White Folks by Timothy J. Lensmire

Author:Timothy J. Lensmire
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Obviously, much could (and should) be made of Norman’s worry when he was drunk that he may have assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Many interpretations, from diverse disciplines and perspectives, could be generated. The one developed below proposes that Norman, at such moments, intuited something important about the constitution of his own white racial identity.

In Rabelais and his World, Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) explored folk humor and popular festivals in the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance because he saw in them lessons for how to oppose an oppressive social order and official ideology. Bakhtin thought that official truth was held in place by fear. Consequently, he was interested in how that fear might be lifted or countered. He theorized that feasting—sitting with friends, eating, drinking, laughing—might provide occasions for fearlessness and that, with this fearlessness, counter-truths might be perceived and expressed.

There is an inverted feasting here with Norman, one with drinking and tears. However, these tears and drinking appear to have enabled moments of truth-telling.

As explored in the previous section, Ellison (1986) thought that the sorts of stereotypes Norman espoused about black and Native peoples were “symbolic substitutions” for a more “primitive blood rite of human sacrifice” (p. 177). Furthermore, Ellison argued that such scapegoating rituals were crucial to the creation and maintenance of white people’s sense of themselves as white and American. Norman’s fear that he had killed Dr. King, then, seems an uncanny recognition of the connections Ellison draws between stereotyping and blood rites and identity. In other words, the truth Norman expressed at these moments was that his identity, in some profound way, was dependent on killing people of color.

*  *  *

Robert was an educator and a basketball coach. Two interrelated themes are developed with Robert’s interviews. The first is that people of color often became the focus of conflict within this white community. Stated differently, there was not an agreed upon, monologic word or perspective about race in this community. The second theme is that Robert’s physical and moral development as a boy was wrapped up with people of color, even though he had little contact with them when he was young.

Experiences with people of color increased for all of these men as they grew older, both because of the expansion of activity and interaction that comes with becoming an adult and because of demographic shifts that included Hmong and Mexican Americans joining their community. These experiences were often characterized by conflict, which pointed not only to enduring racism within their local community, but also to conflict within the white community itself. Thus, Robert resigned as the coach of a nearby city’s high school basketball team after the ongoing criticism of him by white parents—criticism that started when he suspended a white player for calling the only black player on the team a racial epithet (the racial epithet). In addition, Robert described contentious debates within his Lutheran church over whether it should sponsor and support Hmong immigrants to the area (as did William, discussed below).

Robert

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