I’ve been working on a post on why racism has become so difficult to talk about in the new millenium. I am still working, but this post by John on “Theory My Culture” recently grabbed my attention. The post is about Falwell’s legacy:
Falwell was also so sinister because of how he cleared the space for hate “after racism.” By “after racism,” I mean that shift in our culture and political life after which outright, honest, plainspoken racism was just untenable. This created a real crisis for conservatives. Falwell and the Moral Majority made hate possible again. Or at least transformed racial hatred, giving it a code.
To me, part of what is so interesting about Falwell’s politics is the way its encoding of hate is actually quite pre-racism– if we imagine what John calls “fifties” racism as a post-civil war phenomenon. Prior to emancipation, racial difference was already heavily encoded as that which exemplifies all that is hateable. Slaves were simply thus slaves because they were not the chosen.
What we think of as racism today, however, is heavily influenced by the rhetoric of the civil rights movement, for instance describing racism as the denial of rights justified by skin color. The CRM took the humanity of blacks as a given, and moved the conversation to the question of rights and privileges. By helping America forget that language, the CRM trumped slavery’s rhetoric of blacks as the explicitly unchosen. I’m not saying it went away; I’m just saying that that way of thinking about race fell out of public consciousness.
By reinvigorating the language of being chosen, Falwell’s ministry “avoids” racism by taking away intent. We aren’t racist/homophobic/sexist, they might say, because we don’t have any intent against “them.” It’s not our fault that they don’t do what it takes (e.g. renouncing homosexuality) or have what it takes to be chosen too.”
Free from intent and thus released from any sense of culpability, hate is unmitigated by any sense of relation. There is something of the fallen, from the social fabric and even from the religion it professes, that makes Falwell and his ilk very, very scary to me.
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