Merge Left by Ian Haney López

Author:Ian Haney López
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2019-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

White Self-Regard and the Refusal to Engage with the Privileges of White Identity

Why do liberals so often get this history wrong? It’s not just because Americans are lousy historians. Rather, look again at the story Traub was telling, and consider in particular what that story said about him, other elite whites, and the whites who fled the liberal coalition.

In Traub’s narrative, who are these liberal elites? Are they cold mathematicians willing to throw African Americans aside if that’s the way to win elections? No, they come across as well-meaning people who want to help others, including people of color, though their laudable commitments sometimes lead them astray. Traub describes Hubert Humphrey as “the Joe Biden of his day—irrepressible, unscripted, prolix,” and also with “the unquenchable zeal of a reformer.”24 White elites, it seems, are bumbling saints.

And what about the racially resentful white voters who broke from liberalism? According to Traub, especially outside the South, the whites abandoning the Democratic Party were racially innocent. “Beyond the Jim Crow South,” he writes, whites “had no consciousness of having kept blacks down” and were “unconscious beneficiaries of entrenched white privilege.” They didn’t know they were white, didn’t recognize racial hierarchy, and didn’t fight to preserve white dominance, Traub’s characterization suggests.

Indeed, Traub invites The Atlantic’s readers to emulate him as he puts himself in the shoes of innocent, beset northern whites. When he writes about busing children to promote school integration, Traub imagines how his own childhood would have been disrupted had he not been, well, a member of the white elite. “But how would I have felt, and how would my parents have felt, if the bus had come for me?” That formulation—“if the bus had come for me”—makes integration sound like the Grim Reaper. Shifting to contemporary white angst, Traub suggests that “Trump voters also may have reason to feel that something precious is being taken from them.” Then he advises, “Maybe it behooves today’s Democrats to take those grievances more seriously than they’re inclined to.”

Traub is indirectly explaining the interests of whites, himself included, in preserving the advantages of being white. Yet he does not investigate the actual contours of these “precious” things, and he certainly does not examine the reality of how whites fiercely defended their racial privileges.

Nor does he have much to say about communities of color. Regarding nonwhites, Traub mainly offers silence. He does not urge his readers to imagine how they would have felt as children if trapped in a school dilapidated by racism. He does not speculate about those denied a fair shot at making it in a competitive economy or making it out of an impoverished community because they did not receive a quality education. He does not reflect on the family-twisting stresses of high unemployment on the next generation of students themselves doomed to still-segregated and neglected schools.

At work is a form of white identity politics that expresses itself through an unconsidered sympathy and indifference—sympathy for the racial in-group, indifference for the out-group. White

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.