CONCERNING THE CONTINUING AMERICAN DIALOGUE ON RACE AND OTHER IMPERTINENT AFFAIRS
A small sandy-haired boy was throwing stones
at the master's recently invented (and highly successful) plow. Benignly Jefferson
watched the boy?who was now periously climbing a tree.
"Your grandson is going to hurt himself," [says Mr. Burr in the novel of
his name by Mr. Gore Vidal.]
Jefferson flushed deeply. "That is a child of the place. A Hemings, I think."
Two hundred years pass. And once again--ignorantly, clumsily--we find the nation
stumbling into its recurring barroom-brawl argument on the issue of race, and afterwards,
like the average drunk, we will teeter out into the rainy streets, battered, bloody,
ought-to-be-embarassed, but not, blearily confident that we have satisfied some nagging
responsibility that we wish would simply go away of its own accord. Race? Didn't
we fight that guy last year?
The latest entry in the Continuing American Dialogue On Race And Other Impertinent
Affairs comes in the form of the 2003-04 Presidential campaign. As does all candidates,
Mr. Howard Dean, formerly the Governor of the state of Vermont, would like for everybody
all over to vote for him, and that would be that. But if he were to simply stand
up and say, "Hey, everybody, vote for me," someone, somewhere, would feel
left out and offended and look elsewhere for leadership, and so Mr. Dean, like all
candidates, must ask for particular votes, each and every one.
This is not as simple as you might think. One can ask for all the African-American
votes, or all the Latino votes, or all the votes of women or the great working people
of this nation. But one never asks for all the white votes these days. There seems
to be something tawdry and improper about this particular subject, an uncomfortable
reminder of a besotted past that makes folks shuffle and look uneasily over their
shoulders as if in anticipation of the appearance of some pale and bony hand. And,
so, American candidates must be creative. Richard Nixon had his Moral Majority. George
Bush the Lesser has his Heartland. Now comes Mr. Dean. In trying to expand his voter
base from the progressive-liberal to include more conservative, working-class, National
Rifle Association Member Southern white men, Mr. Dean has said in a couple of recent
speeches that he wanted to also be"the candidate for guys with Confederate flags
in their pickup trucks." Code word, sort of, for regular Southern white guys.
You'd have thought he'd urinated in public.
"It is simply unconscionable for Howard Dean to embrace the most racially divisive
symbol in America," says Senator John Kerry of Massachussetts, a rival of Mr.
Dean's for the Democratic nomination. Presumably Mr. Kerry meant the Confederate
flag and not Southern white men. Mr. Kerry went on to say that he, Mr. Kerry, "would
rather be the candidate of the NAACP than the NRA."
"He just has the wrong idea about how you should communicate with Southerners,"
says a spokesperson for General Wesley Clark, another rival.
A spokesperson for Senator Joseph Lieberman, a third rival, calls Deans remarks "irresponsible
and reckless."
"I regret the pain that I may have caused either to African American or Southern
white voters," Mr. Dean is forced to admit. He adds that he had been trying
to provoke a dialogue on race in America, but admitted that he had "started
this discussion in a clumsy way."
Admit all you want, Mr. Dean, but that clumsiness long ago got
claimed by a larger circle.
In the recent trial of the Oakland Riders, a group of police who stand accused by
the District Attorney of running rampant and roughshod and out-of-control on an African-American
community, it was widely reported that there were no African-Americans on the jury.
A majority of the jurors wanted to convict, but three jurors held out. Shortly after
the verdict one of the majority faction telephone Tribune columnist Brenda Payton
and, apparently embarassed at the actions of his own kind, said he'd wished there
had been African-Americans on the jury, since all of the alleged victims of the cops
were black.
"Without them [meaning African-Americans], people like me [meaning white people]
were speaking for them [meaning African-Americans]," Ms. Payton reports the
juror as saying. "I believe them [meaning African-Americans] and I know people
it's happened to [meaning police misconduct]. But when I was talking to those three
jurors, as far as they were concerned, how would I know?"
The African-American alternate, Ms. Payton reports the anonymous juror saying, would
have made a difference, adding, in the juor's words, "To some, she might have
added credibility through personal experience and to those others, she might have
shamed them."
As if, like Mr. Jefferson's grandson, it is the job of African Americans to hang
around in a tree long enough to shame (other) folks into admitting the actuality
of our existence.
One wonders why my white friends, who, after all, have done many wonderful things
down through the ages and contributed many valuable inventions towards the progress
of the world, cannot gather among themselves and speak of this as adults might do?
Why all the tittering and fumbling about as if someone has passed gas in a middle
school classroom?
"It's always the darkies, always about the darkies," laments the Confederate
Legislator-General to the British attaché in Gettysburg, the movie, when the
attaché inquires about slavery and what the Legislator-General really wants
to talk about is matters of more serious merit.
But the nation and all its inhabitants continues to find it difficult to move on
to any other conversation until we have properly finished the first. Still, we wait
to see, now, if Mr. Dean's admittedly clumsy beginnings produces anything more than
a polite clucking of his fellow politicians' tongues.