I’m white. I’m proud. Yet I’m confused about this “white pride” business.
Because the two qualities seem to belong to different realms, race and self-esteem, without much intersection. My race is a condition of birth. I didn’t have to work hard for it. I almost said it’s like being left-handed, but I am rather proud of being left handed, as it sets me apart and imposed a series of minor lifelong challenges that I overcame.
That’s what leads to pride: facing difficulties, accomplishing something hard, something that not everybody can do. Using right-handed scissors requires effort and a bit of dexterity, for a left-hander, but I am not especially proud of that because most people manage it.
The things I am proud of tend to be endeavors that not only take effort but effort over time and produce a valuable result. They’re also something that others fail at. I’m proud of making a living as a writer for the past 44 years, thinking of the lines of the Robert Browning poem, “Andrea del Sarto”:
I do what many dream of, all their lives,
—Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do,
And fail in doing.
Include in there being married for 35 years, producing two fine boys — I won’t bother ticking off all the ways they’re superior to their dad — who launched well and easily transitioned into careers and families of their own. Plus 20 years sober, speaking of things that people try to do and fail, spectacularly.
None of that fell into my lap. I had to work for it. Hence a certain pride. Not unseemly pride, I hope. I try to view my achievements with a humble practicality. My writing kept me alive but did not set the world aflame. No best-sellers, no Pulitzer. I’m not even the most successful writer in Northbrook — that’s Bob Kurson.
Yes, other groups have pride — Black Pride, Gay Pride — but that is interwoven with overcoming difficulties.
This is where the masked men marching in Washington, D.C., on the Fourth of July come in. Their worldview is that being white and Christian, the world is stacked against them. They struggle and suffer, being white, since whites deserve everything, having created the world, and so anybody else achieving anything is theft, from them. Every medical student of color stole a slot from a white person, because white people are just, you know, better.
It’s a strange, narrow, fearful, complaining worldview —nobody cries like a bully — and a very bad look. Hence the masks.
And the funny thing is, the white nationalists, or whatever they were — commentators said the masked men were members of a hate group called the Patriotic Front — would boot me out of the white boys club for being Jewish. Which, in that strange way that if you go far enough right you meet the left. The far left would also exclude me from the Oppressed Minorities Clubhouse for belonging to a religion that supports the nightmare nexis of all evil, aka Israel.
See? That’s why I’m also proud of being Jewish. Look at the awkward fix we’re in: not white enough for the Patriotic Front but too white for the Liberal Students Klaxon for Peace.
The general reaction to the Patriotic Front march was concern, maybe a little fear. At these white supremacists marching in close formation. Me, I see the masks as improvement —100 years ago, the Ku Klux Klan was marching in Washington, in their white hoods and robes, faces uncovered. Give today’s marchers credit — dumb as they may be, they know enough to not want to lose their jobs.
Myself, I am neither alarmed nor afraid. In truth, I feel kinda sorry for the Patriotic Front types, for all haters who are so insecure about themselves they feel they can’t complete, can’t win any fair match. Every refugee crawling across the border, with limited language skills, is a threat to their existence. Every line of history that doesn’t exult their glory, a stab at their hearts.
I watched clips of those masked racists marching in Washington, D.C., on the Fourth, and it was if the Brown Haired League was putting on a pageant. Good for you that you are proud of your auburn locks. But isn’t that something you’d rather do in private? Don’t you have any actual accomplishments?
That’s where we differ. To the Patriotic Front, the world is all about them, and anything that isn’t about them is a crisis, a theft or an insult. Me, I live in a varied, inclusive, bountiful, open, generous world where even strutting nutjobs like the Patriotic Front have a place and purpose: for starters, as abject lessons in how not to be. I’m kinda proud of that.