“The Price of Defending Whiteness”

“The Price of Defending Whiteness”        January 19, 2020   Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE VIDEO

Dying of Whiteness by Johnathan Metzl, pp. 3-4

"Ain't no way I would ever support Obamacare or sign up for it," (Trevor) told me. "I would rather die." When I asked him why he felt this way even as he faced severe illness, he explained, "We don't need any more government in our lives. And in any case, no way I want my tax dollars paying for Mexicans or welfare queens." 

. . . I could not help but think that Trevor's deteriorating condition resulted . . . from the toxic effects of dogma. . . . Dogma that, as he made abundantly clear, aligned with beliefs about a racial hierarchy that overtly and implicitly aimed to keep white Americans hovering above Mexicans, welfare queens, and other nonwhite others.

            

 It seems like a lifetime ago, but over the Christmas school break in 1988, my then wife and I went to visit our parents to give them some important news. We went first to Memphis to tell my in-laws that we were adopting a little girl from Korea.    

     Of course, I knew that they were racists . . . you couldn’t spend five minutes with them and not be painfully aware of that, but nothing had prepared me for the ferocity of their reaction to the news that we were going to make them grandparents to an Asian baby. I will not repeat here the racist screed that we were treated to that day but catch me alone and buy me a beer and I’ll recount the whole sordid tale.

So, when we then drove to Kentucky to tell my racist parents what we were going to do, I was better prepared to set the stage. I told them, “We are going to tell you some really good news, the best news of our lives, but before we tell you, I need for you to understand that I am going to remember what you say for the rest of my life and if you say the wrong thing, it may be something that can never be fixed.”

After I had given them the news, my father wisely just left the room to keep from

Saying the wrong thing. My mother teared up but managed to ask some basic questions about when we would get her, and what we knew about her birth parents.

When they met her, they tried to put a good face on it. My mother needle pointed a quilt for her baby bed that featured a little girl with curly blond hair, and when some weeks had past, my father hazarded the speculation, “I think there’s a lot of white in her.”

Both my parents and my in-laws were rural Southern hillbillies. To the best of my knowledge, none of them had ever known an Asian. My dad and my father-in-law had served in the military, but once the war was over, neither had ventured outside of the USA and almost never ventured outside of Kentucky and Tennessee. Why was my daughter’s race such a painful issue to them? 

She is smart, beautiful, personable, educated, successful, world traveled, and she has a ton of close friends . . . in short, not only everything that they were not, but also exactly the kind of daughter everyone hopes they will have. Which, in the end, is probably what our families feared 31 years ago. 

What I am only lately beginning to realize is that the root of racism is not so much a fear and loathing of races that are perceived as being somehow “other,” but it is actually a fear of the loss of status and privilege, the loss of a sense of superiority that comes from being white. 

I have lately been reading this book, Dying of Whiteness. It is written by a Kansas City native, Jonathan Metzl, who is now a professor of sociology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt. Being from Missouri and living now in Tennessee, he has examined the paradoxical problem of why the most ferocious white racists are almost always the people who have the least about which to feel superior to anyone. 

I don’t want to go too far down the rabbit hole here, but what has this guy so worried about racial purity? I’m not saying that there clearly wasn’t a lifeguard on duty at his gene pool, but here is the irony of the lingering racism in America . . . a hundred and fifty years after the end of slavery, fifty years after the integration of public schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces, and more than a decade after electing the first black president of the United States, how is race still a thing?

In the most recently released Star Wars movie, this Disney film proudly featured a very passionate lesbian kiss in a film that was made primarily for children . . . well, children and me. I say “proudly,” but they did cut that scene out of foreign releases of the film because, you know, Americans are so much more sophisticated than foreign audiences . . . honestly, you can’t make this stuff up. 

But why, if we are ready for this in a children’s movie do most of our neighbors here in Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, still flinch

when they see this? Metzl writes what, now that I have seen it in writing, should have been obvious to us all along. For those who have little else to claim as a reason to not feel inferior to the world, simply being white becomes a precious possession that many white southerners are loath to have threatened. 

I say “southerners” but it should be noted that some of the worst of race riots and racist holdout communities have been in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Massachusetts, and some of the current white supremacist activity is in Washington and Oregon, but, you know, when you hear hoof beats, you think “horses” and not “zebras.” Metzl didn’t have to travel outside of Missouri, Kansas, and Tennessee to find plenty of subjects to interview for his book. 

A hundred years ago, the first black man to earn a doctorate at Harvard, W.E.B. Du Bois, wrote:  It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. 

Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule. (Black Reconstruction [1935], 700-701)"

Du Bois was describing the ipso facto inheritance of every white person in America. No matter how poor you may be, your kids went to the white school. And When Metz writes about Missouri, he talks about how we have made our conceal and carry, and our open carry laws regarding guns so lax that it is not uncommon to see people carrying guns in the grocery store or at Walmart but even still, when a white man does that, most people don’t react at all, but when a black man does it, someone usually calls the police. 

But the difference is that when Du Bois made these observations, he was just describing the way it was in America. But that is what made school integration such a violent and painful transformation during the Civil Rights movement . . . white people realized that they were losing their status. . . the social dividing line that made their trailer park better than the tenements in black neighborhoods was that the school bus for the white school stopped at the trailer park and not in the black neighborhood. 

