WHITE

 

Donald Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, just can’t keep his stupid mouth shut. If the far-right accuses Kamala Harris of “flip-flopping,” that goes triple and quadruple for Vance. When he isn’t trying to “explain” Trump’s false or contradictory statements, he is confronted with his own statements of recent origin, which he tries to worm his way out of by twisting himself into a human pretzel with uncoordinated gymnastics of logic.

One recent example is when he was confronted with his statement about “waves of Italian, Irish and German immigration” leading to “higher crime and interethnic conflict.” When asked why he wouldn’t have supported mass deportations of these “criminals” back then, but does now for non-European migrants, he lamely asserted that there was “a lot of benefits to that wave of immigration”—implying that there was no “benefit” to the country, say, from Hispanic labor. You know, the people who the Vance-supported AppHarvest had to rush in because the “native” white people in eastern Kentucky the plant was meant to give jobs to quit in droves because the work was “too hard”?

Vance went on to suggest that certain types of immigrants (gosh, I wonder who) were insufficiently capable of “assimilation,” and deportation would “cure” that “problem”—you know, like how some Asian groups tend to gather in their own little “Chinatowns” to avoid “assimilation” on white terms? The truth of the matter is that the people who talk most about “assimilation” are those who don’t want the “others” to intrude on their “turf” and “assimilate.”

I have this film in my collection that was one of the last true film noirs of the “classic” period, and one of the better ones: the Robert Wise-directed Odds Against Tomorrow, recently released on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber. Although this film came out in 1959, it still has a "contemporary" message, that the more things “change,” the more they stay the same. The racial views of Robert Ryan’s Slater may not be expressed as overtly today as it was then (although perhaps in private); but what does still ring all too true is the complaints of the kind of white people who support Trump in reality have only themselves and the politicians they vote for to blame, and not the designated scapegoats, for their problems

Slater's hatred of blacks is so intense that he doesn’t recognize that the accusations he makes about them (being incompetent and untrustworthy) are actually better descriptors of himself, and a tendency to violence (he served time for assault and manslaughter) is the only way he knows how to “settle” differences of opinion in the direction of his life. But in one moment of self-awareness, he tells his needy girlfriend—who the perpetually jobless Slater has been living off of—that whenever he’d start a job, if it didn’t work out right away, he’d just leave. She asks him “Aren’t things ever easy for you?” His response speaks for many Trump supporters today:

Only when I get mad. Then they get too easy. I think that’s why I get mad, to make it easy.

It’s easy to blame “the illegals” and the “liberals” who they are told supposedly allow them to have an “equal share” of the national pie instead of examining one’s own personal fault. They are fed the addicting drug that they are fitted for something “better” because they are white, and some “undeserving” and “inferior” species has their job--or if not, they are living off their tax dollars (if they are paying taxes at all) on public welfare.  Whatever the reason, they just want to be “mad” at someone or anything—because that is easier than self-examination and thinking things through. I mean, if people like this were capable of logical thought, they'd realize that when Trump says "I" he really means just "I":

 

That is why Trump is flipping the bird at his critics, since when people lie about themselves, it doesn’t matter if anything Trump says is a lie, because all they know is lies. It doesn’t matter that Trump lies when he says he is “for” working people, when his tax cuts for the rich and corporations which is still on the books has done absolutely nothing to help them (being yet another failed example of "trickle-down economics"), and if anyone is to blame for their “problems” externally is for that reason and Trump’s handling of the pandemic, which more than anything else was responsible for the rise in inflation after it was over and consumer spending rose again while production tried to “catch up,” and certainly would have occurred anyways if Trump had been re-elected in 2020; and yes, he would be trying lay the blame for it on the Democrats or Anthony Fauci.

What happens when people don’t trust one another because they are “different”? A seemingly easy “job”—in this case a late night payroll heist—goes terribly awry simply because Slater cannot overcome his racial hatred toward “partner” Ingram (Harry Belafonte) to “trust” him with the getaway car keys. The two of them run from the scene of the crime, less to escape the police but so they have a chance to kill each other; after they start shooting on top of a petroleum storage unit that explodes and burns both of them to a crisp, the police and medical personnel at the scene note that their “color” doesn’t matter anymore; they both look the same now:

 

There was a story by CNN recently about a Virginia woman in the no doubt inaptly named town of Christiansburg who runs a gift shop full of pro-Trump paraphernalia. We learn that

Jo Anne Price wears a button that says, “You find it offensive. I find it funny. That’s why I’m happier than you…She’s 72, wears black-rimmed glasses and her gray hair swept back, and has been lifting weights for 20 years. She says, “racism is a made-up word,” and “I don’t know what it is, because it doesn’t exist,” and “if I don’t accept it, it doesn’t apply to me.” By the register, she sells credit card-like objects, one of which says, “WHITE PRIVILEGE CARD.”

