That Long Walk

Tommy Thompson wants to be the next Senator for Wisconsin.  The problem, as his supportive son sees it, is Barack Obama, but, as Thompson's son sees the solution, is to send Barack Obama back to Kenya.

Tommy Thompson had the good sense to say his son had mis-for-spake, or something.

A lot of people are mis-for-spaking, out of context, not meaning what they say they said.


There is something discouraging about being old enough to recall the civil rights struggles of the 1960s--a mere half century ago.  The echos continue.  Except that then, it was all black people who were supposed to go back to Africa, where they had come from three or four hundred years earlier, in the holds of slave ships.

I do believe that it was not until I was fully grown that I really began to appreciate what had been an obvious fact of my own life:  that is to say, I was very much a part of the immigrant life.  Even though I had been born in Tacoma, Washington, our father had immigrated from Norway, not so very long before marrying our mother, whose parents had immigrated, too.  Most of the family was of Norwegian descent.

But it was in Berkeley, California, and in Chicago, that I really first heard people whose families had also immigrated--because almost all of us are immigrants--but who had immigrated earlier than our family, demand that black people, most of whom had come to this country earlier than most white people, should go back to where they had come from.  It was as if my father were demanding that my grandfather go back to Norway, where he had come from.


It is worse than that, of course:  Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, as surely as I was born in Tacoma, and like me, and many others, had only seen the place where his father was born when he went there to see where his ancestors had come from.  He also went to Kansas, where his mother grew up.  (I am assuming that Hawaii, where Obama was born, is a part of the United States.)


It is racism.  It was racism in the 1960s.  It was a kind of cultural claim to superiority in the 1930s, when I was born, and Norwegians were Squareheads.

But it seems uglier now.  Maybe it was always ugly, and maybe I was just too young or too naive to understand how persistent and ignorant it is to pretend that people who are not exactly like us must necessarily be inferior, just because they are not quite like us.  Stokeley Carmichael said that racism persisted because "everybody needed a n*****':  everybody needed somebody they could feel superior to, even if the only thing they could find was skin color.  I hope he was wrong.

If it means that skin color makes one superior, of course he was wrong!  But maybe we are such lamentable and ignorant critters that we do actually think that way.  Carmichael might have been right about that.


I think I know why human beings think like that:  once, it was necessary for survival that we recognize the people who were not part of our family, or clan, or territory.  A Norwegian friend once, in Norway, looked at the shoes of the person walking ahead of us and said he was not Norwegian.  Once, it might have been wise not to turn one's back on a person whose shoes indicated he was not a part of "us".  But no more.

Now, everyone has strange shoes; especially here, in the Americas.  We all came that long walk.