, they'll never be able to nitpick me into a box that will accommodate their flawed view a reality. Reality is, what reality is, and it doesn't ask for our permission to be so. And the true reality is, I could edit what many of my would-be "mentors'" write, and when I'm done it would look like a chicken danced on their copy after walking through red paint.
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Black people are accustomed to dealing with White delusions of grandeur, so in the past we simply smiled to ourselves and rolled with it, because whenever a Back person is confronted by a White person throwing his or her defensive barriers up, it's actually a "slapliment," because it says that you're demonstrating the kind of excellence that's causing a particular White person to feel insecure, and such situations are so routine that my grandfather saw the necessity to instruct me in it as a child.
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He instructed me to "Never let White folks know how much you know. Always use the fact that they think you're dumb to your advantage." Actually, that's the rationale behind "Uncle Tom" behavior. The only problem is, modern-day Uncle Toms no longer use it as merely a manipulative tool; they actually allow themselves to become accommodationists, and white pets.
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But the tactic was once used very effectively against White hubris. A perfect example of it in action was shown in a scene with Jack Bennie and Rochester. Jack Bennie was walking behind Rochester, and to his right, as Rochester was carrying a long board over his right shoulder. Then Jack Bennie, who had been irritating the hell out of Rochester throughout the entire scene, told Rochester to turn right. But instead, Rochester turned left and knocked the hell out of Bennie, knocking him to the floor with the back of the board. Then when he "realized" what he had done, he dropped the board in a "panic," which caused the board to hit Bennie yet again. Then, when Rochester went to help Bennie up, Bennie said, "I said, turn RIGHT! To which, Rochester said, "Oh, Boss, I's so sorry. Sometimes I's so dumb I don't know why you put up with me."
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So dealing with White hubris is nothing new to Black people. In fact, some Black people have elevated the technique to an hilarious art form that's playing itself out every day all over America. So for the GOP to think that Black people don't recognize the "hidden" motives behind their behavior, is once again, the height of arrogance. That's why their campaign to recruit more Black people, and their contention that Black people have blindly attached themselves to the Democratic Party is a joke. Black people know exactly what they're doing - and it has absolutely nothing to do with the Democratic Party passing out welfare checks, a racist assertion in itself. Thus, the only ones blind in this scenario is GOP leadership.
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But Black people have to be careful, because we are human, and the need to contort truth in order to forge a comfortable reality is not just a White predilection, it's a human trait. So we make some of the very same mistakes on the flip-side of the equation. Stevie Ray Vaughan (below) proved that it is just as fallacious to assume that all White folks are challenged in the area of "soul," as it is for many White people to assume that Black people are intellectually challenged. There are White musicians out there who can play Black music better than most Black people. That's a simple truth that I found could not, and would not, be denied, regardless to how good it made me feel to believe that Black musicians were anointed. So that's a truth that I just had to learn to accept. But watching the negative affects of White hubris has made that much easier to accomplish.
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Thus, a White person doesn’t have to be a racist to want to believe that they are somehow special predicated on being born White. That's not racism, it's a human delusion that brings them comfort and pads their self-esteem. Thus, it's a simple coping device. Racism is when we become so vindictive and hostile in our refusal to accept race-related reality that we begin to hate the person that challenges our comfort zone, and then try to create artificial conditions to corrupt reality and support our delusions. Racism would have been if I became so insecure over Stevie Ray Vaughan's excellence that I took aggressive steps to prevent him from being heard, or used unrelated issues as a pretext to attack him. That's what the GOP is doing in response to Barack Obama - and the only people who can't see that is the GOP itself.
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The late psychologist Carl Jung said that once we’ve satisfied our primary needs, everything we do thereafter, we do to enhance our feelings of self-esteem and reduce our feelings of inadequacy. So watching many conservatives trying to come to terms with being out-maneuvered, out-classed, and out-thought by Barack Obama is indeed a phenomena of human nature that is amazing to behold.
