Arizona State Lawmaker Proposes Holiday For White People

From the Huffington Post:

After a Latino state legislator proposed a Latino American Day, lawmaker Cecil Ash stepped up before the legislature to suggest a holiday for white people. Seriously.

This is, after all, the land of S.B. 1070, the contentious and draconian immigration enforcement bill that has been mired in legal deadlock since it was signed into law by Gov. Jan Brewer (R) in 2010. The legislation, considered the strictest of its kind when it was passed, is to be ruled upon by the Supreme Court later this year.

It's also home to Russell Pearce, the former Republican state senator credited with laying down the framework for the state's controversial immigration law.

And who can forget the ever-graceful Brewer, stateswoman and author, wagging her finger dismissively in the face of President Obama at an airport in Phoenix last month?

And the swashbuckling Sheriff Joe Arpaio lives there, too. He proclaimed himself "America's Toughest Sheriff," and now finds himself ensnared in a U.S. Justice Department investigation accusing his department of racially profiling Latinos, basing immigration enforcement on racially charged citizen complaints and punishing Hispanic jail inmates for speaking Spanish.

More here, with video.

Of course, it's very tempting to just say that there are a lot of racist weirdos in Arizona, which is true, but I think this white history month concept is fairly typical of how lots of white Americans understand identity politics. That is, lots of white Americans don't understand identity politics at all.

In brief, the reason there are various ethnic holidays and observances, ethnic studies classes, ethnic history months, affirmative action, racial and ethnic advocacy groups, and on and on, is because the dominant culture in the US is overwhelmingly white. So the idea behind all the identity stuff is to sort of bring non-white points of view into the mainstream, ideally creating a more inclusive society that values all cultures existing within our borders, with numerous side benefits, such as getting Americans more used to living and working with each other.

This isn't rocket science; it's a simple concept. But when people call for a white history month, or a white people's day, or affirmative action set asides for white people, they're at the same time revealing intense ignorance of the whole identity thing. To these people, observing the value of non-white American cultures is a liberal plot to take away status and power from whites.

Now, to be fair, there are some very good reasons that the white history people feel like they're losing power and status relative to non-whites: conservative economic policies have for some three decades been making American workers, most of whom are white, work much harder for less pay and security than in previous generations. If you have some residual racist tendencies in the first place, and don't understand politics and economics in general, it's easy to go a bit racist, and blame all the brown people. But throw in four decades of GOP rhetoric reinforcing this notion, that non-white people are taking from white people, and you bring in angry whites who have no residual racist tendencies at all, dupes with reasonable grievances aimed at the wrong parties.

Really, this has been a winning formula for the Republican Party for many years, and one wonders if they could even win elections if there were no racism to stoke so as to deflect from their anti-worker, pro-wealthy policies.

At any rate, such widespread ignorance about the actual nature of identity politics does everybody a disservice. The news media and the schools have done a lousy job explaining things. It's pretty easy for the uninformed to resent the situation, given the near total lack of information on the overall dynamic.

On the other hand, especially given the fact that, while white, the dominant American culture is now mass media driven, and therefore something of an artificial construct, I would welcome an honest dialogue among whites about what it means to be white in a pluralistic society. That's something else we never seem to think about. I mean, in a healthy way.

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