I’ve concluded that whiteness is an American invention. In Europe people have their cathedrals, ancient towns and cities, paintings, opera houses, that have been there for centuries. They have their roots. They’re secure. In the United States we have people who call themselves ‘white.’ They don’t say they’re Irish, or French, or German, or Swedish . . . just white.
The white middle class, however, is in more trouble now than the blacks were thirty years ago. With all the big migrations, this country is not going to be all-white, all English-speaking, in a few years. Of course these migrations, changes, are enriching their culture. But they don’t see it that way. The white middle class has a settler mentality: very paranoid, insecure, embattled. They become more and more isolated. What this class forms at this point in time is a group of people who call themselves white and who feel that their experience is the only permanent, historically viable experience, that everyone else’s—Afro-American, Latin, whatever—is just a short term fad. This point of view affects American education, politics, culture, the psyche.
The white settler culture can’t relate to other cultures. There’s more resistance to cultural change in the United States than in almost any country. But just as there’s transformation, now, from the old technology to a high technology, there’s a transition going on from a settler to an international culture, and this only increases the white settler’s sense of being embattled, and increases anxiety and paranoia.
From persons who are spokespersons for this settler culture, you aren’t going to get an accurate reading of reality. It’s too paranoid. It’s appropriate they have a white settler cowboy for a leader. But I feel sorry for Reagan. I think what’s happened to him is probably the worst tragedy since what happened to the salesman in Arthur Miller’s play. It’s pathetic that he’s been used as he has. He’s just another expendable front man.
The white male can’t rule the roost anymore. He’s in a terrible position. The kind of power he had is disappearing, and looked at over the longer historical view, he didn’t even have power that long. It’s become difficult to be a white man. I didn’t think I’d ever hear myself say that…
A white man…is some kind of homogenized, standardized profile that occurred in the United States. It began in a Yankee puritanical ideal that these old patriarchs, codgers, elders, who formed our leadership class, men like the Mathers and Jonathan Edwards who built the Ivy League schools our leaders—like George Bush, for instance—went to, a man who’s just ignorant, who talks about voodoo economics. Being a white man is an ideal that comes out of that matrix. I guess you would call it ‘patrix.’ All white men—and white women—are supposed to mold themselves in that ideal. They’re supposed to give up their ethnic roots—Polish, Irish, French—and become some kind of bland homogenized… supermen. Some kind of Rocky, the white male wish fulfillment. There’s a lot of narcissism, too, in the white man’s ideal. But this white macho swaggering stuff, the Yankee ideal and old Puritan myth of self help, discipline, self-sufficiency—all that transcendental moralizing you get with Emerson—it doesn’t work in this world. It worked at a time when a man could go out and hunt and fish and raise cattle. But now, more and more white males can’t make it, can’t do it, can’t be successful at it. And then they start striking out.
From “A Conversation with Ishmael Reed” with Judith Moore. First published in Express: The East Bay’s Free Weekly, 18 Feb. 1983; reprinted in Conversations with Ishmael Reed, 1995, UP Mississippi.
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