The Dance of Bigotry

Creative Bigotry. Another semester is about ready to start at Morehead State University in Kentucky next week. Because I teach African-American thought early in my Intro to Political Theory class, one of the first things I encounter is the newest rationales for racism. When ideas like "blacks are just as racist as whites" peter out, new or recycled ideas like "stereotypes are real" pop up to take their place. Last fall, a student told me to the approval of other white students that racism was causeded by "blacks complaining about racism." Like other dimensions of American culture, white racism has a creative vitality.

Dancing around Anti-immigrant bigotry. In Texas, the town of Farmers Branch near Dallas has adaopted legislation that bans illegal immigrants from renting apartments. According to businessman Andrew Mungeon, the whites in town "don't like Mexicans" and passed anti-immigrant legislation as a result of their bigotry. Illegals, legal immigrants, and Hispanics in general responded by moving out of Farmers Branch and even avoiding the town.

For Tom Bohmier, the leader of a group backing "the city's push against illegal immigration," the charge of ethnic bias is "hogwash. We're going after illegal immigrants." But then he added the kicker: "the message is we are trying to slow down the degradation of our city." "The degradation of our city" is a code phrase for the sentiment that hearing Spanish spoken in the streets and stores, seeing commercial advertisements in Spanish, and the presence of brown-skinned people is a "degradation" of traditional culture, i. e., white culture. Of course, the sentiment that any Hispanic presence beyond tokenism is a "degradation" is a very powerful ethnic bias. Like "color-blind" rhetoric in relation to blacks, opposition to illegal immigration is a mask for a desire to cleanse American society of hispanic culture.

Entangling White Liberals. White liberals generally don't recognize the extent to which the traditional bigotries have begun to entangle them as well. Today's Houston Chronicle has a comment on the efforts of conservative Southern Republicans to use "Democrat" rather than "Democratic" as an adjective --as in Democrat Party, Democrat proposals, and "Democrat" members of Congress. The official rationale for this effort is the idea that "Democratic" has a favorable association with "democracy" that Republicans want to deny to the Democrats. But the real reason is the underlying sense of power over the Democrats that conservatives can claim by "naming" them something they don't want to be called. The ungrammatical sound of "Democrat" Party is also appealing to the anti-intellectualism of conservatives. By imposing "Democrat" as an adjective, conservatives can impose their own sense of moral superiority on the liberal artsy-ness they associate with the Democrats. From the right-wing point of view, liberals are associated with fields like law, science, and the arts, and these fields are characterized in terms of deficiencies in manhood and power--in other words as gay or feminine. In giving the Democrats an ungrammatical name, conservatives experience themselves as imposing their values over wimpy, limp-wristed liberals thus ensnaring white liberals in their homophobia and misogyny.