"I don't want to sound like I'm prejudiced. I've never been around a lot of black people before. I just worry that they're nice to your face but then when they get around their own people you just have to worry about what they're going to do to you." -- Veronica Mendive, white, woman, & U.S. citizen
It was partly cloudy in Mobile, Alabama, yesterday. Pickup trucks filled the parking lot of the Wal-Mart just north of town. Red Chevy Silverados. Black Ford F-150s. Blue Chevy Avalanches. Green Dodge Rams with hemmies hidden under their shinny hoods. No Nissan Titans. No Toyota Tundras.
Americans, wearing the typical uniform of the Patriot, walked toward the Super Store. Obese women wore t-shirts with cartoon characters on front and sweat pants. Pink was a popular color. The men wore camouflaged baseball caps, jeans, and tight black t-shirts.
A Neoliberal journalist, from up-North, interviewed the men and women in the Wal-Mart lot, the men and women whom John McCain called,
"the fundamentals." The journalist asked only one question: "What do you think of Barack Obama?" James Halsey laug
hed at the silly question, or perhaps he laughed at the silly Blue-State Northerner. Mr. Halsey quickly composed himself, and responded earnestly, "He's going to tear up the rose bushes and plant a watermelon patch. I just don't think we'll ever have a black president." Ricky Thompson, a parking-lot philosopher, channeled his inner Palin to respond in cryptic, foreboding tones, "He's neither-nor. He's other. It's in the Bible. Come as one. Don't create other breeds."
The Neoliberal journalist got the quotes he wanted. He got the photograph he wanted. He made sure his "Neoliberal elite" audience knew the place he got the quotes: a Wal-Mart parking lot, north of Mobile. He constructed a context that would allow the "Neoliberal elite" to dismiss the words of Mr. Halsey and Mr. Thompson. The article's context presents these men as two ignorant, hate-filled rednecks. They're aberrations, not the norm. They're marginal and minor, most certainly not representative.
The Neoliberal journalist's unquestioned faith in an ideology that promotes the United States as a superior land of multicultural tolerance, which may have some minor racial problems, led him to end the article with a quote from Bud Rowell. Mr. Rowell is a retired oilfield worker. He is, the journalist wrote, "uncertain about Mr. Obama’s racial identity, and was critical of him for being equivocal and indecisive." Mr. Rowell confessed, "I've always been against the blacks." But he has changed. He has three bi-racial grandchildren. Children, who in the words of Mr. Thompson, are a new breed of "neither-nors." Mr. Rowell would not agree with Mr. Thompson. Mr. Rowell loves his grandchildren. Although initially, "it was really rough on me," said Mr. Rowell. But in time, Mr. Rowell admitted, he "found out they were human beings, too." Yes, the article suggests, we too can change! Even Mr. Thompson can change, someday he might believe that bi-racial people are "human beings, too!"
By concluding with Mr. Rowell, the article propagates a feel-good message: although some Americans are intolerant and racist, they can learn, like Mr. Rowell, to be tolerant. By focusing on individuals, the article sidesteps the
structural,
institutional racism in the United States.
The article strives toward neutrality. It portrays itself as above ideology, or outside of ideology. It strives for objectivity. It fails. It is yet another ideologically based apology that allows hypocritical Americans to see their nation as God's gift to the planet, as a superior, tolerant, multicultural society.
