Or, better: depressing things have to stop happening.
Today's depressing thing: a snippet of a Radiolab episode I heard today while driving. The episode, "Father K," concerns Khader El-Yateem, a Lutheran minister of Palestinian descent and Brooklyn resident for over 23 years. He was running for New York City city council. The episode looks at his campaign through the lens of the shifting demographics of the southern Brooklyn area. Historically white (Irish), it's been diversifying--gentrifying, really--lately, particularly with immigrants from parts of Asia and the Middle East. Unlike other kinds of gentrification, in this situation older white people are feeling the squeeze, seeing local housing they had long considered "theirs" gradually being priced out of their reach.
El-Yateem seems like precisely the kind of unusually patient, passionate, outgoing person who's born to be a politician--or a pastor. I mean both those in the best way. Politicians get a bad rap. Calling someone a politician can sound like a smear. But, just as our complicated society requires bureaucrats, technicians, and other specialists, so too do we require politicians. Our representative-democratic system requires that there be people like El-Yateem willing to sacrifice their privacy and mental well-being for a shot at being a servant of/by/for the people. To be sure, some are attracted to politics for less than altruistic reasons. But El-Yateem struck me as the real deal.
That hardly seems to matter, though, to a lot of the white people in south Brooklyn who'd have to vote for him if he were to find a way onto the council.
To be fair, the episode does a good job taking us on a deep dive into the complex politics of this area and of Arab-Americans in this era particularly. Arab-Americans have of course had a rough time of it in the last few decades in the US. If you come from the wrong country, you're pushed to register. The government has given this community plenty of reasons not to trust their names and information to government entities. That makes it hard to get people registered to vote. There's also a good bit of mutual distrust within the Arab-American community, between Christian and Muslim Arabs, for example, who know and hear about inter-religious violence in places like Egypt. El-Yateem, a Christian minister, is sometimes distrusted by other Arab Christians for his close ties to Muslims.
All of that tension, however, pales in comparison to the good old-fashioned racism readily apparent in some of the anonymous Brooklynites interviewed.
"That one that is running," said one, "He's Egyptian."
"He's Palestinian," journalist Simon Adler corrected gently."
"Okay. Palestinian, still Egyptian," the voice asserted flatly. "That's how I feel. It just completely turns me off." Others echoed this sentiment. These were Democrats. The "how I feel" person continued:
Anybody asks me to vote for Donald Trump. When he was running, I would turn around. I said, hell no, but I feel this is our country. This is America. And I feel American person should be in for office.
Pastor El-Yateem is of course American.
Democrats, El-Yateem notes, are often a little more "under the table" about their anti-Arab, xenophobic, racist sentiments. But Republicans, echoing Trump, are just fine saying the quiet parts loud: immigrants are bad for white people, aka the "real" Americans.
The election in September came and went. El-Yateem lost. There were many reasons. None of the polling stations in the area (where about 10% of the population is Arab-American) had translation in Arabic available. The campaign's volunteer translators were turned away--illegally, it appears--from polling stations. The bigger reason for El-Yateem's loss? White folk. "Just in this moment," says Adler, "there were not enough white folks who would be willing to vote for an Arab candidate. Uh, no matter what."
The episode did its best to explain the white Brooklynites' sentiments in terms other than racism. And those contexts matter. Racism isn't magic; it doesn't just appear out of nowhere. But neither is it merely a side-effect of economic duress and fear. It becomes its own thing, acquires its own malignant agency.
I'm so disappointed in white people. Just when I think I'm really, thoroughly disappointed, I hear a story like this and discover a new sub-level, an underground bunker, for new levels of dismay.
A conservative columnist today has a standard, "isn't critical race theory dumb?" column up today. "Is there any criminal thing whiteness cannot do?" his headline (which he may not have written) asks. He means the question ironically.
I'll ask it unironically and slightly altered: Is there any criminal thing whiteness will not do?
I dunno. I just don't.
JF
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