The “Semi-White” Pat Buchanan and his “Teacher in Chief”

Pat Buchanan may be the only bigot that I find difficult to hate, but he suffers under the serious delusion that Irish Catholics, like himself, were ever really considered “white,” until the election of John F. Kennedy as President in 1960.

With few exceptions, the Founding Fathers he extols as the embodiment of “whiteness” and all-American “whites-only” achievement, were also Anglo-Saxon [ie. English], and Protestant, the real definition of “whiteness” in matters of power until the ascent of one of my red-neck forebears [on my mother’s side], Andrew Jackson, to the Presidency.

From Jackson’s time to the present, Scots-Irish Protestants, like later Catholic Irish and Germans, found refuge in the swindle of “aristocracy of the skin.” Protestant Germans who thought they might qualify, despite their penchant for beer and wine, found out in 1917 that they not only were not “white,” but were not even considered good Americans, even though overwhelmingly willing to provide a quarter of all U.S. combat troops in both World Wars.

Scandinavians, except in places like Wisconsin and Minnesota, were not numerous enough to matter; they “talked funny,” and they were the wrong kind of Protestant—Lutheran, instead of Episcopalian, or, in a pinch, Presbyterian.

By the standard that really has mattered in the circles of American power, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant [WASP] standard, well over 90% of North Dakotans, are, of course, not really “white.”

Meanwhile, WASP money and power brokers from Jackson’s banking antagonist, Nicholas Biddle, down to Dubya held on to their ever-diminishing demographic dominance by setting the vastly more numerous non-WASPs against each other, based on race, creed, nationality… and class.

Racism [Aristocracy-of-the-Skin] has worked so well, that current Republican Party leadership is reluctant to discard their fear and loathing strategy, despite the fact that the current Commander-in-Chief, whose mother’s WASP credentials are, historically at least, far better than Pat Buchanan’s, is also a “Teacher-in-Chief.”

When Barack Obama, the son of a white mother and a black father, invited Professor Gates and Officer Crowley down to the White House for a very German custom of a glass of beer, he was practicing the ultimate in political peace making originating in WASP England, and passed down to the Irish and Scots-Irish immigrants to America through centuries of conflict and observation.

President Obama learned his considerable skills in the friendly confines of Chicago, while combatting a political machine originated by a Czech Bohemian, Anton Cermak; perfected by two Irishmen, Kelly and Nash; a Jew, Jake Arvey; and the two Daley’s, significantly interrupted by an African-American, Harold Washington. In case anybody is wondering why Obama is so good at political jiu-jitsu, you might try examining his political heritage, rather than his ethnic one.

The racial grievances of Professor Gates have been well documented by the media over the years. The class grievances of Officer Crowley, have not. There is no other plausible explanation why he would lose his professional cool with a perfectly harmless citizen in the guy’s own home, than that Officer Crowley was as sick of being treated like a low class “honky,” as Professor Gates was of being treated like a “nigger.”

While teaching in Chicago, I had a lot of cops for students. We got along well because I was a realist about the hidden injuries of class, as well as the visible ones of race and religion. Over a beer, one of them said, “Charlie, teachers and nurses are the only [professionals] ones I cut any slack for—because you take as much shit as we do.”

One of the hallmarks of Harold Washington’s first administration in 1983 was that he hired a black Police Chief, who was notorious among black militants, like Jesse Jackson, for talking to white cops. It is worth remembering that President Obama’s “Audacity of Hope,” stems from the Harold Washington phenomenon in Chicago, 1983-1987.

In case Lynn Sweet, the Chicago-based White House Reporter who broached the Gates-Crowley flap in the first place, is baffled by Obama’s statesmanlike recovery, she may wish to look to the history of her own city, instead of making the same myopic assumptions of “whiteness” as Pat Buchanan.

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