To Be White and Conservative Is To Be Racist

I still have a few white, conservative friends.

They are people who deeply dislike Donald Trump and much of the direction of the Republican Party, but also have serious reservations about the Democrats and many progressive causes.  They remind me that it is possible to be white and conservative and not be fascist and racist.  I think they are right about fascism.  Liz Cheney is a good example.  I disagree with most of her political positions, but I respect her commitment to the democratic process.

I am not so sure about the racism claim.

Is it possible to be white, conservative, and not be racist?

I am always curious about what white conservatives are trying to conserve.  Some seem to long for a past age in America when “life was good.”  Others suggest they seek to conserve American values they see as threatened or even lost.  Still others hope to conserve – or perhaps reclaim – a politics with less rancor and vitriol.  While their pronouncements sound noble, they all build upon the idea that America’s best days were in its past.  These people may despise Trump, but they seem quite comfortable with “Making America Great Again.”

I often ask them when they think America was great.  When asked this question in 2017, Roy Moore, the Republican candidate for the Alabama Senate race, replied, “America was great at the time when families were united — even though we had slavery.”  In other words, America was great when six million Black men, woman and children were treated as property.

Most of my conservative friends were as appalled by Moore’s claim as I was, but their response to that question isn’t really all that different.  They often mention some time in their childhood or early adulthood.  A Pew survey of Republicans found that when asked “when was America great,” many chose the 1950s and early 1960s as the last years when America was great.  In other words, America was great before the Civil Rights Movement challenged Jim Crow and restored civil rights to people of color.

This is the problem with any nostalgic desire to return to an American past – it is inherently racist.  To do so is to ennoble and glorify a time when people of color had far fewer right than white people.  It is to conserve a status quo that was white supremacist in tone and practice.  Frankly, unless you are a white male, there is no better time to live in the United States than right now. This is true if you are woman, a person of color, physically or mentally challenged, homosexual, bi-sexual, transgender, gender neutral or any other minority or marginalized group.

When I point this out to my white conservative friends, they never ague.  They know this is true.  They usually shift to arguing for conserving certain American values – a belief in God, a defined moral order, slow and careful change, valuing past precedent, and social order.  For example, they often lament the loss of the nuclear family as the bedrock of American greatness.  Divorce is too easy.  Children are raised without fathers.  They yearn for a day when the family is once more honored and advantaged.

They seem completely unaware of how racist policies caused much of what they lament.  Historically, public policy intentionally and consistently undermined the families of people of color by creating economic and legal obstacles to their success.  Policies were designed to promote white families at the expense of black families.  In the 1950’s, public policy brought millions of dollars to white veterans through the GI Bill and largely ignored black veterans.  Social Security was originally designed to exclude many occupations that employed people of color.  Welfare laws required poor families to be led by single mothers, disrupting many minority families.  After the 1960s, many of these policies – designed to impact families of color – began to also impact white families negatively.

Here is a painful truth for white conservatives – the nuclear family with a mother at home was a result of policies which gave white families financial advantages at the expense of families of color.  Women of color rarely had the option of staying home with their children.  They were often working for those white nuclear families.  Nostalgia for this kind of family inherently devalues a multitude of other types of family configurations that developed as alternatives to a kind of family primarily reserved for white people.

Too often, whether white conservatives acknowledge it or not – what they seek to conserve is a culture of whiteness.  It is a belief in the God of a white Jesus.  It is a defined moral order which values and defends a status quo where whites are vastly richer than people of color.  It values past precedent without acknowledging the racist motives and prejudices of past figures, pronouncements, laws, and legal opinions.  White conservatives love to talk of the founding fathers without any embarrassment that all of them were white men – most of them slave owners.

When I bring all of this into the conversation, often white conservatives admit these truths, but argue that they miss the days when such conversations didn’t have to be so rancorous, when we could talk about racism and justice without animosity.

To which I say that day never existed.

What existed was a culture where the opinions of white people were the only opinions given opportunity, value, and voice.  There was little rancor around issues of race and justice because white people generally agreed that people of color – as minorities – did not deserve a voice in American democracy.  And, since white people were the majority of the electorate, they were in a position to defend their privileges.

The animosity white conservatives are experiencing now is the built-up frustrations of voices long ignored or silenced.  They are often aimed at those who would conserve this racist past.  Are they loud?  Yes.  Are they insistent?  Yes.  Are they invalid?  No.  When white conservatives yearn for a day when political discourse was more tranquil and less partisan, they yearn for a day with all political parties and social institutions generally supported white supremacy.

This is my problem with my white conservative friends.

They yearn for a past that no one else misses.

It is a racist past.

Their desire to conserve that is racist.

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