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It clearly shows that some people would rather poke their own eyes out than to be forced to come to terms with a reality that causes them cognitive dissonance, discomfort, or having to confront a truth that they don’t want to accept - and that’s in spite of screaming evidence rendering that truth to be irrefutably valid. Thus, the fact that Barack Obama is not only better and more competent than anyone the GOP has been able to put forward in over a century, but also, could very possibly be among the top three greatest presidents in America’s history, is literally killing these people: "A Black man!!!? - never!" They don't like what they see, so they're banging their heads up against the wall trying to reconfigure reality, but all that does is make them look like idiots.
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They think their emotion-driven motivations are hidden, but they're glaringly obvious to the entire world. What they really want - other than wanting Obama to just stop being president, period - is for this first Black president to "stay in his place." They want him to stop being smarter than them, to stop out-classing them, and to stop being more competent than they are. That's what they really want, and they want it desperately (and there are a few high-profile Black people who feel that way as well, by the way, but that's a different article, regarding "bligotry").
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They're desperate, because Obama’s very presence represents such a brutal assault on the concept of White superiority that it’s, literally, driving many ultraconservative Republicans over the edge. They’ve become so distressed over it that they’ve descended into a literal state of cognitive dissonance.
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Cognitive dissonance is the emotional stress that results when what one wants to believe doesn’t coincide with observable reality. The late social psychologist, Leon Festinger, the father of the concept of cognitive dissonance, says, "When dissonance is present, in addition to trying to reduce it, the person will actively avoid situations and
information which would likely increase the dissonance [emphasis added]."
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That’s exactly what many ultraconservatives are doing, and it perfectly accounts for why you, Tom, would send me quotations like the one you sent in your last email. It quotation said:
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"Obama has grabbed blank-check dictatorship powers that are a violent assault on our personal liberty, property rights and the rule of law . . . By limiting how we travel, what we can eat, and where we can work he can create the communist utopia he has always dreamed about!"
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Tom, that's ridiculous, and you and I both know it. So considering your keen intellect and powerful analytical skills in most other areas, I can’t help but suggest that you have to be suffering from, at least, a little touch of cognitive dissonance yourself.
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Again, President Obama's intelligence represents a frontal assault on the concept of White superiority, and that’s a bitter pill for many conservatives to swallow. Because, that means that they’re not special by virtue of birthright after all, and if they want to become special, they’re going to have to invest in themselves as individuals just like anyone else, Black or White. Obama also represents the fact that their mediocrity is actually true mediocrity, and there’s no hidden reservoir of "specialness" within them that they can take comfort in. That can be scary to some people.
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So Tom, give that some thought before the next time you send me any more of these unsubstantiated conservative contrivances. When a man of your intellectual caliber sends me crap like you’ve done of late, it makes me embarrassed for him, and I don’t like feeling embarrassed for you, because you, indeed, are special. But you aren’t special because you were born that way, or because you’re white; you’re special because you made yourself that way as an individual, just like Obama did. So actually, you and Obama are essentially two of a kind. You have much more in common with Barack Obama than you do your conservative allies.
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So you don’t have to try to diminish Obama to feel good about yourself - many conservatives might, but you don't. I like you just the way you are, Tom. I like taking pride in the fact that I have a brilliant physicist with a highly trained mind as a friend. So don’t spoil my illusions by sending me what amounts to electronic spitballs. You’re better than that - in fact, you’re almost as intelligent as I am, in spite of the fact that you're a White boy.
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Fox News Chief White House Correspondent Ed Henry Tried to Embarrass
the President in Front of Another Foreign Leader. Watch How Adroitly Obama Handles Him -
Again, Without Bustin' a Sweat Bubble. These People Are Out of Their League.
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Your bud,
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E
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Eric L. Wattree
Http://wattree.blogspot.com
Ewattree@Gmail.com
Citizens Against Reckless Middle-Class Abuse (CARMA)
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Religious bigotry: It's not that I hate everyone who doesn't look, think, and act like me - it's just that God does.
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