Four years ago, during the Bushie/Kerry election, my friend K. and I joked that we wanted to make t-shirts that said, "I'm so sick of old white men," due to the fact that there we were, another election, another set of old white men as our only options. After I thought about it, I realized that this could be taken the wrong way, so it's probably a good thing that we didn't ever make them.
But it made me think.
The Christmas after that election, I got in a little, er, discussion, shall we say, with some relatives. One relative said that the country was in so much better a condition 200 years ago - more focused on God, more moral. I could only gape at him and finally I said, "Yeah, for rich white men it was better! It wasn't better for anyone black. They were slaves. And it certainly wasn't better for women."
I don't think things were better in this country 200 years ago. I think some things were better, perhaps, and some things were worse. For anyone concerned about the moral heart of the country, I point out that slavery was supremely immoral, and it was a fatal flaw in the moral heart of the nation just as surely as anything happening now. To get all Biblical on you, oppression is the one sin that God hates, as the Bible says over and over. I can't imagine he was all that happy with this country in 1804 given the slavery thing. This country was a brilliant place to live in 1804, sure, if you were white. And rich. And male. And if you didn't mind the fact that thousands of people were enslaved.
A few weeks ago, this old white men thing came up again. I was talking with a friend about issues of race and gender, and I told her this story. Why, we wondered, do white men get so defensive when the situations of women and people of color improve even a little?
I can only conclude that it seems to white men like a zero sum game. If people of color are less oppressed, white men lose power. If women gain power, white men lose it. It makes sense, in a way, because if other people are no longer under your control, you feel like you have less power. You feel like you are losing control. It's not really a tenable power, though. Keeping the power to control other people... well, I don't have that much sympathy. I'm sick of old white men, and I'm sick of them clinging to power.
But it made me think.
The Christmas after that election, I got in a little, er, discussion, shall we say, with some relatives. One relative said that the country was in so much better a condition 200 years ago - more focused on God, more moral. I could only gape at him and finally I said, "Yeah, for rich white men it was better! It wasn't better for anyone black. They were slaves. And it certainly wasn't better for women."
I don't think things were better in this country 200 years ago. I think some things were better, perhaps, and some things were worse. For anyone concerned about the moral heart of the country, I point out that slavery was supremely immoral, and it was a fatal flaw in the moral heart of the nation just as surely as anything happening now. To get all Biblical on you, oppression is the one sin that God hates, as the Bible says over and over. I can't imagine he was all that happy with this country in 1804 given the slavery thing. This country was a brilliant place to live in 1804, sure, if you were white. And rich. And male. And if you didn't mind the fact that thousands of people were enslaved.
A few weeks ago, this old white men thing came up again. I was talking with a friend about issues of race and gender, and I told her this story. Why, we wondered, do white men get so defensive when the situations of women and people of color improve even a little?
I can only conclude that it seems to white men like a zero sum game. If people of color are less oppressed, white men lose power. If women gain power, white men lose it. It makes sense, in a way, because if other people are no longer under your control, you feel like you have less power. You feel like you are losing control. It's not really a tenable power, though. Keeping the power to control other people... well, I don't have that much sympathy. I'm sick of old white men, and I'm sick of them clinging to power.
No comments:
Post a Comment