JUST INSIDE THE DOOR
Jordan, June
JUST INSIDE THE DOOR June Jordan In the Land of White Supremacy Iused to think I was up against racist belief and behavior. But then, about a year ago, I began to focus on white supremacy....
...Come unto me all ye who suffer and who seek asylum and an open road, and I will blow you away...
...There have always been fools who have flared into infamy almost like an awful amusement before the curtain lifts...
...To impose an Aryan Nation upon these United States would require bodily and juridical and legislative assault upon the constitutional liberties and the constitutional protection that defines basic citizenship here...
...I will efface you from my territory, my Aryan Preserve...
...Whatever that might mean, I didn't have Aryan Nation-type in mind...
...And forget about Negro clowns in the tradition of Clarence Thomas—clowns like the University of California regent Ward Connerly, who has risen to national stature by attacking affirmative action, or the Negro head of a rightwing militia group in Alameda, California...
...Oklahoma City has lifted the curtain...
...Anything or anyone appearing to challenge your center-stage position and its privileges becomes ungodly, or the Devil, or the Devil Incarnate, as in "The Jews," "The Niggers," "The Wetbacks," "The Chinks...
...It has taken me until the tragedy of Oklahoma City to understand that "The Aryan Nation" is not the name of an organization of some sort...
...What a shock...
...Do not be misled...
...The Aryan Nation" is the goal of the Christian Coalition and the Patriot Militias and the Contract with America and Governor Pete Wilson...
...On the contrary...
...I guess that was the picture of one of those angry white men, that photograph of blond, white Timothy McVeigh...
...White supremacy means that God put you on the planet to rule, to dominate, and to occupy the center of the national and international universe—because you're "white...
...Hence, the viciously orchestrated attack on "affirmative" for the sake of "angry white men" who, statistics inform us, continue to occupy 95 percent of all senior management positions...
...And, besides, the only democratic justification for centralized, federal government is its provision for the security of the population it presumes to represent...
...I was watching and listening to an everyday, casual kind of mental disorder: something real homespun and regular, like my (white) doctor saying she'd eaten Chinese food twice last week, but the rest of the time, she'd opted for "American...
...And so the catastrophe of Oklahoma City becomes a possible, and, for some, a reasonable, carefully planned event...
...This violent, paramilitary hatred is absolutely homegrown and growing...
...I came to recognize media constructions such as "The Heartland" or "Politically Correct" or "The Welfare Queen" or "Illegal Alien" or "Terrorist" or "The Bell Curve" for what they were: multiplying scattershots intended to defend one unifying desire— to establish and preserve white supremacy as our national bottom line...
...But you cannot provide for the security of a people without justice, without equality, without food, without education, without gainful employment, without housing...
...These were the kinds of things I began to hook up inside my head...
...Underlying such a world view is an infantile mentality as obviously infantile as it is "normal" in these United States...
...And so we pay taxes to "the government" expecting that, in return, we will receive these goods fundamental to our personal security and to the security of our society...
...American white-supremacist white...
...If we do not see ourselves, at last, stripped of all excuse and scapegoat, if we do not recognize the weakness of our connections to other—all of us different, and different-looking Americans—as the well-spring for white supremacy, then we may as well admit that we are ready to submit to Timothy McVeigh's final agenda for our country: to achieve an Aryan Nation by any means necessary.M June Jordan, the poet, is professor of African-American Studies at the University of California-Berkeley...
...Is that the guy who bombed the federal office building and killed 167 human beings because something truly pissed him off...
...And he wasn't really "Middle Eastern looking," was he...
...White supremacy moves beyond racist formulations of "superior" or "inferior...
...Hence, affirmative action, for example, is a federal government policy...
...And California, for example, is the most populous as well as the most heterogeneous (non-"Heartland") state in the Union...
...Dark," Mr...
...There is no difference between hating "the government" and hating "the Jews" and "the Niggers" in the mind-mesh of the Christian-white-rights crusade...
...The monster is an "American-looking" white man...
...And then there was the President droning on about our task is to cleanse ourselves of this "dark" force...
...He looked "American," one of the sheriffs remarked...
...Is he one of those guys "affirmative action" irritated like, so to speak, crazy...
...Nothing and no one—not a one-year-old baby, not a two-year-old child, not unremarkable American workers going about their boring but useful routines, not mothers or fathers or day-care teachers or any number of the simply living—could interdict or mitigate the murder-crazy determination of white supremacists to declare their hatred of "the government" and their hatred of anyone who fails to mirror their faces set, killer resolute, against us...
...White supremacy takes hatred of the unfamiliar to the level of religious war between "good" and "evil...
...To impose an Aryan Nation upon these United States would require overthrow of our government and that's also OK because, as some of us may remember, it's supposed to be a government of and by and for "the people"—and, at last count, "the people" have begun to look less and less like Clint Eastwood playing an unemployed Marine at a Christian Revival meeting...
...Racism means rejecting, avoiding, belittling, or despising whatever and whoever differs from your conscious identity...
...President...
...But Aryan Nation wannabes feel fine about that because only the godly deserve to be free...
...Or it might be something ordinary like media references to "The Heartland" as "true" America, even though very few of us live in North Dakota, Minnesota, or, for that matter, Oklahoma, and even though the majority of Americans reside on the East or West Coast...
Vol. 59 • June 1995 • No. 6
