"What do you mean 'we', White Man?"

The charming phrase on the Subject line of this little meditation is from OffHisMeds' childhood, bestowed by my father and often used by him, since he had a singular talent for expressing cynicism in a humorous manner.  To appreciate the phrase - and not incidentally my Old Man and the manner in which he used it - a little explanation is in order: The phrase "What do you mean 'we', White Man?" refers to some theoretical Minority - be he black, brown or red - that confronts a White Man who is attempting to enlist him in some onerous task, generally one that involves brute labor of a particularly unsavory nature, but frequently something that might also threaten, say, the loss of a limb.  The White Man in this instance will have attempted to enlist said Minority in the task by imposing on a collegiality that he presumes exists between them. 

Feel free to replace the term "Minority" with “Native American", "African American" or the Minority of your choice if you are one of those White People endlessly concerned about the feelings of the lesser souls whose lot you are determined to improve.  This Riff is really about you.

Here’s an example of the use of the phrase: In the book "Tom Sawyer", Tom as a boy is being punished by his Aunt Polly for some misdeed, his punishment being to whitewash a picket fence.  Unwilling to do the task himself, he tries to enlist a young black boy named Jim to help him.  I won't even try to do justice to the exchange, except to say that Tom uses every trick in the book to convince Jim that not only is it his duty to help paint the fence, but that he will enjoy it as well.  Jim finally agrees, but the whole thing is undone by Tom's Aunt Polly, who tans both their hides - however briefly - with Jim allowed to get about his business and Tom relegated yet again to his solitary and lonely task.

In the modern era, Jim’s skepticism as to Tom's motives might well have provoked him to ask: "What do you mean 'we', White Man?"   And there you have the context for the use of the phrase.  The simpatico presupposed by the White Man to exist between him and the Minority that justified the imposition is of course, a myth; it existed only in the mind of the White Man, who assumes not only that his judgment is superior to the Black Man that he was soliciting, but that the Black Man would concede that a White Man's judgment was in fact superior to his own, based solely on his whiteness.

As to why it was that my Dad and his contemporaries – the bulk of them White - came to adopt the phrase I can only speculate.  What I remember with certainty, though, is that I figured out the meaning of the expression strictly from his usage: that an imposition is an imposition regardless of how you attempt to rationalize it.  And since the Old Man suffered foolishness not very well at all, he usually weighed such issues for his customary 1.5 milliseconds before offering a reply.  The phrase was generally reserved for friends or people he otherwise had some regard for, either to provide them the opportunity to retract the request for whatever favor or labor it was that had been solicited, or because he wished to jack with them a little.  If you were not a friend or somebody to whom he otherwise felt obliged, the response you got was much more direct.  The use of the phrase was always good-natured, though, and used more in fun than reproach.

It also had more than a touch of self-deprecation, not just of himself, but of White people in general; more about that later.

There are scores of expressions I inherited from the Old Man that are unique to the Midwest that I use down here in Texas that are somewhat controversial; not necessarily because of the expressions themselves, but their unfamiliarity amongst my friends and acquaintances; and of those expressions that are at least vaguely familiar to them, there might still be uncertainty as to the meaning if the context is not clear.  To me, that is one of the joys of conversation with folks who grew up in a different culture: watching the expressions on their faces when I use an unfamiliar term, to see if they've decoded the meaning and if so, how quickly.  The vast majority of the time, the meaning is intuited promptly, with scarcely a break in conversation.  On occasion, I'll be asked to explain the remark. 

And I find myself on the other side of the equation as well.  There are folks all over this great land of ours that make next to no sense to me.  Take the citizens of Philadelphia, for example.  But that doesn't stop me from talking to them, making the effort to speak their language, and understanding their turns of phrase.

That brings me to the real point of this story: Mostly due to the influence of Ronald Reagan, in the mid-90s there was a "Republican Revolution" that allowed Repubs to capture a majority in both houses of Congress for the first time since 1952, along with a solid majority of governorships and a massive pickup in state legislatures.  This happened because Democrats had used their near-unbroken dominance of American politics since the days of FDR to indulge any and every wasteful and destructive scheme to “fix” what was wrong with America.  By 1994 the result was electoral disaster for Democrats. 

