An old joke has it that the Lone Ranger and Tonto are pursuing a band of Indian horse thieves into a box canyon. They see other Indians on the canyon rims; when they turn in their saddles, they see still other Indians behind them and rapidly approaching. The Lone Ranger turns to Tonto and says, “looks like we’re surrounded, Tonto.” Tonto responds, “What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?”
I told this old joke to introduce a blog years ago, to a different purpose. I juxtapose it to a new joke, short, sweet, and straight from the Constitution of the United States; it goes, “We the People.” (I am laughing as I write.). When were we ever “we”? From the beginning, we have been anything but “we.” “We” have always been “us” and “them.” That is the white man’s story, and a funny-peculiar one it is.
In his famous Gettysburg Address, Lincoln intoned mathematical nonsense. He declared, “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.” When he said this, Lincoln was not only the President, but he also a lawyer; and lawyers are famous for trimming their claims to suit their case. What the “fathers brought forth,” “conceived” and “dedicated” in July, 1776, was not what they delivered in September, 1787. The Declaration of Independence states that principle that “all men are created equal”; mathematically, 1.0 = 1.0. The Constitution states that slaves were to be counted as three-fifths, or 0.6, of a free—translate: white—person (and likely valued at much less). I know nothing about mathematics in Lincoln’s day, but, in mine, 1.0 ≠ 0.6. The Constitution’s “we” was not even “we white folk”; it excluded white men without sufficient property and all white women.
If one looks at behavior, not bombast, the nation has never agreed on the principle of human equality. When the need to recruit soldiers was desperate, the slogan “all men are created equal” had a special appeal to those in society’s mid to low ranks: farmers, tradesmen, indentured servants, and impecunious or idle Whites. That “Base,” especially in the South, did not like the idea that Blacks might be their equal; when they discovered that some people—those damn Yankees—really meant it, they resisted the New Political Math (1.0 = 1.0), which made most of them fighting mad: hence, the Civil War.
The Base and many more than the Base have a psychological need to claim their superiority to compensate for their sense of inferiority. Notable example: Henry Adams, grandson and son of Presidents, who knew that, from his youth, he had never lived up to his and others’ expectations of him, was a virulent antisemite. Whites have relied most on a sense of racial superiority (1.0 > 0.6), but bigotry knows no bounds and extends to others different in all of those ways now itemized in the inventory of identity politics. Thus, after the Civil War, although its emphasis was on Blacks, the nascent Ku Klux Klan also attacked Catholics and Jews. Today, non-Hispanic White, homophobic, xenophobic, Christian nationalists declare their superiority to all kinds of minorities. They hate them all, usually those close at hand more than others farther afield.
For that psychological need, members of despised minorities often hate members of other despised minorities, as they try to leverage a sense of superiority to others. Item: Black antisemitism, founded on the presumed superiority of Christianity to Judaism, is an instance of one minority trying to raise its self-esteem by scorning another minority. Narratives of inter-minority rivalries or conflicts—e.g., Irish versus Jews in Brooklyn—are too many to list, much less to detail.
Most people by nature or by nurture are disposed to need a sense of superiority, with birthright ways in which they differ serving as discriminators of bigotry. The multitude of minorities, including intersectional ones, likely impedes respect or, at a minimum, toleration. Too many differences can be overwhelming and make adjustments difficult.
