You should feel guilty – white guilt guilty. Because Michael Bauman says “racism is in the foundation of bourgeois white America from sea to shining sea.” And we are a nation of “violent oppressors.” We’re all supposedly guilty.
A writer for The Ringer blog, Bauman claims that merely pointing at the people who hurled racial insults Monday at the Orioles’ Adam Jones in Boston “only lets us think of racism as someone else’s problem.”
Numerous writers rushed forward to review the history of racism in Boston after this week’s incident at Fenway Park, but none so angrily and pointedly as Bauman.
Even a cursory knowledge of American history, culture, and economics shows that racism touches every American in some fashion. You’d have to be willfully ignorant or self-deluded to believe otherwise, and given the enormity of the crimes from which white Americans have at least tangentially benefited, if not committed indirectly, it’s easy to understand why willful ignorance and self-delusion are so attractive.
Instead, calling out Boston allows us to fool ourselves into thinking that the disease can be quarantined when it’s already metastasized.
Bauman finds America “in a frightening place as a culture, where denying dignity and security to others, whether out of prejudice or simple greed, has become the dominant political cause of the century. This is not because most Americans are cruel, but because we’re a nation made up of some violent oppressors, some violently oppressed people, and a few hundred million people who want above all to stay out of it. Cruel people will fight harder to keep being cruel than average people will fight to stop them.”
By condemning what happened in Boston, government leaders, the Red Sox organization and the commissioner of baseball don’t get off the hook either, writes Bauman. Nor were the other 30,000 fans at Fenway that night and the entire nation absolved of wrongdoing by merely saying, “It wasn’t me!”
“[W]hen we’re confronted with a tentacle of our society’s greatest sin and aspire to nothing more than the avoidance of personal blame, the reflection doesn’t flatter anyone,” Bauman wrote.
