Panglossian ninny shrieking racist unwittingly proves my point

In the last ezine, I wrote that in any discussion of the coming minority status of whites in the United States, we should dismiss as Panglossian ninnies those proper, polite whites who affect to see no cause for concern in this event. Further, I wrote, a white reader already shrieking "racist!" shouldn’t bother reading on as the discussion "will be over your head anyway."

Well, it didn’t take long for a reader to prove my point.

I received the following email before the ezine was even finished sending:

SUBJECT: It is not "way over [my] head…

FROM: director_general_emeritus@socialjusticealliance.org

MESSAGE: The Alliance for Social Justice International..[something in Latin] you ARE a blatant racist. Pathetic !

I did a little googling (here’s his user profile on wikipedia) and discovered that the sender is a white guy with lots of diversity cred, including "Native American" diversity associations.

So, I replied with a quote from Chief Sitting Bull as if it were my own, replacing words like "red" and "Sioux" with "white" and "American":

"Is it wrong for me to love my own? Is it evil for me because my skin is white? Because I am a native-born American?"

I received in reply the following under the subject line, "My final response to you, Racist…":

1. First, I did not know you are an albino. Only albino’s have white skin. So must be very difficult for you…pink eyes and all. Which would explain your mental disturbances to a significant degree.

2. Secondly, [some more stuff in Latin]. So I have nothing more to say to you: no need; you are self-condemning.

(send him email: dr_ajb@post.harvard.edu)

This person proves my point: the discussion of what the response should be to the news that whites are about to become the minority in this country is over his head. In that discussion, I wrote, we should “start by assuming that white Americans share with all peoples throughout the world at all times throughout history the characteristic that being disempowered as a group is a negative–like being conquered, or being subjugated. Let’s assume that it is the same disaster for whites that whites consider it to be for everyone else.”

The racist-shrieking person who sent me the email believes the disempowerment of the Sioux and other Native Americans was a disaster for them; he would never call Chief Sitting Bull a racist. Yet he calls me a racist for quoting Sitting Bull back at him.

In other words, the sender does not seem able to abstract from the historical experience of the Sioux and apply his thinking consistently–to apply objectively his logic to the situation whites now face. This, to me, is a sign of a mediocre intelligence, i.e., the discussion is over his head.

The only other explanation I can think of to explain an email like this is a perverse form of racism on the part of the writer–an inverted kind of racism, which I addressed in the rest of the paragraph:

Let’s assume there is nothing magical about being white that permits whites the luxury of indifference to this disempowerment–this permanent disempowerment. Let’s assume whites are not so superior that they can ignore gritty bloody reality–that they can ignore as if he were a precocious child, Willie Brown, the black former speaker of the California Assembly, when he says, "I think most white politicians do not understand that the race pride we all have trumps everything else.” Let’s assume the United States is a nation not so exceptional that Americans of any color can opt out of the destiny that demography is.

This is not to say all Panglossian ninnies possess only modest intelligence or are the perverse products of inverse racism. They may not even be ninnies, though they are certainly unjustifiably and foolishly optimistic.

For example, a reporter at a mainstream daily responded:

To be clear, the central thrust of your concern is that when one group does not represent a majority, they are subjugated. That in years to come, whites will no longer be the majority (leaving aside that we will remain the plurality) and therefor will feel be subjugated and “conquered.” By your definition, other blacks and Hispanics, in minority status are “disempowered,” and whites hold a superior position. Public policy must be prescribed to maintain white superior position based solely on skin color. Dude. I’m not reaching to call that racist. I’m trying to figure out how it in any way, is NOT racist. It is the belief that one race should dominate others and the dangers if that dominant race is no longer white. You’ll note, I’m not calling you a racist but if you don’t want to be considered one, stop sending out e-mails like this.

First, in a democratic republic, or any system involving majority rule, the majority wields the power. Everything that occurs in a majority rule system occurs by leave of the majority unless it occurs through some kind of corruption or special interest pressure (and even then, arguably, it still occurs by leave of the majority).

If the majority loses majority status, whether it is Republicans in Congress, or whites in the United States, it is disempowered insofar as the system is democratic.

Moreover, losing majority status in any given geographical area is seen by everyone, including white Americans, as a negative regardless of whether the area is under a democracy. For example, ethnic Han Chinese are now a majority of the population in Lhasa, Tibet and in Inner Mongolia. This is seen by all (except the Han Chinese) as a negative for ethnic Tibetans and ethnic Mongolians. When the European waves rolled across the land of the Sioux, it was, it is widely agreed, from the standpoint of the Sioux, a negative. Thus, in most of the world–in Japan, in Israel, in Saudi Arabia–immigration policy (if immigration is even possible) today reflects a desire by the dominant ethnicity to maintain that dominance.

We implicitly acknowledge the negative quality of being in the minority by the mechanisms we have in place to ensure minority representation in the power sharing in this country. Significantly, these very mechanisms, instituted under a white majority, are by no means guaranteed forever (consider the rank injustice and racism of the reparations movement).

Perhaps I am wrong to be concerned about the disempowerment of whites in America, but I don’t think, in all sincerity, that I am. In any case, if it is “racist” for a white person to be concerned, then I share with the rest of humanity the quality of racism, and the word itself has lost any useful meaning.