Now, you’d think to yourself that this person is the worst kind of racist in this country, and in a way she is. What I left out there was that this individual is identified not as white, but black—or maybe she wishes people would think she should be something else:

 

This is what it means to “assimilate” on white terms. The story goes on to note that there was a black customer (much darker than Price) who thinks Trump is “right”  that migrants are responsible for all the crime (although he admits an “affinity” with Trump for being a fellow felony convict) and are stealing “black jobs”—you know, the kind of “jobs” that drew heckles at Trump when he said that at the black journalists forum. Naturally there is the usual dose of hypocrisy here...

 

...and although blacks account for "just" 20 percent of the population of Virginia, they account for 57 percent of all crimes, and 74 percent of the homicides. The post this information was provided in tells us that "The biggest lesson is that both Black families and society simply have to do a better job of raising, education, and mentoring Black youth."  OK, but what about all those crimes that illegals are supposed to be committing?

But mainly the store attracted white customers who no doubt welcomed an Aunt Tamsin in their midst who made it “easy” to be “mad” at people who didn’t think like themselves.

In my case, “assimilation” has been mostly an abject failure, but not because of lack of a proper "environment" in which to do so; it was thrust down my throat, and I just choked it out once I realized there was no point in living in a world of illusion. I ask myself, is being “white” more a way of being, or does it really just mean looking “white”? I recall being in a college classroom when out of the blue a very pale, very blonde female blurted out that she wasn’t a “racist,” but she would never marry a black man. She then repeated that she wasn’t a “racist.” 

The other students look at each other and silently asked WTF was that about? I’m sure that most of the white females in that Southern culture merely assumed the same about themselves, but why embarrass yourself and sound like what you claim you are not? Well, alright; at least she was "honest," and it is always nice to know what people are "really" thinking.

And me, I had a ringside seat on the mendacity of it all, although it took me a long time realize exactly how far that went. I read a book called A Death in White Bear Lake by Barry Siegal on the Dennis Jurgens case, which I talk about in a post here 1 and thought to myself while reading one passage. “This sure sounds ‘familiar’”:

Once, after Lois had whipped him with a belt buckle, a school counselor and coach noticed big purple welts on Grant, but he explained he had gotten them falling down the driveway. ‘If I tell, they’d just send me back to Lois…Over time, the children became scared even to come home from school. When the bus dropped them off each afternoon, they would go up the steep driveway to see if Lois’ Buick Skylark was parked by the house, relaxing if it was gone, cringing if it was there’” because they knew that she “‘would walk through the house and down into the basement until she found something wrong or out of place’ and they would 'hear' about it.”

My mother told me I was born a “blue baby,” apparently a mild case since I didn’t die from it. Being “first born” didn’t give me any special privileges, in fact less so. The three siblings who came after me had all the “privileges”—they got the allowances while my mother became angry if I asked her on a hot summer day for a quarter for a soda  when she made me ride my younger brother’s bike because he was in an absurd “competition” with another kid to see how many miles they could get on their bikes, and they got the braces on their teeth while my teeth were allowed to grow out as crooked as they pleased.  I was “imperfect” from the start, and only got worse, no thanks to mother.

When we were living out in the country, I did most of the “chores,” and even had to wake up early on school mornings to feed my sister’s “pet” horse and clean out its stall.  I learned at a young age what was meant by “social hierarchy” and that my “good” traits (like an addiction to reading books) were discouraged, and that my “bad” traits (the results of being afraid of my mother) were encouraged by default. Most of the “bad” things I did to deserve punishment were motivated by this fear; even when there was a brief period of niceness, there was always some dumb thing sure to soon end it, like me having the audacity to ask for something, because mother interpreted this as just taking “advantage” of her niceness. 

Admittedly this fear could lead to some embarrassing memories that could have been avoided; for example, if I wasn’t afraid to tell someone I wasn’t feeling well when I was 4 or 5, I would have lost my breakfast somewhere other than in the middle of a church service.

I wasn’t a very good student in grade or high school, but for me that wasn’t the point of being in school, it was just a safe haven, and I always dreaded returning home from fear of what mother had found that necessitated more punishment. I remember I went to school one day and a teacher was horrified at the welts she saw around my neck; I couldn’t tell her how I really got them, and it was very “convenient” that the school bus that morning had a little “accident” that I could use as an “explanation.” My mother was called by the school nurse and she accompanied me to the hospital for an examination. Lies and deception was such a part of daily existence for me that the irony of it not surprisingly didn’t seem to register with her.

