I am a Southerner, both by birth and (self) design.
It is how I choose--in some situations--to identify. In those moments when I think of myself as someone who might be sorted and binned, I generally think of myself as a middle-class white male Southerner who has for most of his life been fortunate to work indoors. I am acquainted with the customs of my tribe. I can talk about Bear Bryant with graying old gentlemen wearing houndstooth caps in coffee shops; I blend in at country clubs and Wal-Marts and small-town Rotarian luncheons. I can change a tire, run a chainsaw, drive a tractor and on more than one occasion I have killed a snake with a hoe.
That I have also stood in Sainte-Chapelle and appeared on Japanese TV says more about the random and fantastic ways the world quivers than it does about any overarching ambition or special talent on my part. I try to do my best, the way my father told me I should, and accept opportunities that present themselves. And Lord knows I've squandered others out of the ignorance and fear that define the human condition.
What this makes me, in a very real sense, is conservative. By that I mean I try not to over-extend: I am not one of those people who is willing to risk a lot because I believe in my own abilities, even though I believe in my own abilities. Most of us should have enough humility to recognize the role luck plays in our achieving whatever it is we achieve. Barring some sort of obvious and transcendent gift, most of us need the help, or at least the forbearance, of others to achieve what we might think of as the good life.
Like Nick Carraway's father said, "all of the people in the world haven't had the advantages [we]'ve had."
Not everyone is born into a viable family; not everyone is loved by capable adults. Not everyone avoids calamity, has the benefit of schooling, has someone to bail them out when they slip up. Not everyone escapes the madness of adolescence without permanent scars. Not everyone is able to negotiate the fraught dramas of young adulthood.
Being a middle-class Southern male, I have seen plenty of my kind screw up, some too grievously to ever recover. Boys I went to college with ended up destroying themselves, some slowly, others in a rare decisive moment. Some were infected with black thoughts, others just lost the thread and wandered too far afield to make their way back.
Others screwed up and were--because they had a family who cared for them--eventually returned to the ranks of mortgage-paying citizens fully vested in society. I had the advantage of a safety net; just because I never fell doesn't mean it didn't keep me safe. I'd guess that doesn't make me too different from most of the people reading this column.
All of us got troubles. Most of us are pretty lucky. We are after all Americans. I don't know why so many of us feel so angry and aggrieved.
Except that there are plenty of people willing to tell us we should be. That somehow the gains of others represent losses for ourselves.
I've written about identity politics--what people are now calling the "alt-right"--for 30 years. I thought white supremacists were pretty pathetic in the '80s, though individuals could be dangerous. Joseph Paul Franklin. Chevie Kehoe. Dylann Roof.
I grew up with boys like them, who believed they were denied something by our society, who thought that others could gain because they lost something. Boys who listened to the radio too much, who found in the ether a rationale for their obliterating hate. I can't believe y'all still fall for that, but invariably some of you will. There's always some bully with a microphone.
You can find someone willing to tell you any fool thing. That the earth is flat; the moon is a hologram; FDR had prior knowledge of Pearl Harbor; owls only exist in Harry Potter books; the Beatles "as they were presented to us" never existed. Someone will tell you that you are of superior grade and you've been cheated out of your birthright by those inferior to you; well, you can find plenty of support for that.
Someone will tell you America was founded as a nation for white Christians and, given how the world worked in the 18th century, there might be some truth in that.
But we don't live in the 18th century anymore, and we know more than those people did, and we know there's no reason to believe that race is anything but a cultural construct that doesn't really exist by scientific lights. It's just something we made up. We have to come to grips that our country was founded--and rose to economic power on--the stolen labor of black folks who were ripped away from their homes. Slavery was this country's original sin, and it's something which has never been fully redressed.
It never will be. It's just the way it is.
Identity can be a prison. It can trap you in your own head, it can make you blind to the real privilege you enjoy. Because maybe all you can see is how hard you have to work. And how nobody feels sorry for you.
I don't know exactly how it is for you. But whatever problems we face in this country, we're still better off than most people in most parts of the world. I was not born black or poor. Or at least not desperately poor, though when I think about how my parents lived for a few years after I was born I marvel at their optimism. They were just kids when I was a kid. I expected them to know so much.
These days I understand that most of us don't know too much, and that the really dangerous people are those who think they have the answers, or that the answers can be pointed out in a book or derived from the words delivered by a radio personality. These days people seem more and more inclined to seek out the fierce and the indignant, to adhere to the forceful certainty of the loudest people who happen to look like them.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 12/11/2016