Race Matters, Ctd

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25 Apr 2008 11:30 am

I've been overwhelmed by lots of thoughtful emails on the racial question in this campaign. Here's one particularly concrete and honest one about unconscious attitudes among liberals:

I'm white, and I live in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I've been for all but a few of the past twenty-five years. In the last few years, I've been heavily involved in a youth basketball program that my twelve year-old son participates in. The teams in the program are overwhelmingly African-American, and they play in leagues and tournaments throughout southeastern Michigan and in some neighboring states. Many of the teams they play are predominantly or exclusively African-American, many are all white. In watching these teams compete, as both a spectator and coach, I've had a revelation about how many white people have reflexively suspicious, if not antagonistic, attitudes about African-Americans.

For example, consider the differing reactions to games where one team blows out another. Competition levels are often uneven in youth leagues, and scores of 45-10 are common. In a Detroit league, when one African-American team dominates another by that kind of score, no-one objects. It's another day in the gym. In a league in almost-all-white Livingston County, a white-on-white blowout elicits the same reaction. But how do the losing parents and coaches react when an African-American team blows out a white team? There's a palpable sense of anger and resentment. The winning team is accused of playing dirty or "too physical" or of running up the score, or of having ringers who are really older than the maximum age, or (most revealingly) of being "thugs."

These prejudiced responses come from whites in places like Howell, a town with a long and storied tradition of KKK activity, or Livonia, a quintessential enclave of middle-class Reagan Democrats. But white left wingers from Ann Arbor react the same way. Exactly.

Two years ago, when my son was in the fourth grade, his team played a team from the west side of Ann Arbor, where "Impeach Bush" signs are found on every other lawn. It was a blowout, and all those liberal parents were ready to throw my son's team out of the league, contending that all of these black kids were a group of ringers who played too rough. This is not an exaggeration. The rest of my son's team's schedule was canceled, and the rest of their games were only against teams that volunteered to play them. My son's head coach, an African-American, was personally excoriated in an email campaign . Shortly after this controversy, in the same league, I watched one all-white Ann Arbor team get blown out by another all-white team. I think it was 20-0 at the end of the first quarter. Nothing but laughs and smiles all around, and consolation ice-cream cones (or soy milk hot chocolates). No-one's schedule was changed as a result. No-one was raising threats against any coaches.

This is just a microcosm, but there's a lot going on within it. Whites -- of all political persuasions -- don't like to feel inferior to blacks. They don't like to compete on a level playing field with blacks, and, when they do compete and lose, they can't accept the loss. They insist that there must be some explanation besides the fact that they just weren't as good. None of the racial attitudes are overt. But after seeing these attitudes repeated again and again and only when black kids are winning, it's impossible to conclude that they are anything but racial, even though they might be represented as something else.

I still have hope. I still think change is possible. I'm going to do everything I can to work for Obama's election in November. But there's a lot of prejudice in every part of the polity that's gone unrecognized by those who hold it -- even if it has been recognized and exploited by a cynical few of both parties who know just how to bring it out without calling its name. In the contest with the Clintons, the Rovistas and their ilk, we may not win this time, but we must fight nevertheless. As Danton said, "il nous faut de l'audace, et encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace."

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