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TRIBALISM, JIMMY CARTER, AND PAPER CLIPS
09/17/2009
Human beings are tribal by nature. They favor their own family, their own race, their own nation, their own religion, their own culture.
If you doubt this tribalism exists in yourself, think of a time when you were cut off on the Freeway by a bad driver and saw that the driver was Asian. Is it possible you may have exclaimed with disapproval "Asian drivers!"? You may have even done the same thing if you are male and think the woman driving in front of you is going too slow, or the one in back is tailgating. Now, come on, be honest. Haven't you men at one time or another said in exasperation "women drivers!"? Or what if you are in the market and overhear two women speaking Spanish. Have you not at least thought to yourself "Probably here illegally"? Why don't they speak English?" You might think this even though you know that if you were in Mexico with another American you would probably not be speaking Spanish. In each of these instances, you have, because of a tendency to tribalism, painted the whole tribe with a broad, negative brush.
Of course, not everyone voices these thoughts. Some people, who become educated and enlightened and who are open minded enough to see that those who are different from them are valuable human beings worthy of equal treatment and respect, will work towards overcoming that natural tendency towards tribalism. In politics, they will enact Civil Rights laws, outlaw slavery and unequal treatment, and attempt to give all people, regardless of race, nationality, religion etc. a fair chance at living a prosperous and secure life.
When people are especially frightened for their own safety or security, their tribalism can kick in big time, and they can behave as if they are in a life or death struggle with those who are different from them. We've seen this over and over again, even in recent memory. Rwanda, South Africa, 9-11, Northern Ireland, etc. Fear became a reality after 9-11 for most Americans, and now with the financial meltdown, the job losses and threats of job loss, and let's be honest - the fearmongering by the party out of power - people are feeling very unsettled. They are in the mood to find a scapegoat. Some even become unhinged. So when influential figures, like Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh, make racist comments about our elected president, they are really playing with fire. They are hooking into a primitive tendency that was once an important survival mechanism, merely for political advantage or to entertain their audience to get ratings. If they pour enough racist gasoline on these fires of fear and discontent, there could be an explosion. Instead of evolving into a better and more tolerant species, we could deteriorate into unrest and violence.
Former President Jimmy Carter exposed this tribalism recently when he stated that a great many people who are protesting against the Obama administration are doing so on the basis of their belief that a black man is not qualified to be president. As an 85 year old white man who has lived all his life in the South, and who has had a close up view of human behavior for more years than most of us, he deserves to be listened to when he points to continuing racism on the part of some Americans, not just in his native South, but in other parts of the country as well.
Carter's comments unleashed a firestorm of attacks against him, hostile and defensive attacks from the right who say Carter (on behalf of Obama, naturally) is "playing the race card" and insisting that those people who demonstrated Saturday against the Obama administration and big spending (which actually must be laid at the feet of the Bush administration more than the Obama administration) were not racist.
Anyone reading this, who opposes Obama's policies, may think I am calling you racist. I most definitely am not. There are ideological reasons to be opposed to some of Obama's policies and indeed I believe some of those protestors on Saturday had legitimate concerns. But there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that racism (tribalism if you will) still exists in this country and was evident in many of the signs displayed at the protests. Signs for example that said "Obama's plan: white slavery" and "Obama, what you talkin' about Willis?" and "Obama for president of Kenya." These signs have nothing to do with health care, or the deficit, or the bank bailouts. Nor do the signs with Obama in white face and big red lips, or Obama with a Hitler mustache and Hitler uniform. And the signs where Obama is compared to Osama bin Laden, as in "Impeach Osama Obama Hussein," are saying Obama is as far removed from the white, Christian, American "tribe" as is the man who orchestrated 9-11. The many confederate flags, as well, are sending a message of racism.
This is abominable, as Jimmy Carter said, and frightening.
There is also no doubt in my mind that certain television and radio personalities are not only racist themselves, but are deliberately whipping up that tribal animosity against our young black president. Anyone with eyes and ears, who is willing to face reality, couldn't miss it. And this racism, broadcast daily on the airways, is the gasoline which is being poured on the discontent of many frightened, vulnerable and mostly uneducated people in this country.
Here are just a few quotes from Rush Limbaugh:
"I mean, let’s face it, we didn’t have slavery in this country for over 100 years because it was a bad thing. Quite the opposite: slavery built the South. I’m not saying we should bring it back; I’m just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark."
"You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray [the confessed assassin of Martin Luther King]. We miss you, James. Godspeed.
"Hugo. Cesar – whatever. A Chavez is a Chavez. We've always had problems with them."
"Why should Blacks be heard? They're 12% of the population. Who the hell cares."
"If we are going to start rewarding no skills and stupid people -- I'm serious, let the unskilled jobs that take absolutely no knowledge whatsoever to do -- let the stupid and unskilled Mexicans do that work."
"Have you ever noticed how all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?"
"Look, let me put it to you this way: the NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons. There, I said it."
Limbaugh has also been making fun of Jesse Jackson for over a decade, mocking his title by exaggerating how he says "Reverend." And he recently said that the inexcusable beating of a white boy by two black boys on a school bus, rather than being evidence of teenage bullying done by both blacks and whites, is evidence that in Obama's America blacks have permission to beat up whites. This, of course is not only absurd, it is a deliberate attempt to build hatred of the president. And he loves to point to Obama's Kenyan father, insisting that this makes Obama an Arab. Because he has been called out so many times on his racist attacks, Limbaugh has found it just as effective to use the term "Arab" for black. After all, more than a few of our citizens have referred to Iraqis as "sand ni**ers."
