\n\n\nI think one of my biggest realizations out of our country\u2019s latter-day tensions is there\u2019s a black nation in the United States, amalgamated from separate origins like the American/white one was assembled from Scottish, French, English, later Italian etc.
Which is a change from my 90s End of History model of like, an ill-treated subculture within the same people as me, or even my later one as the latest wave of immigrants from rural feudalism, dating to the Great Migration
That makes some things make sense - MLK as the consensus like, president of the black nation, and that Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson\u2019s occasionally farcical insertion of themselves into every \u201cblack issue\u201d, everywhere, was a competition to succeed him
Segregation, the whole water fountains thing, goes from a blatant insult to a surreal China Mieville attempt to maintain two states for the nations - a white bourgeois metropole and a South American extractive colony - in the same place, which is destabilizing because I was never trained into a moral sense that Havana should by right have as nice facilities as Boston or anything
It explains a lot of what\u2019s happened since Obama got elected. I see a lot of black writers now gawping that white people (like me) expected the Obama election to be a final resolution of racial tensions and not like, the opening of some sort of settlement process. Because they saw it as the black nation getting its deserved seat at the table of US government, AT LAST
But yeah, speaking for myself and the other whites, yeah, we saw it on the model of (Catholic) JFK being elected as a sign of a new golden age where the \u201cwhite ethnics\u201d became white together, and black people would be White now - maybe we\u2019d make something up like \u201cJudeo-Christian\u201d or \u201cAbrahamic\u201d, maybe we\u2019d just leave it there for comics to get easy dunks on.
That\u2019s what all those well-meaning years were for, right? Of giving to the United Negro College Fund ads on football, and euphemizing inner-city crime as multicultural graffiti gangs on the shows you train your kids on, or ESPN commercials where multicultural office friends come together around The Game, or the reconciliation ministries at megachurches that are ESPN At Prayer
(huh, broadcast sports. that\u2019s why the NFL stung and Huffy Young Man Journalism swapping MLB for NBA matters)
so what was it for, then?
(4/30/18)
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