Describing America

People love to describe America, and Americans.  We ourselves love to do this, and so does the rest of the world.  Why is this?

Because, as everything becomes more complicated, we need to simplify.  Instead of describing 330,000,000 people individually, we just give them one single description.

They're rich.

They're rotten.

They're bad at math.

They all love Trump.

and so on.  We may as well say: they're all women, because females are a slight majority.  (I had better check that . . . Whoa; there are significantly more women than men.)

The very complexity that makes it necessary to make generalizations about us, actually makes these generalizations less valid.  I've listened to people doing this for decades, and I have gotten increasingly worried about the phenomenon of generalizing about the attitudes of Americans concerning various things.

The news and the Internet makes generalizations about us.  But we, private individuals, make generalizations as well, and our generalizations tend to flow from the people we know.  And guess what?  The circle of people anyone knows has changed over the years.  In the 40's, I have a feeling, a typical person knew a bigger variety of types of people than a typical person knows now.  I could be quite wrong; it may have varied wildly from year to year, and person to person.  But in the last decade or so, since political attitudes have begun to diverge so strongly, people tend to stick with like-minded others, so that our generalizations are based on our bubbles, and we don't really know what others outside our bubble are thinking, except through the media.

Now we come to the elephant in the room: Black Lives Matter.  As I understand it, the phrase has a very definite sense that few people have taken the trouble to understand.

It means that white people should not consider killing black people as no big deal.

Once you put it that way, it becomes obvious that it is true.  Black folk immediately understand this; that the phrase BLM is simply a sloganization of that statement.  The importance of that remark is that we should not go around saying that we disagree with the phrase 'Black Lives Matter', and that any person who says that black lives matter is wrong, and should be xxxxx, whatever it is.  We may quarrel with that statement above in boldface being reduced to BLM, but to save time, we should accept that that abbreviation—created by Black folk, since it affects them the most—should continue to be accepted by us, until racism is no longer a problem, at which time we can invent a better abbreviation.

People on Facebook often put each other on the defensive about being racist.  The important thing is to realize that we cannot blame African Americans for being in the USA.  Many whites—fortunately not a majority—subconsciously feel that African Americans are out of line trying to be American citizens.  This issue has been hashed out more than a century ago; if you consciously thought about it, you know that African Americans have every right to be here, same as everyone else, in fact they have a better right, because they were hauled here, and plunked down here, and suffered countless humiliations, until today, when some of us are indignant at the righteous anger of Blacks at somehow being kept in poverty.

Of course, not all Blacks are poor.  A large minority has managed to become moderately well off, by essentially adopting white culture.  I believe that the majority of Black folks are genuinely reluctant to adopt white culture for several reasons.

Foremost among these is that they love Black culture.  (Many whites do not understand this, and think that this clinging to Black culture is just stubbornness.  There may be elements of stubbornness involved, but genuine love for Black culture and traditions is a far bigger reason.)

Another reason is that most Blacks are uncomfortable adopting white culture.  (Asians don't; Latinos don't; Arabs don't; Jews don't adopt white culture completely; so why should Blacks be criticized for remaining outside it?)

Finally, there is the suspicion that even if they adopt white culture, Whites will ridicule them for not getting it right.  (Obviously, whether they do or they don't depends on the white person involved.  There is great diversity among whites, even though some of them do not realize this.)  So it is a small minority of Blacks that have been able to become so completely assimilated into white culture that they have acquired a certain degree of prosperity.  While some whites secretly despise them, other whites are eager to point at them as success stories, and demand to know why all blacks can't assimilate like that.

The terminology is also vague.  Many whites think they are racist because they merely do not like Black folk.  Do Black folk want to be liked, or do they only want to be left in peace, and allowed to do anything a white person does; have as nice a house; work only as hard as a white person, but no harder; have their children go to as nice colleges as white children, and so on?  I don't identify as Black, so I don't know the answer to that question (and neither does any single Black person; the answer is different for each individual).  But it seems to me that some white folk do not want Black folk to have those things.  The biggest give-away was to see the anger of many white people when Barack Obama was elected President.  Many of us thought: it's about time someone whose head and whose heart was in the right place was elected to the White House.  But a few of us thought: A BLACK PRESIDENT?  WTF?

And those of us who were thinking WTF looked at our fellows, our friends and acquaintances, and either saw other people who celebrated Obama, or others who were just as stunned and unhappy as we were, and made generalizations about what white people were thinking.

Honestly, it has been decades since most people consciously thought that Black folks were born to be shot and killed by police.  But there were many of us who unconsciously thought, well, innocent Blacks getting shot by police is just a necessary concomitant to Law and Order, and keeping people safe; it can't be helped.  I thought like this too, until I stopped.  It is not that Black folks are asking for it.  It is that many of us have been OK with white folks being trigger-happy with Black folks, white folks owning more guns, and white folks getting away Scott free having committed manslaughter, or first degree murder, or any sort of Blackslaughter.

It may be that Blackslaughter has to become a bigger crime than Whiteslaughter, before things become better for all of us.

Remember when some guys used to complain about reverse discrimination?  I have a feeling that this sort of thing is going to come back, because there is a nucleus of mediocre white folk who resent any sort of advantage that Blacks are given to offset centuries of discrimination.

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I just learned that in Portland, there were people going around in unmarked cars soon after a protest, and taking people in for questioning.  These people were white (if I read the article correctly) but were wearing black.  This sort of thing seems to tell me that some white folk are very, very nervous about protests.  Trump, of course, is eager to jump on anything that will give him an edge, and appeasing those who feel that BLM protests give the impression of general lawlessness is just perfect.