Health Care--Tribal Troubles?

A few days ago I watching one of the news channels (I honestly don’t recollect which) when the question came up as to whether or not race was an issue in the national protest against Obama’s health care policies. “Definitely,” said one of the pundits (a black woman).
I hoped not. I’m a product of prewar thinking, and I plead guilty to my share of biases. But I am also a pragmatist. If I’m seriously hurt, I don’t care if the practitioner is pink, green or black—so long as he manages to save my life and limbs.
Save me money, improve my health care—and you can be any color you want. I may not like you; I may not prefer your company, but I’ll pay for your services or vote for you. As far as I’m concerned, that should end any racial issue in health care.
Maybe not. The other day I was listening to an acquaintance talk about several political issues. He is not in the least happy with the present administration. In the midst of his political commentary, he segued into a story about shoeing his horse the week before.
He shows horses all over the country. When he went to the blacksmith, there was a new apprentice—a chap from Texas. They talked politics there, too. The young Texan suddenly spoke up. “We’ve played cowboys and Indians; we ain’t played cowboys and N----rs yet.”
I guess the lady on TV had a point. It’s hard to overcome centuries of tradition and attitude. Canada is an example—two centuries of French resentment of English contempt has not gone away, and nobody can say it ever will.
The Walloons and Flemish of Belgium may never learn to love each other. The tribes of Nigeria haven’t learned to really accept one another. Northern (Lombard/German) Italians still despise Neapolitans and Sicilians. Ireland kept the beacons on to guide German bombers to London. The Basques and Castilians of Spain have no love lost. And so it goes.
I could write several more pages on European, Asian, African, Australian and Latin American “tribes” who go on expressing hostility one to another, sometimes with real bullets. So I suppose it should come as no surprise that electing Obama was a bit like putting a Catholic in charge of North Ireland or trying to make an Ainu prime minister of Japan.
The sub-Saharan black man in “Christian” and “Muslim” societies is up against over 1500 years of bad tradition. Ever since the Eighth or Ninth Century when Arabs began the African slave trade down past the horn of Africa, he has been seen as nothing but a source of slave labor.
Then, in the 1400s, Portuguese traders bought into the slave trade around along the Atlantic coast and then eventually past the Cape along the East African coast. Then, of course, the Dutch supplanted the Portuguese, taking over their slave trading posts. (My wife’s family had what must have been slave traders living in East Africa as early as the 1630s, part Swedish, part Dutch.)
As slavery became unfashionable in European Christian societies (it continues as an accepted practice in Muslim societies today), American slave owners were forced to come up with justifications for keeping black people in slavery.
This they did with pseudo-science and pseudo-theology that “proved” the black man was racially inferior and divinely cursed. For a hundred years, Americans were inculcated with the belief that black Africans were inherently lesser beings than white folk.
It’s hard to outgrow attitudes like that. Attitudes flowing in either direction. There was contempt (and fear) on the part of whites and resentment and self-hatred, leading to deeper resentment and covert hatred on the part of blacks.
Yes, some significant things happened in the 1940s through the 1960s that BEGAN to change this here in America. (It may take historians a while to appreciate what a “favor” the Nazis did for American blacks. As our troops rolled into the German death camps, we had a chance to see the logical outcome of our own racial attitudes—in full page spreads in “Life Magazine”.
We were embarrassed. Rightly so. American history text books were revised—check out one from the 1920s; compare it to the ones your kids study now, or even by 1960. I would contend that the Civil Rights movement could not have occurred without the events of 1945.)
Then, about 1949 or 1950, anonymous persons invented machinery that could pick cotton—thus making it no longer economically necessary to keep blacks on plantations. At the same time, television came into wide use. We could watch Bull Connor, his dogs and whips, over dinner.
With television came a courageous and articulate man, Martin Luther King, Jr., who formed a movement that could not be fought with prison cells and guns. The Supreme Court and Congress altered the laws that regulated black lives.
Yes, the laws are changed. Yes, the twisted science is no longer respectable. But attitudes formed over centuries—flowing both ways—are not so quickly altered.
I have had the sometimes very disconcerting experience of seeing deep into the souls of few (in every case, educated and professional) black Americans—back in the days when I was active in civil rights. It shocked me, occasionally frightened me, to realize how deeply my black “friends” hated ALL white people—a hatred born of an all too often justified distrust of smiling white faces.
One unforgettable instance: sitting at the table of my attractive, talented hostess—whom we had known and been friendly with for a long time—when she was apprised of a situation that had just happened to one of her close friends.
Watching her lovely face contort in rage as she screamed about wanting to set up a machine gun in Times Square and “kill all white people”. We thanked her for the excellent dinner as soon as things calmed a bit and left. We did not return. She did not ask us to.
I could recite several other instances. But that one really stands out.
That is my one big fear of Obama. He was raised a black man in America; he is married to a black woman also raised in American. How could he POSSIBLY not hate whites? Is he really that much better a man than the Texan blacksmith apprentice?
Better educated. Harvard Law trumps blacksmithing, no doubt. But the South Side of Chicago breeds its attitudes just as quickly as do the white parts of Texas.
If I were black, I wouldn’t trust the blacksmith—or me. I’m white. Can I trust a black man not to hate me?