Member-only story
The Cretin Who Sold America
My Outrage at Being White
I am a white man in his 60’s. I am from the American South, the Heart of Dixie, the Bible Belt. I can no more apologize for being white than I can for being from Alabama. I am an accident of birth, in the sense that I had no control over my engendering, my skin color, or the fact that my mother was protestant, my father Jewish.
I did not choose to be born white but I have surely benefitted from it. Being white is being privileged in America and in other countries of this world. I understand that privilege intellectually, and often I understand it emotionally, too.
I’ve never boasted about being white, nor have I ever gotten down on my knees and thanked whatever God there is that I was born white. I’m glad to have been born at all, though in these gut-wrenching, shameless days, I’m not sure how glad I am to be here and to be nominally associated with the morons and assholes and traitors who stormed our Capitol.
Let me clarify that: I am most definitely disgusted, nauseated, and ashamed to have anything in common with the fascist right-wing thugs who desecrated our nation’s capital.
I have watched the news and read as much as I can digest over these past few days, from MSNBC to CNN to FOX (for maybe five minutes) to the New York Times and to The Dispatch…