By Carlos Dews, Rome, Italy.
‘’The nigger show."
I first heard this expression used to describe the Obama administration
during a visit to my hometown in East Texas during the early summer of 2009.
I understood what the epithet meant: Our minds are made up, the president
lacks legitimacy, and there is nothing he can do that we will support. I was
not surprised to hear such a phrase.
I grew up in the 1960s during the ragged end of the Jim Crow era, where many
of the books in my school library were stamped Colored School, meaning they
had been brought to the white school when the town was forced to integrate
the public school system. I recall my parents had instructed me, before my
first day of elementary school, not to sit in a chair where a black child
had sat. And I remember my sister joked that her yearbook, when it appeared
at the end of her first year of integrated high school, was in "black and
white."
The outward signs of racism of my home state have now disappeared, but
racial hatred remains. My father and his friends still use the word nigger
to refer to all black people, and the people of my hometown don’t hesitate
to spout their racist rhetoric to my face, assuming I agree with them. I
hold my tongue for the sake of having continued access to this kind of truth
I learned long ago how not to accept the hatred I was being taught and how
to survive not having done so. More recently, I realized that I also learned
another lesson: how to recognize racism when it masquerades as something
else.
More than 40 years after my first experiences with racism, I am thousands of
miles away in Rome, but surrounded by ghosts. Last year, I received a grant
from the National Endowment for the Arts for a community program called the
Big Read, which sponsors activities to encourage communities to come
together to read and discuss a single book. I chose Harper Lee’s To Kill a
Mockingbird, in part because I thought that some of the most salient issues
in the novel - racism, classism, xenophobia, the Jim Crow era - were perhaps
relevant to an increasingly diverse, contemporary Italy.
That there is racism in Italy is obvious to anyone who pays attention to
current affairs. In fact, during the first week of the Big Read Rome, a
story in one of Italy’s national newspapers detailed the experience of a
Nigerian woman being called sporca nera (essentially, dirty nigger) by two
women she asked to stop smoking on a Roman bus.
But I never imagined that consideration of the novel would prove so relevant
to a country that had just elected its first black president. Ironically,
until the election of Barack Obama, my discussions of racism in the United
States seemed historical. I felt that with the passage of the civil rights
legislation of the mid-1960s, the country had turned a corner, that the
slow evaporation of overt racism was perhaps inevitable. Now, my personal
experience of Southern racism feels current and all too familiar. A news
story about the Big Read that appeared in La Repubblica on Sept. 20 (unaware
that my grant was awarded during the Bush administration), presciently
brought Rome, Obama, To Kill a Mockingbird, and racism together in its
headline: "Obama brings antiracist book to Rome."
Jimmy Carter was lambasted for having recently explained that the vehemence
with which many Americans resist Obama’s presidency is an expression of
racism. Carter was accused of fanning the flames of racial misunderstanding
by labeling as "racist" what on the surface could be perceived as legitimate
policy differences. Like Carter, as a white Southern man, I can see beyond
the seemingly legitimate rhetoric to discern what is festering behind much
of the opposition to Obama and to his administration’s policy initiatives. I
also have access, via the racist world from which I came, direct
confirmation of the racial hatred toward Obama.
The veiled racism I sense in the United States today is couched, in public
discourse at least, in terms that allow for plausible deniability of racist
intent. And those who resist any policy initiative from the Obama
administration engage in a scorched-earth policy that reminds me of the
self-centered white flight, the abandonment of public schools, and the
proliferation of private schools, that followed the 1954 Brown v. Board of
Education decision to desegregate public schools. The very people, like my
own rural, working-class family back in East Texas, who stand to gain from
the efforts of the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress are,
because of their racism, willing to oppose policies that would benefit them
the most. Their racism outweighs their own self-interest.
Unfortunately, racists in the United States have learned one valuable lesson
since the 1960s: They cannot express their racism directly. In public, they
must veil their racial hatred behind policy differences. This obfuscation
makes direct confrontation difficult. Anyone pointing out their racist
motivations runs the risk of unfairly playing "the race card." But I know
what members of my family mean when they say - as so many said during the
town hall meetings in August - that they "want their country back." They
want it back, safely, in the hands of someone like them, a white person.
They feel that a black man has no right to be the president of their
country.
During a phone conversation a few weeks after Obama’s election, my father
lamented that he and my mother might have to stop visiting the casinos in
Shreveport, La.: Given Obama’s election, "the niggers are already walking
around like they own the place. They won’t even give up their seats for
white women anymore. I don’t know what we’re going to do with ’em."
My students often ask me how I managed to avoid accepting the lesson in
racism offered by my family. From the time I was 4 or 5 years old - roughly
the same age as Scout Finch, the narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird - I
recall knowing that I didn’t agree with racism More important, my paternal
grandmother provided me with the encouragement that I could ignore what I
was being taught. She provided me with the courage to resist.
My grandmother hoped that my father and his father represented the last
generations of the type of Southern man that had shaped her life -
virulently racist, prone to violence, proud of their ignorance, and
self-defeatingly stubborn. It was a type of Southern man that she hoped and
prayed I could avoid becoming.
However, my father and his father were not the last of their kind; their
racial hatred has been passed on. My grandmother, if she were alive, would
recognize the same tendencies among many of the people who shout down
politicians and bring guns to public rallies. She would also see how the
only change they have made is to replace overt racist epithets with more
euphemistic language.
Rather than seeing my home state and its racist attitudes, slowly, over
time, pulled in the direction of more acceptance, the country as a whole has
become more like the South, the racial or cultural equivalent of what is
called the Walmartization of American retail.
It might be easy to see literature as impotent in the face of the
persistence and adaptability of racism. But I continue to believe in the
transformative potential of literature and its ability to provide an
alternative view of the world. And for children who are not lucky enough to
have grandmothers like mine, I believe that books like To Kill a Mockingbird
can provide inoculation against the virus that is racism.
Carlos Dews is an author, a
professor of English literature, and chairman of the Department of English
Language and Literature at John Cabot University in Rome.
This article originally appeared in the December 2009 issue of Aspenia, the
Italian journal published by the Aspen Foundation.
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