The sad ignoramuses who fall victim to those audacious enough to act “as if”

From my vantage inside the liberal urban bubble of Chicago it’s tough to find people who are overtly against our new president. Nationwide, 66 percent of Americans polled said they feel optimistic about Obama, and in the golden boy’s adopted hometown that percentage is undoubtedly higher. Within the social circles in which I operate, arguments posed against the politician far more frequently revolve around a sense of disenchantment with American politics in general than any idea that Obama’s opponent would have been a better pick. One group of acquaintances does provide me with reports of such sentiments, however: Friends in my hometown of Rock Springs, Wyo., tell me that anti-Obama attitudes are by far the norm, and that racist rhetoric and actions aimed at him and his supporters are commonplace.

During a visit to Rock Springs last September, I hung out with my good friend Dan, an Obama supporter who builds various apparatuses for an oil field equipment supplier. He said that, to most of his coworkers, the 2008 presidential election was even more of a far-gone conclusion than most in the avidly Republican state, and backed up their staunch stances against Obama with such eloquent arguments as, “Why would I vote for Muslim?” and “Just what we need — a nigger in the White House.” I asked Dan via email the week after the election how his coworkers were taking the results, and he replied, “So if I learned anything new during this election season, it’s that I’m a ‘nigger lover.’ At least that’s what everyone at work calls me. It has actually gotten quite unbearable, and pisses me off considering one of my blood cousins is half black. There’s a lot of people thinking Obama’s election means racism is over. I on the other hand am astonished on how rampant it actually is. Some things will never change.”

Dan rules

I spoke on the phone today with another friend who is a lawyer in Rock Springs, and she told me someone down the street from her put a Confederate flag in their living room window the day after the election, where it will probably remain for the next eight years, or until the people there move.

These things all felt particularly poignant later this afternoon while I was watching Ken Burns’ fantastic documentary about Jack Johnson (the boxer, not the hippie songwriter). One hundred years ago, it was virtually unthinkable that a black man would ever be allowed to hold the title of heavyweight champion of the world. Boxing, along with horse racing and baseball, was one of the most-followed sports in the world at this time. In Jim Crow America and pretty much every other white region of the world, the degree of its popularity roughly coincided with that of the idea that people of African descent were inherently inferior in every way to whites. As Johnson, the son of recently freed slaves, emerged as the premier pugilist of his day by pummeling opponent after opponent regardless of their race, he was denied the opportunity to fight for the heavyweight title by a series of white boxers who said they would never give a black man the chance to obtain it. However, in 1908, then-world-champion Tommy Burns succumbed to public pressure and a lucrative purse and agreed to fight Johnson in Australia. Johnson beat Burns easily, becoming the first black heavyweight champion in history. Two years later, former undefeated heavyweight champion James Jeffries was goaded out of retirement to take the title away from Johnson in order to restore white America’s damaged sense of superiority. “I am going into this fight for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a Negro,” Jeffries said. After fourteen rounds in Reno, Jeffries’ eyes had swollen nearly shut, his broken nose has spilled blood all down his front, and he had been knocked down twice. His corner threw in the towel, acknowledging that Johnson had won. Over the next few days race riots tore most major American cities apart.

Jack Johnson was a champion character aside from his skills in the ring. He held a patent for a wrench he invented to help him work on the fast cars he loved to drive, he played the bass cello, read voraciously, and attracted scores of ladies — many of them white — in an age when white mobs lynched black men with startling frequency for nothing more than a glance at a white female. When a white man asked Johnson, as an expert on the subject, why he thought white ladies were so often attracted to black men, Johnson, with a straight face, replied quite perfectly: “Because we eat cold eel, and think distant thoughts.”

On other more serious topics, Johnson was equally on point. One oft-cited quote attributed to him is this: “White people often point to the writings of Booker T. Washington [who argued that blacks should work within the framework of 'separate but equal' until an opportune moment came when they could demand better] as the best example of a desirable attitude on the part of the colored population. I have never been able to agree with the point of view of Washington, because he has to my mind not been altogether frank in the statement of the problems or courageous in his solution to them … I have found no better way of avoiding race prejudice than to act with people of other races as if prejudice did not exist.” [emphasis added]

I have always been a strong advocate of willing your desires into existence. Many of my successes in life have begun with an element of arrogance — or “audacity,” as some would put it — which I carried with me into tasks I was entirely unqualified to undertake, but that I completed with bravado regardless. Uncountable failures stem directly from underconfidence. By pretending an unappealing situation does not exist, we condition those who constitute it to accept the change we wish to create.

Christopher Hitchens discusses this idea in his book Letters to a Young Contrarian. He writes:

“In the fairly long interval between 1968 and 1989 — in other words in that period where many of the revolutionaries against consumer capitalism metamorphosed into ‘civil society’ human-rights activists — there were considerable interludes of quietism and stasis. And it was in order to survive those years of stalemate and realpolitik that a number of important dissidents evolved a strategy for survival. In a phrase, they decided to live ‘as if.’ [Note Johnson's use of this exact phrasing in his statement about Washington.]

“I’m never certain which author can claim the credit for this mild-sounding but actually deeply subversive and ironic decision. Vaclav Havel, then working as a marginal playwright and poet in a society and state that truly merited the title of Absurd, realised that ‘resistance’ in its original insurgent and militant sense was impossible in the Central Europe of the day. He therefore proposed living ‘as if’ he were a citizen of a free society, ‘as if’ lying and cowardice were not mandatory patriotic duties, ‘as if’ his government had actually signed (which it actually had) the various treaties and agreements that enshrine universal human rights. He called this tactic ‘The Power of the Powerless’ because, even when disagreement can be almost forbidden, a state that insists on actually compelling assent can be relatively easily made to look stupid.

“One could add further examples. In the late Victorian period, Oscar Wilde — master of the pose but not a mere poseur — decided to live ‘as if’ moral hypocrisy were not regnant. In the Deep South in the early 1960s, Rosa Parks decided to act ‘as if’ a hardworking black woman could sit down on a bus at the end of the day’s labor. In Moscow in the 1970s, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn resolved to write ‘as if’ an individual scholar could investigate the history of his own country, and publish his findings. They all, by behaving literally, acted ironically. In each case, as we know now, the authorities were forced first to act crassly and then to look crass, and eventually to fall victim to stern verdicts from posterity.

“All I can recommend, therefore, (apart from the study of these and other good examples) is that you try to cultivate some of this attitude. In an average day, you may well be confronted with some species of bullying or bigotry, or some ill-phrased appeal to the general will, or some petty abuse of authority. If you have a political loyalty, you may be offered a shady reason for agreeing to a lie or a half-truth that serves some short-term purpose. Everybody devises tactics for getting through such moments; try behaving ‘as if’ they need not be tolerated and are not inevitable.”