Lovable Racists, Magical Negroes, and White Messiahs by David Ikard

Author:David Ikard [Ikard, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-226-49277-3
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-08-16T16:00:00+00:00

What she refers to as a “distraction” is indeed a key function of white supremacist ideology—to hold blacks chiefly responsible for their extant victimization from slavery to present-day institutional racism and structural inequalities: the chief goal being to keep blacks preoccupied with defending their humanity to whites and, by turn, focused on how blacks contribute to their own oppression rather than on how the social and material realities of white supremacist oppression—past and present—undermines and sabotages black progress and self-determination. Paradoxically, the preoccupation with proving their humanity to whites legitimizes white supremacy as it places them in the privileged position of determining black humanity. Because their white privilege depends on denying their history of oppressing blacks and, specifically, how whites continue to reap the social and economic benefits of this history of oppression, they have a deeply vested interest in keeping blacks in this defensive ideological posture. Which is also, consequently, why blacks who emphasize black culpability in oppression to the exclusion of historic white oppression, such as Ward Connelly, Clarence Thomas, Bill Cosby, Charles Barkley, and Don Lemon, become white media darlings and are often treated as brave and heroic for being willing to “call blacks out” for their social and economic woes.

In a pragmatic sense, it is useful to think of the discourse of distraction as a long-standing apparatus of white supremacist ideology designed ostensibly to misunderstand black Americans’ plight and, by extension, trivialize whites’ culpability in blacks’ subordinate social, cultural, and economic status. As we will discuss shortly, this intentional misunderstanding gave way in more contemporary times to a culture of conditioned ignorance, encouraging whites to experience this distraction maneuver as commonsensical and, conversely, blacks’ challenges to it as frivolous, even racist. We can trace this phenomenon of intentional misunderstanding back to slavery. Proslavery whites experienced the atrocity of slavery during the antebellum era as a civilizing apparatus for enslaved Africans. That is, enslavement was understood or, rather, strategically misunderstood as a benefit to Africans as it not only “saved” them from their “primitive” existence in Africa but also “exposed” them to white Western civilization and most importantly (white) Christianity. White slavers situated themselves as paternal figures ordained by God who were responsible for the care and discipline of the enslaved. The enslaved Africans were prefigured in this white supremacist paternalist calculus as perpetually childlike in their understanding of morality, civilization, work ethic, and self-determination and in need of constant instruction, surveillance, and discipline. Manual labor in this context was a way for the enslaved to “earn their keep” while at the same time providing them with exposure to white civilization and paths beyond their imagined primitive nature and pathological cultures. In keeping with this mindset, white paternalism was necessarily violent at times because the enslaved, especially the men, were considered violent, hypersexual, and immoral by nature. White violence against enslaved blacks was thus experienced—emotionally, legally, and religiously—as either paternalistic discipline or a form of self-defense. Of course, white lethal violence against blacks spiked dramatically after slavery

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