I was always quiet and timid around people when I was a kid, but not so "timid" when no one was looking. Fear had made me "untrustworthy," and there was no accounting what I would do on the "sly." There was "obviously" something very“wrong” with me, and I had to be punished in order to act “normal” or “smart” like my siblings, who unlike me had no trace of “ethnicity” in them (especially my blonde, blue-eyed youngest sister). 

Then there were the psychiatrists, who told my mother to just try to be “nice” to me; she didn’t want to admit any fault, and said they were the ones who were “crazy” like me. One of them just invited me to draw a picture with him; from what mother had told him, he probably expected me to draw some knife-wielding maniac, when all I could think of drawing was a Navy ship or birds. By her reaction when she got off the phone with him, I wonder if he told her he thought she was the one who needed "help."

Sure, I did “bad” things—mainly doing things on the “sly” like taking food when no one was looking or hiding the books I was not allowed to have; in fact, as time went on I had fewer and fewer objects I could actually “keep” as my own, and if I was in possession of anything, it was assumed it was “stolen.” I have to admit that today I am surprised I felt a need to do things a certain way in order to “survive.”

I was so far gone by the time I got to my teenage years, that even with people who "sympathized," if they made me feel at all threatened I simply reverted to my shell behavior. Where did this “fear” come from? I remember visiting an aunt in Pennsylvania and she hugged me like she really meant to be affectionate, maybe because she knew I wasn’t getting much of that home; the next day we went back to her house, and when I saw her outside I hid behind a car. 

Why did I act that way? It was seemingly an instinctual reaction from being touched.  I have an early memory of spilling milk from a cereal bowl and then things kind of blacked-out after that. What I do remember next was being in a clinic to get stitches on the bridge of my nose, the scar from which still can be seen 60 years later.

But as I grew older I became more emboldened; I remember once I was left behind locked outside the house while the rest went on some family outing; unfortunately they came home earlier than expected,  to find that I had somehow found a way to get inside and bake some cookies; while my sister admitted that she was impressed by my baking skills, mom and dad  (who usually just stayed out of her way) were not so much.

There was no account for my feelings at all; I’ve mentioned a visit to a barber shop which my mother pulled up a chair in front of the barber’s chair to instruct the barber in how short he was supposed to cut my hair; I don’t know if it was either to save money until the next visit—or simply that she enjoyed seeing me miserable to the point of tears. The barber wasn’t enjoying it either; he’d cut a little bit, and she would demand he cut more, and this continued for some time until she was “satisfied.”

That was my life inside the family home (that is, when I was allowed inside of it), but what happened outside the family was less threatening but for what I would grow to understand was based on the same “principles.” I was “different” but not so much from what people “saw” in the inside, but from what people saw on the “outside.” That was when I discovered that there was something else going on that I hadn’t realize before, because I thought I was just like the rest of my family, you know, “white” and I liked the same things they liked.

But I didn’t always understand the things my parents didn’t like—especially of people who looked “different” to me. Since we didn’t interact with those “other” people, I didn’t know what to think of them, and did not form an opinion of them; they at least didn't get a chance to do me any harm, like that gang of white boys who held me down on the ground and stuffed grass in my mouth like I was some animal. I suspect that maybe it was believed that there was some DNA that I "shared" with "those people" that accounted for my “behavior."  But in light of what happened after I left home for the Army, this was more a self-fulfilling prophecy than anything ingrained in my cells.

It took me a long time to figure out something was “amiss” that I had no control over. As a kid in school, classmates might be “friendly,” but not friends. Some teachers seemed to be more “sympathetic” with my “plight,” which in hindsight was an opportunity for someone with liberal pretensions to do something for the socially “disadvantaged.” It’s odd, but when I look back on it now, they probably thought I was “adopted," not aware of the fact that my white “mom” was in fact my real mother. Maybe some people who didn’t know the “family” thought my caregivers must be “liberals” to have what they saw was a member of a minority group being afforded the “privilege” of being raised in a proper “white” environment. Of course they were not "liberal" at all, and that helped "shape" my own political views, and helped discontinue the last thread of communication I had with the "family."

Of course I wouldn’t have known what they could possibly be talking about because where I came from wasn't mentioned save in occasional asides of regret. Sure, all I ever saw were white people (we never lived in “mixed” neighborhoods), and  although once in a fit of anger my mother called me a “nigger," it still didn’t register in my mind the real reason why a teacher felt “sorry” for me, and wanted to “help.”   

But I was beyond “help,” I just wanted to “get out,” which included running away from home when I was the ripe old age of 14. I just didn’t like to be around people anymore. I was more comfortable being by myself, never much of a talker and never seeing any point in it. I preferred going out into the woods and communing with nature, which was my “plan” for life when I ran away.

