White moderates

White men are moving from having power to sharing power.

It is a new status quo. It feels like "disorder."

   "I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice."

                              Martin Luther King, from a Birmingham jail, 1963

This holiday is a day to reflect on two changes. One is the black civil rights changes of 1950s and 1960s when the country slowly and imperfectly ended legal segregation and Jim Crow laws. Black people were legally equal to whites. Then, in the 1970s a second wave: "women's liberation" and the notion of men and women as legal equals. 

White men got displaced as the default, legal possessors of economic, political, and social power. Black people could eat in the same restaurants, sleep in the same hotels, be seen on TV with middle class jobs. A woman was no longer referred to as a "female doctor" or a "female lawyer." She was a doctor or a lawyer. 

Boston, 1976. School busing protests.

Legal change moved faster than changes in the hearts and minds of many Americans, especially people who were culturally conservative and invested in the old ways.

I watched white ethnic Boston--the epicenter of abolitionist politics a century prior--erupt in fury that white ethnic neighborhood high schools might be integrated with black children. They fought for "neighborhood schools," which meant keeping black kids out. Blacks and whites mixed while shopping at Jordon Marsh department store, but not in housing. There were black neighborhoods and white ones. Therefore white schools and black schools.

Just because a white man may have a wife, or daughters, or mother, does not make him immune to feelings of displacement. What was formerly a given is now something to be achieved. 

Black voices and female voices assert the simple truth that the old system was unfair and unconstitutional. It was. Men had unfair advantages and they are losing those advantages. That makes it just, but it doesn't make it pleasant for the men feeling displaced.

Republicans and Trump have a  message. Yes, they want equality, of course, but they want order to go along with it. Equality and order--who can disagree?

Democrats have a harder, messier message. Yes, they want equality, of course, but this means ratifying and incorporating in daily life the cultural changes that equality is bringing. It means female bosses. It means black neighbors. It changes the default notion of society. Men experience this as loss. As displacement. An objective way to look at it is that white men are experiencing others stepping into line alongside them, taking their rightful place, but for white men themselves, it is experienced as some people stepping into line in front of them.

This feels like disorder to them.  Democrats are in the position of saying that what may feel like disorder is actually justice and order. But feelings are always true to the person who feels them. 

The country is experiencing change and change feels like disorder because change is disorder.