The Weekly Screed (#692)

Thanks, Butch. It’s real white of you
by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — I’ve been a bleeding heart since second grade. That was when, as I peered between the lines of dogmatic drivel in the Baltimore Catechism, it dawned on me that Jesus was the original Christian.

By this, I mean “original” as creative thinking and “Christian” as a day-to-day habit rather than pulpit-flung crapola. The Jesus who formed in my seven-year-old mind was a Superman of life’s underdogs. He accepted as his brother every other living soul, regardless of circumstances, tempering that universal affection only with an abiding mistrust of the rich and ruthless. The best example Jesus provided me was the loving solace he lavished upon the absolutely scorned and wretched — beggars, cripples, sinners, whores, lepers, outsiders and thieves.

Over the years, I’ve questioned almost every syllable of my religious indoctrination. It’s a long time since I thought of Jesus as the Son of God or anybody’s Savior. I figure that if he was going to save us, he would’ve made a better job of it by now. But, as a model for every last one of us to look out for the other guy, Jesus is still all right with me.

I mention this because of an exchange I had last week with a few friends over an ugly, bigoted joke that circulated my way over the Internet. I objected to this snatch of dimwit drollery and shared it outward, for comment — as one can do so easily these days. My most thought-provoking reply was from a friend (who pointedly demoted me from “friend” to “acquaintance”) whom I’ll just call Butch.

Butch contends that I suffer chronically from “white liberal guilt,” wasting sympathy on junkyard mongrels who sneer at my candy-ass compassion. He sees me trying futilely to correct social problems that a) have been already been solved, or b) only exist in the “white liberal” imagination, or c) can never be solved because you just can’t help people like that — because they’re like that.

Beggars, cripples, sinners, whores, lepers, outsiders and thieves.

I hesitate to label Butch “racist.” I know he’s more complicated that that. Besides, a word so loaded shouldn’t be bandied about casually. To say “racist” is to imply an idea, even a philosophy. But today, racism no longer has any place in genetic science. It flies in the face of a vast body of empirical evidence about the roots of poverty and the structural persistence of economic inequality. The so-called racism that courses beneath society’s surface — eloquently expressed in a string of insults that Butch piled on me — is more emotion than intellect.

But if Butch is not, idelogically, a racist, why does he defend a bad joke that reeks of calculated bigotry? Maybe the answer is his accusation that I typify “white liberal guilt.” This is a familiar charge that liberals tend to concede. After all, white men are historically responsible for the slave trade that turned America’s African-American population into a permanent underclass, spawning an entirely separate native culture that most white people still fail to understand.

However, I’m a Catholic-school veteran, steeped in original sin and lifelong penance since before my First Confession. I know guilt. So it struck me — reading Butch’s diatribe — that I don’t feel as guilty about being white as he thinks I do. After all, I had no say in the institutions, from slavery to Jim Crow to lynchings to the Roberts Court, that are largely culpable for the plight of black people in America. Moreover, unlike all the rednecks of my acquaintance, I don’t derive any measure of identity or self-esteem from my pallid pigmentation. If anything, I’d like to be a little darker (as defense against melanoma).

Moreover, I don’t think white liberals today blame themselves for the offenses committed against minorities by the prejudiced cynics who mock our idealism. Among the idealists, white or otherwise, who fight for social justice and care about other people’s troubles, guilt no longer plays a role. Perhaps it never did. Jesus — who was almost certainly not white (which might have been one of his problems with the Romans, who were) — never uttered a word about skin color.

I don’t mean to suggest that there’s not a colossal cauldron of white guilt simmering in the suburbs and exurbs, in gated communities and boardrooms, in the country clubs, Elks Clubs and strip clubs of middlesex America. It’s there, but the big secret is that it doesn’t afflict the liberals who speak out against a color line that has become all the more stubborn since its protectors learned to speak in code.

The guilty ones — their queasy conscience evidenced by the heat of their denials — are guys like Butch who insist not only that they’re not to blame, but that there’s nothing for which to blame them. Or anybody.

Butch remembers what we both learned (in the same school) about the built-in blessing of whiteness in American society, and the obstacles not merely to success but to survival that non-white (especially black) Americans face. He’s aware that the handicaps of color, ethnicity, creed and poverty have persisted all his life. He insists that social injustice isn’t his problem. Not only is he not his brother’s keeper, he scorns anyone who lends a hand to his brother as a sucker who’ll probably end up with that hand hacked off by a nigger with a knife.

Butch would never admit feeling any guilt for a callousness so vehement that it smacks of outright race hatred. But I think that, among his fellow “realists,” there’s a little less white solidarity than there used to be, less certainty about the universal shiftlessness of their black and brown brothers, less cocksureness than they express in their slightly desperate posts, blogs, jokes and bumper stickers.

And I suspect that some of them remember Pontius Pilate — white guy, nice house. When he turned Jesus over to the mob to be crucified for crimes of compassion, Pilate washed his hands to purge the guilt that has clung to him, and to his name, for 2,000 years.