Sitting solo on a public bench outside a panaderia in Pomona, California and munching a delicious pastry from said location, watching the sun being slowly replaced by dusk and white America being rapidly transformed into a colorful mosaic, it is easy to become reflective at the corner of Garey and Franklin. With my writing energies historically being better expressed along negative theme lines (consult my therapist for the reasons), the thoughts of your lowly author went along these lines:
An affluent white person has what you might call a “perpetual passport.” He can wander into a less privileged community –physically, empathetically, financially—while always having the ability to return to his whiteness, to assume his natal place in the power structure. He needs no green card, no visa, and there is no expiration date on his passport. As part of the white history of the country, he cannot even reject his “passport.”
And yet “whitey” has only a limited ability to hold back what is happening right in front of his eyes: a transfer of power. Moreover, whether “he,” individually or collectively, has the foresight and resolve to participate in a rational progression toward greater sharing of that power, accomplished in a peaceful manner, is open for debate.
The American historical narrative that a senior citizen grew up with is being rewritten, a process which will only intensify, reflecting the combination of demographic change and greater empowerment for those who have previously been disenfranchised. What heretofore have been labeled as “aberrations” –slavery, military excursions, resistance to women being able to vote – are now increasingly considered to be integral to the historical story of white power and its hold on the structure of society.
For some, as a specific example of said revisionary approach, the fathering of an illegitimate child of a slave mother by Thomas Jefferson to some observers almost negates his many contributions to creating a new and stable country.
In such fashion, the concept of evaluating a person on his body of work goes by the boards, replaced by a simple checklist of whether he, whatever the historical context, acted in accordance with the standards of contemporary America—or at least an important and growing part of it.
As a corollary to this view, the country’s numerous foreign wars are lumped together under the heading of a military-industrial complex agenda. Little attention is paid to actions thought to be in pursuit of admirable objectives, such as saving the lives of innocent people; those are offset, in the opinion of many, by egregious errors regarding non-white cultures.
The answer to why women were suppressed is of course simple: to maximize white male power.
The existence of slavery is the clinching argument that the prior American narrative was fraudulent. Slavery is not to be considered the horrible mistake of a young, evolving nation—instead, in fact, it was the necessary centerpiece of the American white power design, of how this country was built.
What is transpiring is not a calm look at our history as a necessary initial step to preparing those in power for a hypothetical peaceful transition (aka, downgrading) in their positions. It is more akin to “The Fire Next Time,” or its contemporary counterpart, “Between the World and Me.”
Time to quit, writing that is. As is typical of less affluent areas around the world, the street lighting at Garey and Franklin is subpar, insufficient for old-fashioned writing on one of those little notepads which, with an accompanying pen, are my perpetual companions.
Will I eventually connect at least some of the above dots? I do not know. Thinking about these topics is quite depressing.