http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-duck-dynasty-phil-robertson-sounds-off-on-gays-20131218,0,6319736.story
So, this hubub around Phil Robertson in the news ties in with what I was saying the other day about why it's not useful to reflexively label conservatives as racists. That still applies here - calling Robertson a racist doesn't actually explain what's wrong with what he said.
Besides the remarks about gay people, which other people are discussing elsewhere, Roberton also said this:
“I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I'm with the blacks, because we're white trash. We're going across the field.... They're singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!... Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”
What's wrong with that? It's a viewpoint of a privileged position. He didn't see the misery of black people under Jim Crow because he couldn't see their misery. He had never lived in any other world where black people were true equals, so the dire injustice of the situation didn't stand out to him as anything but normal. It's most likely entirely true that he never heard a black person complain about their lot in life, but does he realize that if a black person had complained, their lives would have been in danger? The South during that time was filled with horrific tales of violence against black people who did dare to speak up.
This is how the privilege that white people enjoy also hurts white people. It allows white people to hold a view of the world that does not conform to reality, and then it protects white people from the consequences of misunderstanding the world so profoundly. Almost any other person who believed the things that Phil Robertson believes would likely never encounter an opposing view, nor suffer any consequences from believing something so absurd as the myth of black happiness under Jim Crow. It's only a very special set of circumstances that have put Phil Robertson in a place where his view of the world has been exposed.
This can give the impression that Phil Robertson is a rare specimen, and all that's needed here is to call him a racist, make him shut up, and congratulate ourselves that we're all beyond that now, so many years after Jim Crow ended. Yet, we live in a country where along every axis we can find not slight, but deep differences in the outcomes of black and white people. Everybody agrees, black and white people have the same capacity. Some will even strenuously insist that race is a complete myth. Of course they're speaking in biological terms, and in fact nobody of any intelligence anywhere seriously believes that race is a biological feature of humanity.
But we cannot reconcile these things. We cannot believe that black people and white people are humans of the same potential, and also to believe that black people and white people have an equal opportunity for success in this country. Now, I am sure that 99% of the people reading this, including myself, are absolutely dedicated to the belief that black people and white people are all humans of the same potential. So, there is only one escapable conclusion left to us: the idea that black people and white people in America are equal in terms of opportunity is a lie.
The fact that most of us have never truly tried to understand this doesn't mean we are racists, but it does mean that we are ignorant. Just like Phil Robertson here. White people aren't magically gifted with some kind of ability to see privilege, because privilege is always invisible to the privileged. White people have to work hard to see it, because privilege mostly helps white people. White people have to cultivate a desire to see it, because a failure to understand privilege will only rarely have serious consequences for a white person. Phil Robertson here is one of those people who suffers from all the common blind spots, but because the stars aligned just right, he's having to face up to the consequences of ignoring how the world actually is.
So, if there's anything we must do here, is we must realize that he's just like us. We can't just call him a racist and think that we are not like him. If you do that, you're not understanding your own privilege.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-duck-dynasty-phil-robertson-sounds-off-on-gays-20131218,0,6319736.story
