These manifestations have the capacity to break our nation apart as never since the Civil War, perhaps more permanently, both at home and from abroad. “A Republic, if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin is reputed to have said when emerging from the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Those words—often considered more of an apocryphal tribute to Franklin’s wit than an accurate quote—have suddenly taken on more relevance in today’s America, because moral narcissism has helped create that most reactionary of results . . .
How and why moral narcissism helped bring back racism and the disastrous racial violence across America at the very time it was starting to diminish.
“Nostalgia” seemed an odd term to apply to racism in mid-2015 when a twenty-one-year-old white devotee of apartheid regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia had just walked into an historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and gunned down nine innocent people, including the pastor of that church, who was also a state senator. When I first heard the dreadful news, I thought I should revise the title of this chapter and perhaps its slant. Like many, I was hugely depressed by the event. And indeed, I knew the terrain of the killings personally, having stayed at the Courtyard Marriott across from that church when covering the presidential election of 2012 for PJ Media. It had been the site of Denmark Vesey’s ill-fated slave rebellion in 1822 when Vesey and thirty-three others were executed before their revolt could even get started. Hallowed ground.
But on reflection I obviously didn’t change my title or what I had already written, emotional as those days in June 2015 were. Evil or criminally insane individuals (depending on your world view) like the homicidal Dylann Storm Roof have existed throughout history and have appeared in every country and among every racial and ethnic group. Until we are genetically engineered, and even possibly after that, they will continue to exist, unfortunately. To consider such a person—Roof was apparently also an abuser of the pharmaceutical Suboxone that has been linked to spontaneous outbursts of violence—as an exemplar of anything except the random tragedy of human life is finally pointless.
Barack Obama, in his typical morally narcissistic style, declared the morning after the event that these mass murders do not occur nearly as frequently in other advanced countries—this only months after the even more extensive massacres in France at the offices of Charlie Hebdo and the Hypercacher Jewish supermarket (not to mention the recent mass murder in Norway that left sixty-nine dead.) Perhaps the president had forgotten “Je Suis Charlie” because, unlike so many other world leaders, he had decided not to attend the memorial in Paris. Neither did the president mention the steep decline in the murder rate in America in recent decades, only interrupted by an upturn from recent events in Ferguson and Baltimore. Instead, he took the opportunity to propagandize for another of his favorite causes—gun control. He ignored the data, we can assume he was aware of it, that shows a correlation between the growing number of American citizens owning guns and that decline in the murder rate. Candidate Hillary Clinton reacted to the Charleston murders in substantially the same way.
The president and his putative successor both preferred to proselytize in the face of this horrific event, politicizing it, so I am going to do what I originally planned, leave my writings as they were and begin as I did in the halcyon days of 2005. I think we have more to learn from that than from the actions of a psychotic. Yes, nostalgia for racism is involved. It’s possibly the most destructive form of moral narcissism extant.
During an interview that year of 2005 with Mike Wallace for CBS television’s 60 Minutes, the Academy Award-winning actor Morgan Freeman said something that today would seem remarkable about how to end racism—“stop talking about it.” The conversation evolved this way:
WALLACE: Black History Month, you find . . .
FREEMAN: Ridiculous.
WALLACE: Why?
FREEMAN: You’re going to relegate my history to a month?
WALLACE: Come on.
FREEMAN: What do you do with yours? Which month is White History Month? Come on, tell me.
WALLACE: I’m Jewish.
FREEMAN: OK. Which month is Jewish History Month?
WALLACE: There isn’t one.
FREEMAN: Why not? Do you want one?
WALLACE: No, no.
FREEMAN: I don’t either. I don’t want a Black History Month. Black history is American history.
WALLACE: How are we going to get rid of racism until . . . ?
FREEMAN: Stop talking about it. I’m going to stop calling you a white man. And I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man. I know you as Mike Wallace. You know me as Morgan Freeman. You’re not going to say, “I know this white guy named Mike Wallace.” Hear what I’m saying?
I hear what Morgan was saying. I hear it loud and clear and, as an old sixties civil rights worker, it brings tears to my eyes, because, the way things are going now, that simple wisdom from one of America’s finest actors makes 2005 seem ages ago, some distant century or, at least, BBO—Before Barack Obama. Or, more exactly, before Obama, Eric Holder, the New Black Panthers, and the Philadelphia polling place, Henry Louis Gates, and the Cambridge police (“Beer Summit” over nothing), Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman (“If I had a son he would look like Travyon”), Michael Brown and the Ferguson police, Eric Garner and the Staten Island police, Bill de Blasio and the NYPD, “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot,” “Black Lives Matter,” Al Sharpton with the president of the United States, Al Sharpton with the mayor of the City of New York, Al Sharpton with the president of Sony Pictures, Al Sharpton everywhere as if the race-baiting ideologue were the arbiter of American social behavior of almost any sort, our contemporary Emily Post. (He was even praised by the mayor of Bridgeport for “fighting the good fight on climate change.”1) And finally, “What do you want? Dead cops. When do we want them? Now.”
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