The Fantasy of a Lily-White America

[Jilly_in_VA]

BY EDDIE S. GLAUDE JR.

In 1970, two years and a couple days after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Time magazine published a special issue on Black America. The cover was a Jacob Lawrence portrait of Jesse Jackson, against the backdrop of bright yellows and reds, seemingly poised to speak. His eyes sad, skeptical, and cautious. The special issue included an extended essay on Jackson and the shifting terrain of Black politics. Another addressed the militant and hopeful attitudes among African Americans as they recognized the unwillingness of white America “to bend or change to accommodate black equality.” In April of 1970, with grief still palpable, the editors of Time sought to examine the complexities of Black lives and politics in the face of the white backlash during the Nixon years. Race held center stage.

But it was an essay, “What Would America Be Like Without Blacks,” written by Ralph Ellison, the author of Invisible Man, and, later, published in his 1986 collection of essays, Going to the Territory, that struck a chord with me. I have been struggling with how to characterize our current national malaise, especially given the recent reporting about Donald Trump’s plan to use civil rights laws to protect white people. It’s easy to describe MAGA Republicans as racists or to talk about the white backlash and to decry the assault on American history and the manufactured panic around immigration. But something more fundamental about who we are as a nation (or who we refuse to be) is being revealed in this moment. Ellison maintained that “whenever the nation grows weary of the struggle toward the ideal of American democratic equality,” we reach for the illusion of secession—the fantasy of a lily-white America.

That fantasy, of course, involves not only the desire to rid the nation of Black and brown people, but aims to banish us and the issue of race from the nation’s moral conscience. The likes of Jacob Lawrence or Ralph Ellison, for example, or even Dr. King and Jesse Jackson are reduced, by some today, to a mere footnote in the struggle for democracy. These political forces cast aside the creative tensions around race that have made the country what it is. In their hands, America’s original sin is settled by the wishful effort to wash the nation clean.

And we have seen this throughout the history of the country: from schemes during the antebellum period to send free Black people to Liberia to President Lincoln’s insistence that free Blacks accept the colonization scheme because white people “suffer from your presence” to the lies of the Lost Cause and Redemption to American immigration law like the Immigration Act of 1924 that insisted that ours must remain a white nation to the clamoring around the border today and the bitter fights about what to teach our children in schools.

https://time.com/6966768/fantasy-white-america-eddie-glaude/

America wasn't "lily white" when Columbus, or the Vikings, or the Pilgrims got here either.

[jimfields33]

1. The United States needs to figure out reparations

and soon. However, I think Africa should also pay reparations to African Americans as well.

[keithbvadu2]

2. 'Lily-White'... At one time, Irish and Italian were not considered real white.

[intheflow]

3. What's your point!

Irish and Italians have been able to thrive because their skin is actually white. That’s never gonna happen with black skin.