Redneck Nation (11 page)

Of course, I’m not saying that. I’m saying the exact opposite, that the same
New York Times
and CBS television network that helped lead the assault on redneck racism in the 1950s and ’60s are enthusiastically practicing
an updated version of the same racism today.

I’m not arguing that we live in an America where race doesn’t matter, but rather that we have rejected the idea that race
shouldn’t
matter. That was the premise of the Civil Rights Movement, that racism was fundamentally wrong. Dr. King summed it all up
in one sentence: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged
by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., gave that speech before a crowd of 200,000 people in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Today, every
American who agrees with him could fit in a booth at Denny’s, where they would wait for hours without ever being served.

The premise of Northernism, as presented by Dr. Martin
Luther King, is that knowing someone’s race means nothing. He longed for the world where judgment was made on the content
of one’s character, while Bob Jones and Co. stared stubbornly at the color of one’s skin.

I ask you, for the record, who has won this argument in America?

Forty years after the Civil Rights Movement, America is committed to the principles of southern-style segregation. Listen
to the national conversation on race, and all that’s missing forty years later are the dogs and fire hoses.

Glancing through the
Washington Post
in September 2001, for example, readers were asked the question “Is Chocolate City Turning Vanilla?” The piece was written
by Natalie Hopkinson, a
Post
staffer who tells of how proud she was to have bought a home in a downtown D.C. neighborhood. Buying this house in a gentrifying
neighborhood sent a message (in her own words): “We damn sure are not about to let white folk buy up all the property in D.C.”

She went on to decry the fact that white people—
affluent
white people, who are even worse for some reason—were moving into traditionally black neighborhoods. This is a bad thing.
“From our perspective,” she wrote, “integration is overrated. It’s time to reverse an earlier generation’s hopeful migration
into white communities and attend to some unfinished business in the ‘hood…. We not only have to invest in the inner city,
but we can’t let white people beat us to it.

“[My husband and I] wanted to hold a line, stake out our turf,” she went on. “As black middle-class parents, for example,
we may be more open [than whites] to the idea of sending our children to public schools…. Many whites want to help out, too,
and their privileged racial status can only improve the city’s prospects. But this is the Chocolate City.”

The conclusion: “A few months ago, as I left a take-out on Georgia Avenue, a gentleman passed me a flier. It invited me to
a community meeting where residents planned to debate the question, ‘Is the Chocolate City turning Vanilla?’… Not if I have
anything to say about it.”

Wow.

Now, ask yourself what is worse: that there was a college-educated, professional woman spouting racist homilies straight out
of the Jim Crow “concerned citizens’ councils” of the 1960s or that the
Washington Post
was comfortable enough with these overtly racist statements that it ran them without edits?

And how could anyone in the year 2001 get away with using the term “Chocolate City”? Why not “Nigger Town,” a favorite geographical
marker of the racist losers I grew up with? Both are racial road signs reading “Ours” and “Yours.”

In fact, Ms. Hopkinson is just one small voice in a national chorus of Americans, white and black, North and South, who long
to bring back segregation. In this modern, post-civil rights era of resurgent redneckery, the buzzword of the day is “resegregation,”
which is a code word for “good racism.” Self-declared leaders of America’s black community are, according to the
Boston Globe
, “tossing around the word ‘resegregation,’ using it with a new kind
of cachet—segregation without the meanness of the fifties or the fire of the sixties.” Translation: There wasn’t anything
actually wrong with the idea of whites-only and blacks-only public spaces, segregated rest rooms, etc. There was just a failure
in the execution. These new black leaders want to have another try at racial segregation, doing it the
right
way.

Who knows, maybe they’ll take another crack at slavery while they’re at it…

The same
Boston Globe
piece quoted Deval Patrick, assistant attorney general for civil rights under President Clinton and a steadfast integrationist,
as saying that “integrationists are losing in a fight that was never fair. Since Martin Luther King, we have not had leaders
who talk about integration as an inherent value.”

And so today, you have segregated dorm rooms at prominent Ivy League universities like Cornell and Dartmouth, not because
white students refuse to shower naked with persons of color, but because segregated dorms are demanded by black and Hispanic
students. After fifty years of struggle for integration, this renewed segregation is viewed as a positive.

What do the minority students say when you point out they’ve created the same kind of college campus George Wallace faced
off against federal agents to create? “They call it separatism when a bunch of minority students decide to live together,”
one black senior at the University of Massachusetts told a reporter. “But I have lots of white friends who come here and hang
out with us.”

Hey, you’ve got a lot of white friends! That’s great. And let me guess: You’d let your sister date a white guy, too. That
Rocky Graziano—what a fighter!

Erran Matthews from a segregated dorm at Cornell didn’t stoop to the “I have a [fill in ethnic blank] friend” argument, but
he echoed another old southern platitude when he said segregation was about wanting “a place to feel at home. Everybody wants
to go ‘home’ sometimes.”

If you’re a believer in what would have once been considered northern-style integration, it gets worse: The Reverend Raymond
Hammond, president of the Ten-Point Coalition, an umbrella organization of Boston ministers, says that while he and his organization
don’t want a “
legally
mandated separate-but-equal society” (emphasis added), he believes “a community works best economically, educationally, and
socially if it stays together.”

Ah, yes: another all-black, racially segregated community for integration.

It should be obvious to all concerned that this is warmed-over Jim Crow served from the other side of the plate. Can anyone
argue that the rejection of integration and acceptance of segregation (the “good” kind) is a triumph of 1960s northern, liberal
values? No, this is Confederate theology swallowed whole and spit up again, twice as ugly.

