Privileged People Are The Ones Who May Not Speak

A follow-on to Tex's post. It's always struck me as ironic that the dialogue works this way: you can spend literal years using the phrases "Traitor!" and "Nazi!" without being charged with being divisive or with questioning someone's loyalty to America if you are on one side. If you are on the other side, raising a question about someone's loyalty to the American project is itself proof of your own racism or xenophobia or whatever -- even if they have themselves said very nasty things that might lead an unbiased observer to think that maybe they weren't very fond or very proud of the United States of America.

If you asked why, the answer would be that the ones being silenced were the privileged who had to be held to a higher standard for the good of us all. It was all very well for oppressed minorities to make reference to racial solidarity as a means of resisting their oppression, for example, but it could never do for the majority; that would lead to further and increased oppression. Because of the fact of privilege, then, the unprivileged deserved extra privileges that counterbalanced the privileges of the majority.

That rhetorical move (rooted in Rawls, I think) was persuasive to the majority for a long time, but it couldn't go on forever. For one thing, since 1965, the demographics have been shifting rapidly. The old assumptions about privilege were eventually going to have to be tested as majorities collapsed, and newcomers proved in many cases to do better than the native-born. Who, then, deserves the countervailing privileges? Perhaps the double-standards are obsolete?

The late Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Lewis Grizzard used to talk occasionally about migrants from the northern United States who moved South to escape oppressive weather, high cost of living, and massive taxation, only to complain about how 'backwards' they found the South. "If you don't like Dixie," he would say, "Delta is ready when you are." I hear similar sentiments from Texans today dealing with "California refugees." I hear similar sentiments from people in Brooklyn or Austin, for that matter, about richer people moving into the poorer neighborhoods and making them unaffordable for those who used to live there. It's no wonder that people get mad about folks moving here from Mexico and then raising the Mexican flag over American facilities. You can be from Mexico or Somalia, or you can be from New York or New Jersey or San Francisco; you can be born of whatever parentage. If you move somewhere and then gripe about how badly it compares to your earlier homeland, or go about trying to change it into your former homeland, someone is eventually going to ask you why you don't just go back if you liked it their way so much more.

The 'gentrification' complaint is allowed, though, with no one thinking it is really about race rather than wealth even when race plays a big factor in the complaints. Other complaints are not as freely permitted; some are painted as outright racist or as hate-speech. But it is the same complaint in all cases: it's about people of different cultures moving into an area and bringing changes the original inhabitants don't like, and may not be able to afford. It's about communities that exist being disrupted or destroyed or driven under by migration. Some of it's internal to the United States; some of it, the races of both migrants and the extant community are the same. Sometimes they're different, and when that happens race seems to be a bigger factor than it really is. The concerns are severable: even where the races and nationalities are the same, people raise the same objections.

Not everyone is allowed to do so without being demonized, though. That's a cultural double-standard that probably can't survive any longer than it has. For a long time it made sense to people in a larger, stronger majority as an article of justice. These days, there's not so much patience among the smaller, weaker, vanishing majority for being told they must swallow their concerns. Nor will those who long enjoyed a monopoly on the counterbalancing privilege surrender their own privileges lightly. These ugly fights are likely to be with us for a while.