I read Lawrence Otis Graham’s tear-jerking account
of his prep school son’s first encounter with anti-black racism…and I came away
as unconvinced as I was by some of Mr. Graham’s other accounts, like his 2009
memoir, A Member of the Club (http://www.amazon.com/Member-Club-Lawrence-Otis-Graham-ebook/dp/B000UOJTU8/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1416250306&sr=8-2&keywords=lawrence+otis+graham),
or his earlier work chronicling his “undercover” work as a caddy in a wealthy
Country Club, Our Kind of People (http://www.amazon.com/Kind-People-Lawrence-Otis-Graham-ebook/dp/B000GCFWVY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1416250306&sr=8-1&keywords=lawrence+otis+graham).
Lawrence Otis Graham
The prevailing social meme remains that white males
maintain “privilege,” merely by being white that even wealthy, well-connected,
Ivy educated African-Americans do not.
It’s not only a ridiculous and indefensible meme,
but it’s pernicious in that its goal is to mask very real privilege (the kind
Mr. Graham was born into) and to configure actual “victims,” like poor, rural
whites from Appalachia and elsewhere (people who truly have neither any
privilege nor connections) as “oppressors.”
There can be a no more dishonest, disingenuous and
destructive social construct as that, but it benefits the likes of Mr. Graham
to perpetuate it and so many of them do so with gusto!
You see, the kind of blatant bigotry he writes about
his son encountering (being asked if he was “the only nigger” at his prep
school) is so exceedingly rare, as to be virtually non-existent today, while
sadly other forms of racial bigotry are much more common...and at least partly
because of the meme that Mr. Graham among others defend...more accepted.
Those (more socially accepted bigotries) don’t have
to be “fictionalized” (The name of
the boarding school has been fictionalized. This essay is adapted from a story in the Oct. 8 edition of the Princeton Alumni
Weekly) as Mr. Graham’s “story” was.
Just this past week, a New York Lawyer and Chair of
the BAR Association’s Medical Malpractice Division, Andrew Barovick, was forced to apologize and
then resign (AFTER the BAR Association initially defended him) for tweeting
“inappropriate” and “racist” comments about Chemung County Sheriff Christopher
Moss, a black Republican who ran for lieutenant governor this year. (http://nypost.com/2014/11/12/lawyer-resigns-from-bar-association-after-racist-tweet/)
One inane tweet read; “In light of election loss, [Sheriff Moss] mulling offers to be
new spokes model for either Cream of Wheat or Uncle Ben’s rice.”
Upon his resignation he apologized, “As you know, I made a grave mistake by attempting to use humor
to personally convey my frustration with the New York Republican Party through
a tweet that upset a great number of people.”
WHAT?!
That’s not at all clear. What, exactly, is Mr.
Barovick frustrated over? The NYS GOP running a black man for Lieutenant
Governor, or that a black man would be a Conservative, or a Republican to begin
with?
It becomes a LOT LESS clear when Mr. Barovick’s
history of such bigoted comments comes to light;
Whoops! Say it ain’t so Andy;
Then
there was Rep Charlie Rangel who derided Tea Party members
as “white crackers,” and later steadfastly defending it as “a term of
endearment.”
Enough
said, apparently Rep. Rangel would rather people be convinced he’s an idiot,
rather than a racist. Well, OK. (http://dailycaller.com/2014/11/10/charlie-rangel-i-called-tea-party-white-crackers-as-term-of-endearment-video/)
Then
there was Vinita Hegwood, the Texas
schoolteacher who was fired over inflammatory tweets relative to the Ferguson,
Mo situation and her racially offensive, “Crackers...Kill yourselves.” (http://newsone.com/3071087/vinita-hegwood-resigns-over-mike-brown-related-tweet/)
Interestingly
enough, I didn’t have to fictionalize anything, nor resort to anecdotal
accounts, the way Lawrence Otis Graham did with his “story.” In fact, I didn’t
even need to look further back than the past week’s news feeds to come up with
these few examples of the much more socially accepted bigotries we ALL live
with today.
I
think that pretty much proves my point.
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