who am i? why am i here?

Recently, when I have gotten so angry at a journalist or pundit for that person’s comments about race or class in the 2008 election that I want to throw a newspaper or angrily close a computer window, I think about what it is I am objecting to.  Usually, it has to do with a sense that the particular reporter is posturing.  It seems s/he comes in with a set of familiar tropes: the out of touch limousine liberal, the working stiff who has been alienated from his former party, the angry and scary black activist. 

 In high school, the race problem seemed frustratingly easy to me, and I thought my U.S. history class had properly exposed me to the correct historic judgement on the period.  Institutionalized racism could have been challenged by the lower class whites who instead felt they had to keep down black slaves to keep themselves up.  Why instead couldn’t all of the downtrodden recoil against their “masters”?  Today, the view that assigns fault to one party seems frighteningly simplistic, just as many of our conclusions from high school do (not to knock high school–our brains simply were not as developed). 

I hope as a journalist, I will get better at viewing my stories from every angle and not simply a standard journalist’s angle, one that has settled on a rigid historic judgement that one subsconsciouly or consciously advances (e.g. the blue collar vs. white collar of today, the blue collar v. blacks of yesterday).  I say this not to try to resurrect so-called upper-middle class “white guilt,” which is so often pinned on the limo liberals but rather to seek to end the frenzied posturing of the class of journalists who presume to know the sentiments of a bloc of people who they rarely see while presuming elitism in others.

In this vein, I have found an interesting article authored by a man named James A. Sleeper who taught a sociology class to a bunch of blue collar guys back in the 1970s.  He wonders about their reaction to a talk by black author James Baldwin (the reactions vary ) and finds himself questioning his own perspective on his students, particularly, whether his class of academics has unfairly laid racial conflict solely at their feet.  Here is a particularly interesting passage:

Do you ever wonder why we have been imported to this enclave surrounded by clusters of old three-deckers and empty lots where our age-mates, back from the service, are pounding the pavements, where young women strangely haggard work the night shift and Dunkin Donuts, where men with lunchpails punch in at Finast and Fenton Shoe, where old women on their way to our dining halls slip off gaseous buses onto the ice before dawn? What are we doing here? How shall we live? Are we somehow part of their burden? Will we always stand over against them?

Pitting working-class whites against blacks keeps the “white heat” off us, but it keeps a lot of the warmth away as well. That absence of social peace–however “refined,” however accepted–is hurting us more than we know: those at the top, for all their sophistication, become wedding-cake figures, deprived and innocent of the world around them; those in the middle barter themselves daily, hustling and striving and somehow always missing the point. Baldwin says that blacks still “free” of those maladies become not only victims of whites’ hatred and fear, but, ironically, furtively, sources of the love they inhibit among themselves.