Limbaugh's television counterpart, the seriously unhinged Glenn Beck, has also injected racism into the mix of radical right wing talk by insisting with no evidence or no rationality whatsoever, that Obama is secretly implementing programs for the purpose of reparations for families of slaves, calling Obama a racist who hates white people.
Republican political operatives in recent decades have done everything they could to viciously and unfairly destroy Democratic presidential candidates. With Clinton they had an easy mark since he had a history of womanizing. So they investigated him for years until they were able to put a microphone on an intern and catch her bragging about being with the president.
With John Kerry, they had a war hero and anti-war protestor that they turned into a traitor with some dubious "testimony" from Vietnam era soldiers.
But Obama has a stable and loving family, no skeletons in his closet and was born too late to be involved in Vietnam, so the label of philanderer, traitor or war protestor could not be pinned on him. Besides, he ran for president during an unpopular war so it would have been a non-issue. And in addition, Obama is a brilliant attorney and powerful speaker and these cause more than a little resentment in his opponents. For many racists, blacks who educate themselves and dare to speak to school children, are being "uppity" and don't know their place. Saxby Chambliss, a United States Senator from the South, said of Obama before his joint speech to Congress "He'd better be humble." Can you imagine anyone saying that before any of our other presidents gave an address to Congress?
What was left to damn him with, besides his unfortunate name that was similar to the dictator we had just executed in Iraq? Ah – he had a tangential association with two undesirable characters: the black preacher Jeremiah Wright and the white "terrorist" Bill Ayers. Jeremiah Wright gave inflammatory sermons criticizing whites who behave badly towards blacks and Bill Ayers was a former member of a sixties group of radicals. This became the dog whistle used against Obama. When the Republicans say "terrorist" and associate it with Obama, they are really saying terrorist = Arab = black to those who harbor racial prejudice. To others, those who are just vulnerable to fear-mongering, there is no difference between a sixties radical who killed no one and an Arab who killed 3000 Americans by crashing airplanes into buildings.
Republicans, as I have noted before, use dog whistle words that Southerners recognize while many of the rest of us don't. They blow their whistle, the dogs come out and crap all over everyone's lawn, and when the neighbors complain, those neighbors are called animal haters. Another analogy would be the situation when a younger child pinches an older child under the table, where mom can't see what is going on. When the older child yells or tells mom or hits back, he's the one who gets nailed as a bully or a tattle tale because all mom saw was his reaction. So when Republicans and nut jobs like Limbaugh and Beck do their dog whistle acts, people who are racists get irate and act. Then when someone like Jimmy Carter calls them out on it, they blame him, saying he is playing the race card.
So why do so many Americans still harbor rage, fear, and hatred towards blacks? As I said earlier, some of this is natural tribalism that we must work against. However, for some it is more than that.
Many Southerners have never accepted blacks as their equals and have always wanted them kept in positions of subservience. Some resent the South's defeat in the Civil War and take that resentment out on the descendents of the slaves they once considered their rightful property. Some have simply been raised to see blacks as less human and certainly not deserving of being the leader of the free world.
It is interesting, isn't it, that by far the majority of our professional athletes in the three big sports (football, basketball, and baseball) are black? Tennis has recently produced some powerful black female stars and even that last bastion of all white athletes, golf, now has a black man as the top player. I think this adds to the fears that many whites have of blacks because they realize so many of our black citizens are bigger and stronger than many whites. If you add this to the high incarceration rate for young blacks, (often after unfair convictions) you have a stereotype that strikes fear into some whites. Then if you add unconscious and long repressed guilt over the enslavement of blacks, you have a volatile mix. This is why you hear Glenn Beck bloviating about Obama wanting reparations. Actually, Glenn Beck is afraid that a black president might want revenge. This is absurd, of course, and just points out Beck's paranoia, but myths of race, and repressed guilt over white treatment of blacks is so powerful that it is in the backs of even some rational minds.
My late mother, for instance, would probably have voted for John McCain in 2008, until he chose Sarah Palin as his running mate. She thought Palin completely unqualified and didn't want to take the chance she could ever end up as president, so she voted for Obama. But the night before the election she timidly asked me if I thought Barack Obama might want to get revenge for everything that had been done to African Americans. Even my kind, rational and non-racist mother was vulnerable to that kind of fear, so when nut jobs on the television and radio reinforce such thinking in even less rational people, and listeners don't have someone like me to calm their fears, the paranoia can grow.
Carter's comments have indeed opened up a discussion. It's one that is happening only because our work to overcome our primitive tribalism is not finished. Perhaps Carter's timing wasn't so good. Obama is distancing himself from the comments not just because he has always stayed away from racial controversy as it is a lose-lose for him, but also because he is trying to pass a health care reform bill right now and doesn't need this distraction.
But Carter is not a politician anymore. He never was very good at politics. For the past few decades, Carter has been a prophet, warning us, holding a mirror up to us, and saying what is unpopular but necessary. We would be wise to consider the validity of what he is saying. He says he worries for our country, and I do too, especially when I see the young children at the Tea Party rallies carrying ugly signs they cannot possibly understand.
Instead of taking these vulnerable children to rallies and raising another generation of racists, I have a recommendation for parents. Rent the movie "Paper Clips." It is a movie about two middle school teachers in the South, who decide that their all-white students need to develop some empathy to those who are unlike themselves. They begin a project to overcome prejudice and it works. The kids enthusiastically take the project much further than anyone expected and manage to educate the entire town. It is worth seeing. It will change you.
All content © 2005 outragedcitizen.com
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