Back In African-American

It was late in December, the sky turned to snow . . . and blacks in the United States became African-Americans.

It was thirty years ago this month, just before the holidays, that that the Reverend Jesse Jackson, having taken a giant step for black Americans as a serious presidential candidate in 1988 and having gotten blacks to register in record numbers in advance of the general presidential election between Republican George Bush and Democrat Michael Dukakis, declared that, henceforth, blacks in the U.S. should be called African-Americans.   

''To be called African-Americans has cultural integrity. It puts us in our proper historical context," Jackson explained. "Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some land base, some historical cultural base. African-Americans have hit that level of cultural maturity."

Ironically, Jackson's statement coincided with the beginning of the end of white ethnic identity in America.  Dukakis was the last presidential nominee of either party to revel in his white ethnicity - his Greekness - and Mario Cuomo, the Democrats' dream presidential candidate, was very much an Italian-American in every sense of term.  But think about it, how many white ethnic public figures are identified by their "historical cultural base" anymore?  No one says that Andrew Cuomo, Mario's son, could be the first Italian-American President.  No one points out that Mike Pompeo is our first Secretary of State of Italian descent (much to the relief of those of us who are all or part Italian).  Nancy Pelosi is the first female Speaker of the House, but who ever referred to her as the first Italian-American Speaker of the House?  And how is it that her fellow Baltimorean Martin O'Malley exudes Irishness and yet is called one of the whitest Democrats ever to run for President?

Personally, I think Americans should celebrate any heritage you want, but the idea that Caucasians of various ethnic backgrounds should all be called whites and that blacks should be called African-Americans suggests, even if the Reverend Jackson didn't intend to suggest so, that blacks consider their continental origin more important than their nationality.  This is an example of "identity politics" that liberals exalt as a strike against "white patriarchy," though if I, as a white male, am part of a secret group that rules America, well, I'm never invited to the meetings.  This also suggests that most white people have no real cultural base to celebrate, and those who celebrate their European cultural bases only prove how white - how "Eurocentric" - they are.  But none of that is why I avoid using the term "African-American."  I avoid it because it takes too damn long to say and write!  It's an example of what Paul Fussell called the inflation of simple, direct language.  He noted that the trend to go from "black" to "African-American" was based on the idea that a hyphenated, seventeen-letter, seven-syllable-word sounded much more grand than a monosyllabic five-word one.  Also, there's more semantic parity by saying "white" and "black" - five letters and one syllable each.  I had to laugh when some white ultraconservatives started calling themselves "European-Americans" as a counterpoint to "African-Americans" - a stupid idea, not just because "European-American" sounds just as pretentious as "African-American" if not more so, but because the people who call themselves that don't want to be associated with European ideas such as gun control, support for the arts, or universal health care.  And then Pat Buchanan once referred to whites as "Euro-Americans."  What are we, sport sedans?

To be fair, the word "black" has long been associated with connotations that Americans of African descent want nothing to do with - the Black Plague, a black future, Black Tuesday (the stock market crash of 1929), black dress for funerals - something Fussell later admitted to.  But it's also a positive word, as in "black tie" (classy), "black gold" (striking oil), and "in the black" (a profit), and when the word was first used to refer to the people once called Negroes, the terms "Black is beautiful" and "Black Power" had a really cool, strong vibe to it.  "White" is supposed to be all about positive connotations. such as purity, but I would argue that "white" has become a pejorative.  Ironically, we Caucasians are responsible for that, having rendered the word toxic by giving the world a slew of embarrassments from Christopher Columbus to George Custer, and from Lawrence Welk to Donald Trump.  By the way, why can't you use the term "Negro," but you can use the term "Caucasian," even though both are legitimate anthropological terms?

Conclusion?  If you want to use the term "African-American," knock yourself out.  But I don't feel obliged to use it just because Jesse Jackson would like me to.  I also have a thing against capitalizing racial terms, such as "White" or "Black" . . . but that's another issue.

As for the 1988 election, Dukakis lost, and voter turnout was at its lowest point in over sixty years.

Blumenthralled

Connecticut Democrats endorsed state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal to run for the Senate seat currently occupied by Chris Dodd despite Blumenthal's misstatements about his military service during the Vietnam War and despite Chris Matthews's repeated attacks on Blumenthal for saying he had served "in" Vietnam rather than "during" Vietnam. It was done the old fashioned way, at a state party convention.

Blumenthal may have the ability to get through this crisis unscathed. Saying that you served in Vietnam when you meant during Vietnam seems like a plausible mistake to make and an easy one to let go unnoticed because it involves a deviation of one word. A reservist who said he served in Vietnam but in fact remained stateside may not necessarily be referring to the country or the war, but rather the times. For many, the word Vietnam means an era. It's a word that conjures up a time in American history when this country's involvement in that war tore the country apart at home and pitted one American against another over the role of the United States abroad. The fractures that resulted never really healed.

If you served in the military in the late sixties and early seventies - a time when the war in Southeast Asia made an association with the military an undesirable one - you may not have served in the place called Vietnam, but you served in the state of mind called Vietnam. And since Blumenthal used the phrases "during Vietnam" and "in Vietnam" more or less interchangeably, and since he referred to Vietnam and the Vietnam era intermittently, I think it can be said that Blumenthal never meant to mislead anyone and got himself in trouble for reasons that boiled down to semantics.

(You might chalk up my observations to partisanship, but in fact I gave George Walker Bush a pass when he referred to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan allowing terrorists in its harbors, though Afghanistan is a landlocked country. Many people agreed with me that Bush was speaking metaphorically.)

Despite Blumenthal's record of service to veterans as a state public official and an impeccable record as Connecticut's top law enforcement officer, none of what I just said is going to stop the Republicans or either of their U.S. Senate hopefuls from using his own words against him. Linda McMahon had already planned to do so before the New York Times reported this story; indeed, her campaign helped the paper with its research. Rob Simmons, who did serve in Vietnam - the place - will make it an issue if he is the Republican nominee. Simmons is favored to win the nomination at the Republican state convention but if McMahon gets 15 percent of the delegates at the convention, that would force a primary between the two, setting up a primary campaign that noted wrestling impresario McMahon could outspend Simmons in and possibly end up winning. Then, imagine what she could do to Blumenthal.

I endorse Rob Simmons for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination in Connecticut. It would be a travesty if Linda McMahon were to be the next senator from that state, especially given the fact that she became president of her wrestling league in the early nineties as a legal maneuver when her husband, wrestling mogul Vince McMahon, was implicated in a steroid scandal. That she is proud of her tenure as the president of an institution that has had such a toxic influence on our culture - she's not the affable personality Jesse Ventura is, either - is enough to cause concern.

And before Chris Matthews starts acting high and mighty, do I have to mention his own legendary gaffes?