White Tribalism in America

We like to think that, as modern Americans, we have passed the social-evolutionary stage of tribalism. But we have not. We still respond to other people, and potentially threatening situations, the way our tribal ancestors did.

On August 9, a white man walked into a Wal-Mart in Springfield, Missouri, openlycarrying an assault weapon and dressed in a bulletproof vest. People, their memories fresh of the mass shootings that occurred in Texas and Ohio just days before, fled the building, as did the armed man. He surrendered peacefully when authorities arrived.

The man claimed that he was performing an experiment. He had the legal right to openly carry arms. He wanted to find out if places such as Wal-Mart would respect that right. The authorities informed him that his right to carry weapons did not give him the right to act in a way that alarmed the public.

My point about tribalism is this. The man was arrested and treated respectfully because he was white. If he had been black, I have no doubt that he would have been shot—if not by the police, then by the private citizen who kept him at gunpoint while awaiting the police. The white majority in America view other white people as being part of their tribe, and black people as part of a separate tribe. Tribal identity—us vs. them—overwhelmingly determines how we act toward other people, especially in a threatening situation.

This man acted calmly, never pointing his weapon at anyone. But the news is full of white men who have, very recently, committed acts of mass terrorism. Among white conservative males, pent-up resentment brews to a white-hot intensity, in some cases erupting into open anger.

But resentment against what? What immense burden of injustice have white males experienced—from any level of government, or from the economic system, or society in general—that would justify such extreme anger? The idea that white males have been victims of oppression or prejudice, as a group, is ludicrous.

But suppose a black man loses his cool and gets angry. This happened recently in Tulsa, where I live. A black man parked his car in the fire zone at a library. When an armed security guard told him to move his car, he started screaming at her, accusing her of racism and threatening to get her fired. She did not fire at him, and the situation ended without further incident. Obviously, this black man displayed as much crazy anger as do many white men.

The difference is that black people have, in fact, suffered nearly unending oppression in America. Their anger, though inappropriate, is understandable. They were brought here as slaves; they suffered decades of lynching and over a century of racist laws; and, today, the number of black men (even unarmed black men, even uniformed black security guards) get shot by white police far in excess of black police shooting white people. Understandably, black people are afraid of white police, even the majority of police who would not shoot them, and afraid of white men, any of whom might be carrying a concealed weapon and be willing to use it without thinking.

It is equally wrong for whites and blacks to freak out. But blacks, at least, have a reason to feel that way. White supremacist groups far outnumber black supremacist groups. The black groups possess far fewer firearms, and when they do, they get raided. This is what happened to the Nuwabian Nation of Moors. Meanwhile, white supremacist cults continue to proliferate and to accumulate their weapons. White reaction to real or possible threats is strongly controlled by their tribal identity as whites.

Black people will not continue to put up with this. And when a seemingly minor event ignites their wrath, what the black extremists will do will not be reasonable, pretty, or legal. But whites have been asking for it for a long time. I remain astonished that most black people still like most white people.

How I ended up not being a racist

If anyone should have ended up being a racist, it should have been me.

In the 1960s and 1970s, my aunts, uncles, and cousins, as well as my parents, used the N word whenever they could. One of my uncles wanted to make sure that his daughter did not have to experience “bussing.” Does anyone remember what that was? It was deliberately transporting schoolkids by bus to a more distant school in order to achieve racial integration. In order to keep his daughter in a white school, my uncle had to get her to take a course that they did not offer at the black school. The course? Russian. In the middle of the Cold War, Alvin Rice the anti-communist wanted his daughter to study Russian so that she could avoid being bussed across town to a black school. (In a recent conversation with that cousin, she does not remember this incident—she was too young to care one way or the other about bussing—but remembers her father’s strong emotions about it.)

I also remember my parents discussing the question of whether black people were even human, and they concluded that they were not.

I remember my parents and aunts and uncles watching a news report during the 1968 Nixon-Humphrey presidential race. Vice President Hubert Horatio Humphrey was campaigning among blacks and he kissed a black baby. My parents and aunts and uncles were horrified. There, that one act proved that Humphrey should not be president.

Yet somewhere around 1980, this kind of talk stopped. It was rare among my cousins, and even the old folks changed the way they talked. Did they have a change of heart, or did they just finally admit that racism was dying out? I do not know. I just know that I would be astonished if any of my conservative Okie cousins used the N word (at least in my presence) ever again. And I truly believe they do not use it in private.

If anyone should have been a racist kid, it would have been me. I was raised by racists. I had it drilled into me. But, how shall I say it, it just didn’t take.  I remember what I thought and felt during the Hubert-Humphrey-baby-kissing incident. I remember thinking that what my parents said made no sense at all. It was perhaps the first time that I ever considered my parents to be wrong. I couldn’t explain why it was wrong; I just felt it.

These experiences continued. I befriended a Japanese-American guy and my parents were very uncomfortable with it, as they were with my trip to Japan as an exchange student in high school. I was enchanted by Japanese culture and studied it, and the language, intensely for a long time; I also loved the Japanese that I met as individuals. I started an airmail-letter romance with one of the girls from Japan. (Nope, never told my parents.)

Blacks, Japanese, and…Mexicans. My parents also raised me to not like Mexicans very much either. Had I tried to date any Mexican girls, my parents might have stopped me. As chance would have it, I was so timid that I only went on three dates in high school, all with white girls. (There was racial animosity going the other way, too.)

But I couldn’t help but like most Mexicans at least as much as I liked most whites. One particular experience remains in my mind. The whole band, plus the letter and banner girls, was on a bus going on a trip. My friend David and I, both white freshmen, talked with this stunningly beautiful Mexican girl, and we were smitten. I was; I think you were too, David. She was unattainable, of course: a senior. When we were all at our motel, this girl walked through a plate glass window and got minor injuries. I went to her room to wait with her while an ambulance came (I think David was there too) and I realized how much I cared what happened to her. Well, a lot of racism has disappeared from our group; at our 40^th class reunion, there did not seem to be much of a white/Mexican racial divide.

Then there remains the fact that I am a member of the Cherokee tribe, although I am mostly white. My Cherokee mother told me about our family’s history, all the way back to Nancy Ward (who died in 1822). That is, we were a racially blended family. On what logical basis could we be prejudiced against blacks, Asians, and Mexicans? This didn’t really sink into me until I read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, one of the early documentations of white American genocide against Native Americans. Much later, when I told my mother when I was in graduate school that I had a girlfriend (we got secretly engaged after knowing each other about a week and are still married after 31 years), Mom’s first question was, is she white? I said, almost. “What do you mean, almost?” “Well, Mom, somewhere along the line, one of those Cherokees got over the wall.” After a little hesitation, Mom could only laugh. My mom died on the day Barack Obama was elected in 2008, perhaps still struggling with the knowledge that the world was changing in a way she was uncomfortable with.

And today, I find myself more attracted to darker people than to lighter people, who seem somehow to be washed-out and dried up and sun-bleached. I believe this to be a psychological over-reaction against the racism in which I was raised. It is not logical; it is just a feeling.

There’s still a lot of racism around. Each week’s news brings another example of it. But maybe, just maybe, we humans have a streak of anti-racism in us that can make us, as it made me, feel repulsion toward racism. Let’s hope we do.