Not Just Talk: Antiracist Dialogue While the Privacy Wall is Down
When many of our forebears came to America just a generation or two ago, they quickly learned that they weren’t just German, Irish, Italian, Russian, Christian or Jew; they could be White and enjoy the rights and privileges appertaining thereto because there were also — unlike in Africa — Blacks. Thus racism has been the eternal flame under the melting pot of which we have been so proud, that made this the land of opportunity for the huddled mass who could pass. But the myth of the melting pot of the self-reliant meant that we had to hide the fire beneath our feet, had to make it all about our heroism.
We whites became Gatsbies whose self-reinvention was really — as to racism, at least — self-hiding, because we needed to know that we could melt right in and make it. That’s where norms and privacy came in. To make it, you couldn’t talk or act racist in public; in public there were norms everyone observed. But racist talk and even action made for great bonding in the private spaces of Goffman’s backstage, for example on very private phone calls with other major political donors.
Thus antiracism may benefit both from the crisis in political and economic hierarchy and the crisis in privacy. The crisis in hierarchy took hundreds of years despite the egalitarian roots and principles on which it could draw, but in public norms, despite decades of dogwhistles, the crisis could come as an explosion of tweets straight from the id of one racist president, whose greatest construction project was not building a wall but tearing down the wall between the stage and the backstage for racist white America, letting the racism come right out onstage and into the halls of government in so many ways.
Why would antiracism thrive after the privacy wall protecting the backstage has been demolished? Because that wall has hurt people of color a lot more than it has helped. That wall has enabled whites to hide the racism from which we have benefitted, to keep on telling the rest of the world about our wonderful melting pot in the land of opportunity, and to keep on doing nothing like the clergy Dr. King excoriated in his Letter from Birmingham Jail. And it has prevented the kind of authentic dialogue that many of us are having now, which may even have the best chance in 400 years to kill the racial hierarchy so deeply embedded in American culture. Killing that cultural hierarchy may even do more than reparations to assure that this is the land of opportunity for people of color, because if we can do it and demonstrate that we did it, they will be justified in trusting some of the same ladders that our peoples trusted.