But all "good" things have to end, and the best thing my mother ever did for me (if allowing me to be born counts) was having "enough" and sending me to the U.S. Army recruitment office. I was probably like a lot of “white” people who were for the first time in close proximity to those “other” people, and at first I just saw those “other” people as just looking "different," although later I discovered they had some of the same faults as any other people I had spent my life with as a kid, except that this time I wasn’t their “dependent” and what they did was only of concern if I let it be so. 

But I still retained the “cultural values” as the people who “raised” me and I grew up around—in particular taste in music, which curiously “defines” someone’s “culture” more than any other variable, even more than religion. Musically, I was “white” with an open mind that allowed for outside inputs if they had sufficient doses of “sugar”—meaning string arrangements—to “sweeten” it enough to consume it. 

And of course I like films dating from the silent era, but like in music I have a limited tolerance for the self-serving “politics” of today’s films that don’t speak to my experience. Films like Odds Against Tomorrow just wouldn’t be made today; all of the characters have faults, some more than others, just as life itself is. People are responsible for their own decisions. Why some people think they will be “protected” by a partner with a disposition toward violence is something that they have to answer to, not for society to find excuses for.

The Army helped me understand who I was, for good or bad. Any illusions about what other people “saw” and what my “place” in society is was “shattered” once and for all when I had this conversation with a drill sergeant during a locker inspection:

“Is that how you fold your socks, you Mexican?”

“I’m not a Mexican.”

“You…Cuban?”

“I’m not Cuban.”

“You…Puerto Rican?”

“I’m not Puerto Rican.”

“You…whatever you are?”

Anything but "white." I recall once I was working at a temp job when a Hispanic female trying to get my attention started speaking Spanish to me; I could tell by her tone she was trying to get a rise out of me. A fellow worker had to intervene and tell her that I didn’t speak Spanish, just the typical English spoken by someone in a white Midwest environment.

So what was the deal with me? My mother once told me she wished she had never let me be born; if it was because I was so “unhappy” with my life or if she was, that was probably immaterial. I gathered that my mother was a nursing student, and that Dad had been drafted and sent to France (back when it was still part of NATO's military). I don't know if they were actually married at the time, but I heard her once say she wasn't a "passionate" woman anymore, implying that maybe she still was before I showed up.

There was so many stories about who my real “father” was she couldn’t decide “what” he was. I couldn’t tell what was a lie or not, and when I wrote to the Ohio Department of Department of Health to send me my original birth certificate when I was in the Army, it wasn’t much help because the information my mother provided probably wasn’t completely true; being a good Catholic back then still required some fudging if you wanted to avoid the “shame” of not following the “normal” procedures.

It could be said in hindsight that I was a terrible “disappointment” to my mother that I didn’t do more to “justify” my existence, at least in comparison to my (relatively) perfect half-siblings. Although I probably had more of my natural father in me than my mother, it probably didn’t help that I was born a “blue baby” which probably stunted some part of my development, and there certainly was some “concern” there because I was a “quiet” baby and might have some intellectual developmental issues—which later morphed into questions about why I didn’t act “normal.” 

The “problem” was that the wrong questions were being asked, and when the right ones were asked my mother didn’t like the answers--i.e. being more "nurturing." It was rather determined that I was “destined” for jail or an early grave; instead, once the Army of all places gave me a sense of what “normal” was supposed to be like, I “shocked” and disturbed my parents (who had moved from Wisconsin to Knoxville) by having lost all my fear (hell, I had been promoted to sergeant after all), and just did whatever the hell I wanted to do without asking,  and then earned a college degree (much good it did me) and after that managing to stay out of jail, living a typical working class life long enough to see retirement age, and maybe have the time to put that film collection to better use.

Still, the more things "change," the more they stay the same. Using force to turn me into an “assimilated” white person could only be limited to the “culture” I was exposed to from an early age, but what couldn’t be changed was what people saw on the outside and what the stereotypical and prejudicial views they had about it. I can’t even act “normal” in today’s political environment without some people seeing it as “suspicious.” 

Just look at what’s going on at the Democratic National Convention; in regard to Hispanic immigration, what you hear there is almost as despicable as what you heard at the Republican convention: deport “economic” immigrants and curtail asylum, which is in line with “public sentiment” and both completely hypocritical; as I have discussed before, U.S.-deported violence made more “efficient” by the Bill Clinton-signed 1996 immigration “reform” law, and support for the “business” of drug cartels is the cause for feeling it unsafe to work—let alone live—in migrants' own countries.

And who are the Latinos who have been allowed to speak at the DNC? “Moderates” who are parroting the “official” line that they represent an unwanted group, and a voting rights activist who is essentially telling Latino voters that the Democrats are the lesser of two evils. I mean, I don't see any "percentage" in "assimilating" with animated objects who try to pass themselves off as human beings, like whatever this was at a typical Trump rally: