White panic, White Denial: The Racial Prehistory of the McKinney Pool Party

http://www.alternet.org/culture/white-panic-white-denial-racial-prehistory-mckinney-pool-party-white-america-cant-let-go

We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the confrontation between those people was a real event in a real place, which unmistakably evoked America’s history of racial violence and civil disobedience. I also saw it, almost literally, as a collision between the past and the future. Whether or not that young lady behaved with perfect decorum on the afternoon in question, she is unmistakably an American of the future – not a future in which cultural or racial identities don’t matter (we won’t see that in any living person’s lifetime), but a future of increased fluidity and intersection and overlap. Her crime, so to speak, lay in being a black girl who went to a pool party in a largely white suburban neighborhood and acted as if she belonged there, without assuming she was to be held to some special standard of good behavior. That police officer, on the other hand, seemed to have absorbed a contact high from the long and brutal history of police violence against people of color. Fortunately for all of us, his obvious zeal for the role was rendered ludicrous rather than tragic by its context.

Yet it is African-Americans who are constantly accused of fixating on ancient history, a charge presented in various ways, many of them subtler than the white-centric paranoia delivered by Fox. Stated most directly and without hyperbole, this boils down to the idea that black people need to get over all that stuff that happened in the history books or in black-and-white video clips, like slavery and lynching and segregated lunch counters and generations of systematic economic and residential discrimination. It isn’t helpful; it’s only holding them back. Anyway, white people living today aren’t responsible for any of it and America simply isn’t racist anymore: Check out Obama and Jay-Z and LeBron. If anybody’s a racist, it’s all the black people calling everybody else racist.

OK, I said I would avoid hyperbole and I lied. Not everyone who expresses this view follows the chain of association all the way through that last sentence, or the one before it. (Although the “I’m not a racist, but …” mode is distressingly common.) But the important ideological thread, even in the most polite and neutral formulation, is the desire to decouple distressing individual events from the even more distressing current of history. The deaths of Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown and Eric Garner and all the rest are disconnected cases of perceived threat and police authority and possible wrongdoing, each to be weighed on its own merits. They do not belong to any larger historical pattern, and those who insist on perceiving such a pattern are dwelling in the past or playing the race card or nursing old grudges or otherwise denying and undermining the greatness of America.

Except of course for the confusing fact that many white observers do perceive a larger pattern linking the thorniest issues in the African-American community, which is the point where this ideological construction begins to reveal itself. Since it is urgently important to resist the obvious pattern — the one that would be discerned immediately by any outside observer — an alternative must be found. So the pattern we get instead of history is a murky and shapeless monstrosity spawned from the bad conscience of the social sciences: The “culture of dependency” or the “collapse of the black family” or, if we’re really reaching for the dog whistle, the “thug subculture” of baggy pants and Purple Drank and incomprehensible rap lyrics and, most damning of all, a disrespectful attitude towards authority. (Thank God young white folks have never expressed anything like that.)