Sunday, June 22, 2008
Opinion

Obama and the end of white guilt

All I had in my grocery basket was a bag of rabbit food and a dog bone...

Sen. Barack Obama greets people in Wisconsin.
Darren Hauck/Getty Images

By Stephanie Ramage

All I had in my grocery basket was a bag of rabbit food and a dog bone. So I took my place at the end of the short express line, only to feel someone’s body heat wafting onto my behind. Obviously, someone was following too closely. I moved up—usually a clear hint to the person behind you that he or she is too close. (I can never understand how anyone would make the mistake of following too closely in a grocery line—it’s not as if they have the hood of a car in front of them. But, oddly enough, this was the second time such a thing had happened to me.)

Apparently wanting to close the distance, the person behind me moved up, too, this time brushing my backside. I said, without turning around, “Please step back,” and stepped forward again, to no avail: I turned and saw a large man standing in front of his cart. There was no one in line behind him. He edged himself maybe an inch away from the counter, indicated the tiny crevice left by this move, and said, “If you need to get by me, I’m sure you can squeeze by.”

I responded, “I don’t need to ‘squeeze by.’ I want you to move away from me, please. You are invading my personal space and it makes me nervous and it’s rude.”

His leer vanished and he snarled, “Nobody’s ever complained before.”

He was probably about 6-foot-4 and well over 200 pounds. I seriously doubt that most people, particularly women, would have dared to complain. The man was plainly a masher. As my aunt who had traveled a lot had explained to me, in England, on the subway in particular, there were perverts who intentionally stood too close, who pressed up against women or rubbed against them in the crowded trains. They were called mashers. Their shocked victims usually pretended that nothing was happening as they were privately violated in a public setting.

As I paid the cashier, I remembered a black lady I worked with years ago, a short, rotund mother of two—“one on the hip and one by the hand,” she used to say—who arrived late to work one day shaking and in tears. A man on MARTA had, to use my aunt’s term, “mashed” her (and her children were with her).
 
As I took my bag, the apparent masher behind me said loudly, so everyone could hear. “You need to learn that black people don’t bite,” so as to exonerate himself by making me appear racist.

There was a line behind him then, and perhaps I should have just walked out, but I felt I had to say something. The foreign-born cashier looked at me anxiously. The elderly white man behind the masher raised a fluttering hand, as mottled and lined as a butterfly, to his glasses where his watery eyes swam agitatedly from side to side. Behind him another white man suddenly snatched a tabloid from its rack and hid his face behind a cover promising more details of Patrick Swayze’s pancreatic cancer saga.

Like many whites, they didn’t want to be tainted by anything that smacked of racism, so it’s not as if they were going to say anything. White guilt forbids it. I was angry not so much about being accused of fear of blacks, but at the audacity of this creep laying claim to some solidarity in blackness with the other black men who are my friends and acquaintances. Skin color is the only thing they shared. So, under these circumstances, what was the right thing to say?

“I have not one problem with black people,” I said. “You obviously have never seen my boyfriend.”

And I turned and left. Truth be told, my partner is not black, but it’s the most effective way I could think of to remind the listeners of the vast diversity within any given race.

I am a longtime John McCain fan, but it occurred to me as I walked to my car that if Barack Obama becomes president, his occupation of the highest office in the land will absolve white Americans of a great deal of imagined guilt, and that will be a huge step in the direction of equality. Whites will be less reticent to speak up about infractions that involve people who just happen to be black. And that’s important, because white guilt, a burden of guilt unfairly assumed by whites who could in no way be responsible for injustices done to blacks decades ago, harms blacks as much as, and perhaps even more than, it does whites.

At present, white public servants are so afraid of being called racist that they have in some cases failed in their responsibility to serve black citizens equally. Among these fearful failures are the white school officials who refuse to address the problem of an incompetent black teacher for fear of being called racist, even though the students the teacher is failing to teach are also black. These are the white police officials who refuse to send an adequate number of patrol officers into black communities for fear of appearing to be racially profiling, even though the victims of crime in those communities are themselves black. These are the white elected officials who support programs that will harm the city or county or state as a whole, but which appear at least to be favorable to blacks—as if blacks are not really a part of the larger society but instead some inadequate subset of it—because if they don’t support those programs, people might think they are racist.

White guilt, misplaced as it is, gives blacks a counterfeit version of equality through policies and programs designed to “even up” what these well-meaning but profoundly racist and cowardly whites see as black inferiority. Real equality means that we can speak as honestly across the color lines as we speak within them. It means that a woman can tell a man, “I want you to move away from me, please” without fear of her request being discredited merely because her skin color is not the same as his. SP