The literacy of sharing a world

NICSUN already gave us "Literacy in Politics." That put a new twist to a thought I've had for some time: that many people from majority or socially/politically/economically dominant groups have never learned to look at things from any other point of view, and have been educated to regard their own dominance as the right and natural order of the world. Any tipping of the balance, any leveling of the field that reduces the automatic supremacy of the dominant group is unfair, artificial, and part of an evil conspiracy.

Recently, I see this most glaringly from defenders of the Arizona immigration law, and the Tea Partiers. In the first case, many white "Conservative" Americans simply cannot believe there's an objection. "It's only against illegals!", they assure me, and can't imagine why anyone would think this law might impact legal immigrants, or even American citizens, who speak the same language or have the same skin color as those "illegals." I think we can say, with confidence, that Arizona would never have passed a law requiring white people to carry around documentation (documentation most Americans don't even possess) to produce any time a police officer demanded proof of citizenship. First of all, the majority of Arizona's voters would never subject themselves to harassment and humiliation like that. Second, well everyone just knows that white people are citizens, right?; it's non-whites who have to be individually scanned for alien status. Supporters, willfully or otherwise, blind themselves to the racial dynamic and the past and present reality of law enforcement's interaction with minority communities and claim that latinos who are here legally have nothing to fear from the law.

My second example, the one tied to the image above (or any of thousands of egregious signs that proliferate at Tea Party rallies), is the astonishing conviction held by some members of traditionally privileged groups in this country that they are getting a bad deal, that they are victims, that minorities are getting special advantages and taking over the country. This is an old, old refrain in America, dating back at least to the Civil War and white fears of "Negro Rule," as if weakening the institution of slavery or any advances toward basic citizenship and equality for African Americans meant that they'd grind whites in the dust. You see this today, with white conservatives (and, in 2008, Gloria Steinem!) denouncing Affirmative Action and the election of Barack Obama as proof that black Americans have things too easy and white people just can't catch a break anymore. Realistically, whatever disadvantages whites might suffer from Affirmative Action don't begin to override the benefits whites have received (for most of us unwillingly, unwittingly, without intent or understanding of the structural forces pushing us towards the top and others down) from our nation's racial caste system. Certainly, the election of the first non-white president can hardly spell the end of white success in America, especially when Congress, the media, the electorate, the business community, and the president's staff (from Joe Biden on down) are overwhelmingly white. Similarly, every year like clockwork Fox News warns us about a War On Christmas because some retailers have seen fit to ask their employees (who are not all Christian) to wish their customers (who are not all Christian) Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas. To those who are accustomed to ignoring the existence of other religions it seems like a huge affront to be asked to share the holiday shopping season in this tiny way. As my final example, the "Defense of Marriage" campaign, which peaked in 2004 with a series of amendments to state constitutions and an attempt to amend the United States Constitution to "defend marriage" from gay participation. How utterly baffling that so many Americans have taken "heterosexual" as a political and cultural identity, and think that marriage would be devalued and destroyed if a small excluded section of the population were allowed to join in. What on earth gays marrying is supposed to do to marriage as it exists between straight couples remains vague, but the very fact that same sex marriages were performed would utterly devalue the concept. It seems very clear to me that the point in retaining exclusive ownership of marriage is to have someone to look down at; whatever else is going wrong in my life, at least I'm better than them. In a world where diversity is increasing in all fields and classes, this isn't a viable attitude in the long term. We have to learn to share both economic resources and social capital.

Update: As if to prove my point the Tea Party's flagship candidate, GOP Senate nominee Rand Paul, puts the "government mandate" to share space in this country with non-whites in terms of the death of freedom.