Epiphanies on Whiteness

A local newspapr columnist raised this question about his point of view regarding the duke incident-- he wrote the following:
Am I a racist Uncle Tom?
Jun 4, 2006
The national media descended on Durham when the Duke lacrosse rape case broke and described a town that was racially divided.
It made me and other locals want to holler and throw up our hands, because there we were again, on that downward image spiral that makes Reyn Bowman's job at the Convention and Visitors Bureau so hard.
Granted, there are railroad tracks in Durham, but they don't separate the rich from the poor.
So we rejected what Geraldo Rivera and them were reporting. Durham, we retorted, is not stuck in the Jim Crow era, no outward racism around here.
Inward racism? Well ...
There was a time when some deemed brilliant my little comments about the Duke lacrosse case. That's when I was laying it on the accuser real thick, when I was saying the stripper hired by members of the lacrosse team had it coming, that rape -- while never deserved -- comes with the territory in a profession like hers.
Man, some black folks tore me up! They were appalled that I, as a black person, would speak out against the sister.
Well, that's how it was until I wrote the other day that the lacrosse players, too, bore some responsibility. I said we wouldn't even be having this discussion had they not decided to hire some strippers in the first place. So, I continued, even if the accuser is lying, the situation they find themselves in is self-inflicted.
My approval rating with white readers slipped faster than President Bush's with registered voters. And just like that, I became a racist, after that one column.
Hey, I'm a big boy. I can take the heat. No doubt, as I suggested pertaining to the Duke lacrosse case, I brought this on myself. You're as entitled to your opinion as I am to mine.
But let's at least agree on one thing -- that maybe the national media wasn't that far off base when describing Durham's racial divide. Not that we're at each other's throats, not outwardly.
Inwardly, though?
See, this isn't about me being able to take it as well as I can dish it. The hateful comments from white people came from somewhere deep within that caught my naïve self off guard.
Black people who've accused me of being an Uncle Tom sometimes ask if a white person has ever called me a nigger. I was proud to always tell them no.
But I can't say that anymore, not after that column. I was called a nigger and then some.
And it bolstered what I'd been told about how one day it'd happen to me, that sooner or later white folks would show their true colors and I'd then see the need to pick up not one but two chips -- one for each shoulder.
Listen, I love white people, black people, Chinese, folks from Iraq -- I just love people. Period.
So this episode won't make me lose hope.
But this much is true -- those nasty e-mails in my inbox came from as far away as El Segundo, Calif., and from Flushing, N.Y.
So if Durham, in fact, is racially divided, then apparently the rest of America hasn't embraced that divorce from Jim Crow, either.
John McCann's column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Contact him at jmccann@heraldsun.com or 419-6601.

I had to reply internally with this

You know I didn't write this, but damn if it does not prove something. This guy is African American and a bit conservative for my tastes but I’ll damn if it doesn't prove something about being in the good graces of white folks. Now, I can't say all white folks but I can say that some of his white audience and possibly some of the black audience as well, they can easily turn on you like a dime. As he pointed out, while he was chastising the stripper saying, these are the risks go with the job, he was like Armstrong Williams. But then when he called the white boys on the carpet, well he fell out of their good graces suddenly becoming Malcolm X. It's like what Malcolm X said, "too black, too strong." Apparently, brother McCann became a brother on the run as he was a little too black when he stepped out of "his place" questioning and challenging white people—lets qualify this—white people with social status and money. What's sad is that people--a majority of white people, fail to recognize that. This ambivalence and most cases overt denial stuns me. [About to have a Dr. Phil moment here] In my opinion, individuals first need to recognize who they are within their immediate context. Who are you, what are you, what do you stand for, when you are stripped down raw, what is your foundation? Once done, this acceptance allows for some degree of cognizance and thus opens the door to, POSSIBLE change. Racism, like poverty, disease, and even wealth is acquired not exclusively by initial exposure but by more so inherited. If the conditions are manifested, conditioned, and socialized then there is a greater likelihood that these systems will rupture into a full blown malady. Not only is this country endemic of racism but, we really should consider it an epidemic. That said, on the other hand, if there is recognition at an early stage, then interventions can be installed to quell the full blown manifestation of the disease, possibly to its full remission. Racism, in my honest, best, and unqualified opinion must not only be classified as a medical psychological disorder, but furthermore must be seen as social stigma that must be rooted out. Racism to me represents a psychological illness feeding off of delusions of grandeur--almost like schizophrenia. It’s like a detachment from reality that through one's quest—now obsession to be human, they negate all things that are not human by their self definition. This negation extends itself into typologies or even racial taxonomies whereby one places themselves at the focal point of that particular hierarchy. For example, I know a dog is a dog by definition. With that same definition or classification, we are both mammals, but are we of the same species? No. Humans have their way of doing things, Canines have theirs. But then when we humans, these ethnocentric values that has been inscribed at every level, socially constructed and scientifically validated, we humans have been taught to believe that some of us aren't quite human enough; and therefore qualifying them for the level of the animal in some cases below the animal. This is delusional-a gross detachment from reality. It’s very much like that character in the film "A Beautiful Mind." "You're not real," was the recurring theme. Because you are not real, for sanity sake, I have to ignore you, I have to distance myself from you because if I have relationships with you, then I am among the not normals. If we take that same theory and apply it to race, at least in this country, then you have a whole lot of white folks chanting, "you're not real" to a lot of people. You're not real because, you're skin tone isn't like mine, you're not real because you are not of my sexual preference, you're not real because of your religious affiliation, you're not real because-- and you fill in the blank. What is bad (and that probably is a poor choice of words for this discussion) is that this is reinforced through our domestic and international policies, what we call cultural norms, how lies have been grossly enabled to infiltrate our individual belief systems, our psyches; all because there is this quest to be real. This personification of "being real," represents a power. Power of definition, power of acceptance, power of social self construction. This power must be defused from the small minority of those who enslave the majority.