But when official segregation ended in the schools and the workplace, it unofficially continued in neighborhoods and, to our shame, in our churches. As Martin Luther King, Jr. famously observed, the most segregated hour in America is 11 a.m. on Sunday morning. 

You can legislate things like removing barriers to integration in property titles, in school districts, and in employment . . . but where we want integration to happen is in our hearts and that is why bringing a little brown baby into my white family in 1989 was such an affront to our families in Kentucky and Tennessee. We broke the unspoken rule of white segregation in our families. 

Adoption is a bit of a spin of the wheel of fortune. I was at the airport in Memphis, Tennessee when Valerie arrived with several other babies from Korea. They were not all beautiful, and smart, and some of them have had some serious issues in their young adult lives. In many ways, I won the lottery that day in May in the Memphis Airport. 

The horror of racism looks so absurd because she is so beautiful, so smart, and such a nice person but that doesn’t really get at the point. Had she been unattractive, below average in intelligence, and if she had struggled with addiction or unemployment, or any of the horrible things her maternal grandmother predicted . . . I guess I’m still pretty frosted about that . . . then racism is still wrong.

The presumption of superiority based on race, skin color, nation of origin, heritage, religion, or culture, is just obviously wrong without consideration of relative beauty or grade point average. Metzl titles his book, Dying of Whiteness, because people are literally dying from their desperate hold on some sense of privilege based on skin color. 

The interviews in his book, just like the one we excerpted for our wisdom lesson today, shows how much the resistance to Obamacare and the expansion of Medicare was rooted in the fear that poor white people had that blacks, Hispanics, and immigrants were going to get healthcare at public expense. Many of these people also needed ACA insurance or Medicare, but they chose to die from their illnesses, literally as a personal sacrifice, in order to defend the false sense of superiority of their race. 

Missouri refused to expand Medicare and because of that, about 60,000 people die prematurely and unnecessarily in Missouri every year due to lack of healthcare, the overwhelming majority of whom, are white. 

This graph will be difficult for you to read from your seats but it shows how gun deaths in Missouri have shot up over the national average in the years where we voted initially to have conceal and carry laws and then to liberalize open carry laws. 

As Metzl points out, a lot of this passion about gun ownership is motivated by racial fear. But while these statistics are making people call Missouri the “shoot me state” the real climb in the numbers of gun deaths are not inter-racial conflicts or even domestic conflicts. The rise in numbers come from suicides and the rise in suicides is directly related to the number and easy availability of the guns. White fear, racial anxiety, makes them buy the guns and despair about illness, poverty, loneliness, is it too much to say, “loss of status,” causes them to turn the guns on themselves. 

These are not black people committing suicide. These are white men, literally dying of whiteness. Here are the numbers:

 We are decent people here. We have compassion for everyone who commits suicide but look at this race and gender break out. The least likely person to commit suicide in Missouri is a black woman and the most likely, by far, and the distance between them all is growing rapidly, is white guys. And they mostly die from self-inflicted gunshot wounds. 

This is not a metaphor. This isn’t symbolism. As Metzl says, “the politics of racial resentment is killing America’s heartland.” . . . Literally!

A few months ago, when I was outlining this sermon for our musicians, I made the observation that we have institutionalized racism in the current White House administration in the person of an advisor, Stephen Miller. This guy:

We believe that this same guy who produced racist content for Britebart news is also the genius behind Trump’s “Muslim ban” and his harsh border immigration policies, including the child separation policy.

I am way too mature to pull a sight gag on Sunday morning but, seriously, does this not look like photos from a Kentucky family reunion? I may have even been at that one.

But what I said in my notes to the musicians was that I was not sure that Stephen Miller would still be in the administration when this sermon rolled around in January because, after all of those emails came to light that made it so obvious what a white nationalist that he is, surely he would be removed from office by now. Tic toc, Mr. Trump, tic toc. How long does it take for you to remove someone who is so obviously unfit for office? Don’t answer that . . . I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t understand the question. The more important question is for my white peers . . . how much longer will we tolerate this? How long will we pay a crazy price to defend white privilege?

I have spent most of my life now in an inter-racial family. What I can tell you existentially is that after the first month or two, you not only forget that you are a family by virtue of adoption, you forget that you are different races until someone else brings it up. 

In one of those moments of reconciling honesty after my daughter was grown, she showed me the fake ID she used when she was in college to get into clubs where she had no business being. At the age of 19, my daughter was using an expired driver’s license of a 35-year-old Chinese woman who, I may say, looked nothing like my daughter. I asked, “This actually worked?” And she replied using the only racist thing I have ever heard her say, “Dad, you know white people are stupid.” 

I can say that I don’t typically feel very stupid, but when I read this book, I realize that white people sure can be stupid and more than that, they are being stupid in a way that is killing them . . . not really them . . . us. White people, my people, my cousins, stop being racists . . . it is killing you. And, my cousins, I know that you want to insist that voting for a racist doesn’t mean that you are a racist and I know that you would really like for that to be true. So what have you done to get Stephen Miller out of the administration? Or, is it true that voting for a racist means that you actually are a racist? 

Here is the hard news. You aren’t that special. And while there may be some really fine aspects about you being who you are, it has nothing to do with skin color so you can just give that up right now. 

In honor of Dr. King, I’ll let him have the last word today:

We really must learn to live together as brothers or we will surely perish together as fools.