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THE OVERT WHITE SUPREMACIST |
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Although this image represents a dangerous white type, it is the least complex in the literature. Moreover, Joyce Y. Rogers' essay, An Image of Cooperation: White Volunteers in the Civil Rights Freedom Summers Projects shows that it can also be a crutch for many whites who want to believe that only the open bigot can be called a racist. Rogers' research demonstrates that the demonization and "otherization" of this type by whites who like to think of themselves as progressive is a convenient tool: it allows the covert and unconscious racists to redirect charges of bigotry to overt racists, and it allows them a sort of strawman to took down on in an ostensible demonstration of their own racial enlightenment. These attitudes are indicated in an interview with a Northern white college student who went to the South during the Civil Rights movement: [T]he white Southerners . . . are just about the most physically repulsive people I've ever run into in my life . . . the women around here are pale, sickly white. Sickly white pasty bloated with self-satisfied looks on their faces--pasty is the word and they just look as if they're ready to burst and blubber would flow out of them in all directions. They are repulsive and the men are just as bad. The fact that the superiority over blacks among the white Northern volunteers helped precipitate the breakdown of the black-white coalition during the Civil Rights era makes this passage especially intriguing. The disgusting and evil nature of racism is manifested, to this no doubt liberal white, in the perception of physical monstrosity of overtly racist whites. "This is a racist," this mentality wants to claim, "And this is not me." This self-absolution hinges on such whites' defining racism in a way that never implicates them; if a racist is a consciously evil monster, only such a person could be a bigot. As James Baldwin wrote, however, "I am aware that no man is a villain in his own eyes." Thus, as the literature under discussion in this chapter will show, the image of the overt bigot represents ideas that are embedded, whether consciously or unconsciously, in the minds of some whites who think of themselves as progressive or enlightened; in fact, the "evil" bigot identity type is the ego identity off-split of prejudiced whites in general, no matter how good they think they are or how unintentional is their racism. As the image under discussion contains elements of bigotry present in the psychology of the identity types under examination in the rest of the chapter, it is important to focus briefly on key aspects of the mentality of the overt bigot as represented in works by black authors. One of the most exact and representative portraits of this type is Lyle in Baldwin Blues for Mister Charlie. Inspired by Emmitt Till's murder by two whites for allegedly flirting with one of their wives, Baldwin's play dramatizes the mentality of violent white supremacy in Lyle's killing of a black man, Richard, whom he feels has been disrespectful toward him and his wife. David Leeming captures the subtlety of Baldwin's depiction of a man who, in the hands of a lesser writer, might have been presented as a mere caricature: "Lyle is depicted in his home as an ordinary individual with genuine tenderness for his wife and child. But we learn quickly that he is so thoroughly infected with the plague of racism that it is impossible to recognize the humanity of the 'niggers.'" At least two aspects of this reading are relevant to the rest of this study: that the character who symbolizes the open white supremacist is a human being, not a monster about to burst open with blubber; and that he simultaneously cannot recognize blacks as fellow human beings, only as inferior objects. Perhaps the most important aspect of Lyle's murder of Richard is his reason for it: "I had to kill him. I'm a white man!" . This rationale makes it evident that the murder is a defense against what the white man perceives to be his very identity--that this is an extermination of a black man who seems to threaten his sense of himself and that it is the most extreme symbol of whites' need for mutuality between their self-image and blacks' image of them. According to Erikson, the protection and maintenance of mutual agreement with others concerning one's self-interpretation is a main aspect of one's sense of identity, and this idea is clearly racialized in the sort of bigots symbolized by Lyle. All of these qualities are manifested in the image of the hypocrite, the good-hearted weakling, and the liberal in the works of important black writers. That they are sometimes covert or unconscious illustrates Baldwin's theory that many whites' behavior and attitudes toward blacks are marked by "personal incoherence"--the gap between their selfimage and their actions toward blacks and the contradictions that arise as a result. As Erikson points out, "The American group identity supports an individual's ego identity . . . as long as he can convince himself . . . that no matter where he is staying or going he always has the choice of . . . turning in the opposite direction" . The devastating consequences of this mentality to race relations will become eminently clear as we look at the typology of whites.
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