As a result, the term "Liberal" lost most of its virtue with the American people, even among bread-and-butter Democrats.  And well it should have.  By 1994, one could justifiably hold the Democrat Party responsible for the sorry state of our Black brothers and sisters, mired as they are in generational poverty, enslaved to the dole and for the very large part, devoid of households with a father.  That of course was not near the limit of the damage that Democrats did, or continue to do.  The blame for our despicable public education system can be laid at their door entirely, along with the bulk of the blame for the many defects in health care, civil liberties, public infrastructure and the deterioration of our big cities.

This all came to a head in 1994.  All across America, Democrats were in retreat, and the term "Liberal" - if used at all - was used in a pejorative sense.  Their comeback seemed doubtful, and right-thinking folks were hopeful that the tremendous damage they had done could be undone.  It hardly bears recounting what came next, except to say that Republicans squandered the opportunity to reform the system.  Their failure was partly due to the fact that they started acting like Democrats themselves, but mostly the failure was due to messaging: the simple inability to trump Democrat talking points with reason.

Repubs vastly underestimated how firmly Democrats were entrenched in the bureaucracy, academia and the media, and within a decade the Republican Revolution was over.  And of the many changes that occurred that allowed Democrats to retake the moral high ground, none was more profound than the rhetoric they employed to justify their positions.

Specifically, the default Democrat strategy became institutionalized demagoguery: to simply accuse folks who disagreed with them on any issue of racism or bigotry.

This wholesale decline into demagoguery was embraced not just by Democrat politicians, but rank and file Democrats as well.  For close to twenty years, Democrat politicians continuously play the race and bigotry card to legitimize their positions and denigrate their opposition.  There is no opposition to their goals that is not tainted by accusations of low character.  And it has become so a part of the Democrat vernacular that - in describing people who do not share their views - my Democrat friends toss the terms "bigot" and "racist" around as freely as just about any word in their vocabulary.  And they use such terms not just to dismiss a truly amazing and generally benevolent phenomenon like the Tea Party; they use variants to rebuke their Republican friends and acquaintances.  Granted, they might not outright call me a Racist for disagreeing with them on, say, Illegal Immigrants, but they will say that my views are "offensive", the implication being that any differing opinion on matters involving race or creed are morally wrong, and thus are not to be taken seriously.

It's not hard to see why things have developed the way they have: when your national government and the vast majority of your educators and media types are all reading off the Democrat script, it takes a serious effort on the part of any Democrat to be skeptical of what they're being told, particularly since they've been conditioned to feel virtuous only if they buy off on the entirety of the Liberal agenda.

I used to be surprised by the lack of self-consciousness on the part of my liberal friends when they spoke in this manner, and the relative freedom with which they use these terms in dealing with me or other of our friends who held conservative views.  It ceases to be a surprise, though, when you consider that most Democrats cut their teeth on a smorgasbord of “isms” - Racism, Sexism, Homophobism, Ageism – along with the all-purpose accusation of Bigotry.  It was unavoidable that they should view the world through a prism of righteousness vs. unrighteousness, once they had a monopoly on the words that defined righteousness.

Which brings us back to the expression: "What do you mean 'we', White Man?"  Starting probably in the 1950s and through to his death, my Dad used the expression freely and unselfconsciously.  It would not in a million years have occurred to him that it had a racist overtone, nor would anybody of his era have thought so either, much less chastised him for it.  Democrats of today, however, would have none of it.  Racism would be imputed for the simple reason that he bothered to notice that Blacks and Whites are different to begin with, much less that he had used some aspect of Black folks’ centuries-long subservience to Whitey to make a rhetorical point.  Instead of being applauded for so subtlely and humorously using a phrase which acknowledged the burden of the Black man, the Brown man or the Red man - something that might cause a less enlightened soul to look inward - my Old Man would be the one cast as the brute, flogged by the million limp noodles with which Liberals enforce political correctness.  But hey, a million of anything, however limp, will certainly do the job.

That brings me to a classic example of the phenomenon that I encountered today: I was going to save all the specific cases I’ve encountered for another Riff, but this was too precious to pass up.  A liberal Facebook Friend posted the following.  It requires no explanation:

  

Simply put: Democrats have lost the argument, and this is all that is left to them.