America’s multi-dimensional—race, gender, religion, ethnicity, nationality—diversity is unmatched in any other country because no other country has America's dynamically compounding, evolving demography. Whites from northwest Europe (aka, WASPs) dominated America politically and culturally until the mid-twentieth century. Their gradual decline began between 1880 and 1920, when millions of Whites immigrated from southern and eastern Europe. These White immigrants from abroad also came into conflict with Black migrants from the South, to produce various racial-ethnic reactions after the turn of the century. The NAACP, founded in 1909 mostly by Whites, many Jewish, gradually eliminated them and discouraged White membership. The KKK, its revival triggered in 1915 by The Birth of a Nation, rampaged in the South, Midwest, and Great Plains in the 20s, 30s, and 40s. Meanwhile, the romantic states-rights myth of The War between the States, the heroic cult of Robert E. Lee, and the glory of a Lost Cause loomed large in American culture to promote acculturation of the new arrivals. Only lately has Lee received his due in historical criticism; a recent biographer has said that writing about a hero is easy, about a “traitor,” hard. Since the Second World War, after a small, brief spurt of refugees from Europe, Blacks rallied in the Civil Rights movement, and more numerous immigrants from Central and South America, and Asia have earned a place in American society. Not that all Whites have welcomed them. The Confederate Flag, symbolizing White racism and rebellion against the federal government struggling to advance civic equality, figures prominently in conservative gatherings, marches, and mayhem. Conservative extremists want to start a race war, a White “Us” against a Black, Brown, Yellow, or Red “Them” (also Jews).
Differences of identity are not the only prompts to dissention; differences in ideology are, too, including matters of sexual and social issues (LGBTQ, gender orientation and identity, abortion, contraception, same-sex relationships, inter-racial marriage) and causes (civil rights, environment, nuclear power, climate change, tribal relations) As a consultant, I observed many military and corporate officers skeptical about some of these issues mainly because they were scornful of “hippies” and “tree-huggers.” At the higher level of today’s Supreme Court, the conservative Catholic judges are motivated by their malice toward liberals as much as by any ideology.
Today, the choice seems to be authoritarian rule by a minority of White Christian bigots or democratic rule by a mixed majority of bigots more or less willing to live and let others live. The growing attention to, resistance to or insistence on, and controversy about the rights of a larger number of minority groups please or irritate, mollify or infuriate, large numbers of Americans. Traditional targets of past abuses remain targets of present abuses. For example, racists, and only racists, reject the inclusion of Black history in American History curriculums (“CRT”)—their point being to teach that Blacks are a population apart from “Americans”; Senator Mitch McConnell made that point explicit in talking about the ratio of Black voters to “American” voters. LGBTQ people, especially trans-gender people, are being targeted by legislative restrictions. When the Supreme Court hears cases involving such legislation, plaintiffs argue for the rights of these groups under the Constitution. They should argue instead for their rights as citizens under the equal protection clause of its Fourteenth Amendment. They may be able to mitigate social and political friction by stressing, not identity-based group rights, but individual citizen rights. The less thinking in terms of groups, the more thinking in terms of citizens—you know, people like those whom you know—, the better the chances of survival of a pluralistic democratic society.
America is exceptional in the diversity of its population, much of it now hysterical in its fears of “others,” people not like “us.” The more dilute the mixture, as in rural areas, the greater the bigotry; the more concentrated the mixture, as in urban areas, the less the bigotry. The various maps of America follow the distribution of bigotry: red v. blue states, poor states v. rich states, less educated v. more educated states, and on and on. Lincoln would remind us that a nation divided cannot long stand. In the end, until “we” become better at recognizing others as “us,” we are not likely to do well as U.S.
[A personal note, with a warning. My sister is married to a woman with whom she had been in a lesbian relationship for three decades before the law allowed them to wed. Two of my closest male friends of many years are gay and now married. Their situation today is under threat from possible Supreme Court opinions or possible state legislation which may unleash the terrors of vigilantism to enforce the laws. All four were under less threat when they were “in” before they came “out”; their relationships were known by few and unknown or ignored by others. But the formality of marriage has publicized their relationships, identified them in terms of their sexual orientations, and put them at risk from homophobic vigilante violence because they had trusted the enlightened laws of recent years now likely to be superseded by bedimmed laws of an earlier barbarism. The policy questions about anti-LGBTQ laws are what public problems do they solve and what public good do they achieve. The answers seem to be none and none, except for giving a religiously militant minority the force of law to coerce others to live as they do. The practical question is what are cities, counties, and states going to do to protect their citizens.]
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