I say it’s uglier because, quite frankly, we ought to know better. My grandmother, who was born in 1912 and lived her whole
life sharecropping in rural South Carolina, used the word “nigger” nearly every day, sometimes with malice and sometimes without.
But she didn’t grow up with the memory of a martyred Martin Luther King, Jr., and she couldn’t benefit from forty years of
intense public struggle over the ridiculousness of racial obsession.

You and I have. We’ve had Selma and Greensboro and the Boston bus riots and the Skokie Nazis and a thousand
real-life parables to instruct us. If there was one idea of the solid South upon which a family-sized can of whoop-ass had
been dumped, if there was one form of southern stupidity that should have been reduced to rubble in the struggle, it was the
southern approach to race. And yet it is the one idea that is most clearly triumphant across the land.

The triumph of racism is the supreme accomplishment of the Redneck Nation.

The defense of our new love of racism is inevitably some version of “fighting fire with fire.” The timid counterargument from
supporters of segregation and racial quotas is that we need Chocolate City or Hispanic Haven or Indigenous People’s Island
because our entire society is an oppressive, white, European pressure cooker. Black, brown, and citizens of various hues must
escape this dominant culture to protect themselves from the debilitating forces always present.

It cannot be said too often that, yes, racism is alive in America. And there is another inescapable truth, which is that it
is harder in America today to be black than it is to be white. But adopting the war aims of your enemy means that the bad
guys are always going to win, regardless of the outcome. This is why people who want to defeat racism should return to the
idealism of the Freedom Riders and become actual “anti-racists.” Racism will die when the southern ideas that underpin it
are rejected, not before.

Unfortunately, there are Americans who are trying to talk me, Michael Graham, into becoming a racist—and they think every
other geeky white boy should, too.

Don’t laugh. Okay, go ahead and laugh, but some very
earnest people are very sincere in their belief that white Americans need to learn to love our inner honkies.

Just ask Jeff Hitchcock of the Confederate State of New Jersey. He runs the Center for the Study of White America, where he
argues that the road to racial harmony is through more racism. Hitchcock wants his fellow Caucasians to “embrace their own
culture while abandoning the privileges that come with it.”

C’mon, white people—you know the privileges he’s talking about: the reserved parking at Starbucks, the discounts on Wonder
bread and mayonnaise, free long distance on all calls to Utah. And all those free short-sleeve button-down shirts. Ah, the
good life!

According to the Associated Press, Jeff Hitchcock is “an avowed anti-racist—a diversity consultant who has been married for
more than 15 years to a black woman and argues strongly for the United States as a multiracial melting pot.” He’s part of
the burgeoning “white studies” movement in American academia that is currently thriving at places like UC Berkeley, Northwestern,
and Harvard.

Charley Flint, a professor of sociology at William Paterson College in Wayne, New Jersey, and Hitchcock’s wife, explains the
goal of “whiteness studies” succinctly: “We want to
racialize
whites. How can you build a multiracial society if one of the groups is white and
it doesn’t identify itself as a race?”
(emphasis added). Instead, Hitchcock told the
Chicago Tribune
, “White people need to develop a sense of pride not based on saying we’re superior, but based on the fact that we’re working
on building a multiracial society.”

And this guy is an “anti-racist”? I’d hate to see what you have to do in the papers these days to become a racist.
What he and his fellow faux liberals want me to do is exactly the same thing my fellow Southerners tried to get me to do the
entire time I was growing up: become a proud member of the white race.

It is a shame we lack the technology to send the good doctor Hitchcock back to the civil rights era so he could explain to
the liberals of the day why the whites agitating for “white identity” in “white citizens’ committees” were right. Think of
all the time and trouble it would have saved America.

Yes, Hitchcock opposes white supremacy, but the rest of the southern agenda is his—namely, white differentiation, a splintered,
racially conscious society of segregated ethnic groups, all very self-aware and ever divided.

I remember once in high school an indignant classmate angered by some comment I made insulting to rednecks asked, “Aren’t
you proud to be white?” I was taken aback because, quite honestly, it had never occurred to me that I ought to be. Later,
as a stand-up comedian, I got into an argument with a black comedian about why every white person should be ashamed of his
race. Once again, the thought hadn’t crossed my mind.

Just recently, a family member who had her Irish up (literally) over the politics of moving the Confederate flag from the
South Carolina capitol groused at me, “I’m proud to be part Irish, aren’t you?” In fact, I hadn’t known until then that I
was
part Irish. But the answer was again no.

Why would I be proud of my pigment? Where is the joy in the gene pool? Why would I believe I had some significant bond with
a stranger merely because we’re both pale, vulnerable to skin cancer, and really bad dancers?

Instead of creating a community of color, as the “white
studies” movement hopes to do, why can’t we stick with a community of ideas? I am a proud member of that community. It’s called
America. Anyone who can grasp, agree with, and defend the ideas of liberty, equality, and justice that our nation was founded
on (and continues to seek imperfectly many years later) can be an American.

And being an American is, for me, sufficient. At times, it almost seems a luxury.

On the other hand, it’s been my experience that people who are the most focused on their group identity are least invested
in our shared national interest. Right after the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, I got an outrageous,
angering e-mail from a diehard Confederista celebrating the fact that the terrorist attacks had occurred up North and not
in his “southern homeland.”

At the same time, support for the war against terror was weaker among black Americans than among any other ethnic group—including
Arabs. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, one in three black Americans was either
opposed to the war against Al Qaeda or undecided. Among white Americans, fewer than one in five withheld their support.

The Confederate-flag wavers and militant black Americans may despise each other, but they have an important common trait:
a divided loyalty to the United States. One states it as “American by birth, southern by the grace of God,” and the other
reveals it in his self-identity: “African,” then “American.”