The Persistent Strain

THE WEEK leading up to the Michael Brown non-verdict was one in which race was at the forefront of daily life, at least as much as it was in the ancient days of my Mississippi upbringing.

You could say that week started with President Obama’s executive action on immigration. The next morning, I did household chores and listened to NPR coverage of the often-heated reaction to the president’s speech. The next day, my wife and I drove into Louisville to see Dear White People, Justin Simien’s devastatingly clever and thoughtful take on racism and identity politics among the Obama generation.

The movie made me laugh (at a volume embarrassing to my poor spouse) and even applaud in the middle of a crowded theater. It also left me pondering the persistence of the white supremacist virus in the American body politic. Over the past half-century, the film suggests, it may have evolved into a weaker strain, but it’s still lurking in there, and it can still make us sick.

A few evenings later, at the historically black college where I teach, my “Magazine and Feature Writing” class was discussing “Fear of a Black President,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which appeared in the September 2012 issue of The Atlantic. In his epic essay, Coates takes Obama to task for failing to follow up on his 2008 “Jeremiah Wright” speech in which he seemed poised to lead the U.S. in confronting its racial demons. At the same time, Coates also makes a fairly airtight case that, despite his efforts to not be the “black” president, opposition to Obama and his policies has often been motivated by fear and/or resentment of his race. Coates’ analysis centers especially on the right-wing firestorms that ensued when, in two famous racial-profiling cases, Obama acknowledged that he could identify with the victims because of his own race.

The class with which I discussed the article was almost entirely young and African American, and their conclusion was that, while a lot has changed about white racism in the previous two generations, the virus is still around, albeit sometimes in subtle and elusive form. As one young man in the class put it, now you can get the interview, but you never know why you didn’t get the job.

One of the students in that class shared that consensus about U.S. racism, but came at it from a different angle. She is a young woman, originally from Mexico, who only recently gained temporary legal resident status under Obama’s previous executive action, DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). Last summer, as an intern at a regional daily, she wrote a story about her long childhood trek across the Southwestern desert. One of her projects for my class was a story about her undocumented father’s struggle with kidney disease.

There was nothing in Obama’s rather modest new immigration order for my student’s family. But listening to some of the Republican reaction after his announcement, you’d have thought the president was turning the country over to the Mexican drug cartels. The essence of the critique from some Republican members of Congress was that the president was trying to “goad” or “bait” them into doing something crazy in response.

And there is something about the notion of our black president taking decisive action, without begging for approval, that makes some people a little bit crazy. That madness may be compounded when the decisive action is taken on behalf of the basic human rights of mostly brown people.

That scenario seems to activate an old, semi-dormant virus, one that specializes in attacking the brains of white folk.