Letter Betrays Arrogance and Ignorance

As usual, I'm about a week late catching up with The Harvard Crimson, in this case with your report last week on posters around campus calling for a "White Unity" mobilization. And so I also just caught up with a letter-to-editors relating to these posters.

A letter that exhibited a kind of white racist arrogance and ignorance that I thought had dissipated around Harvard some years ago.

Frank Pacheco '99 informs us that he found no "specifically offensive features of this alleged [sic] poster." He even informs us of his putative even-handedness about activism, for, he has "few sympathies for 'militant activists,' white or otherwise."

For in his eyes, "there is nothing inherently outrageous in the concept of 'white unity' as your head-line seems to imply." Facing evil, Pacheco is a man-of-the-middle.

Nothing inherently outrageous about white supremacy? Pacheco seems to reach this conclusion by simple-mindedly equating "white unity" patterns with usual ethnic group reinforcing patterns among different American cultural groups, such as Irish, Italians, Jews, Chinese, Blacks, Hispanics, etc.

Now I would have thought that an undergraduate at Harvard College had learned by sophomore or junior year the difference between exclusivist and xenophobic uses of cultural group patterns, on the one hand, and pragmatic solidarity uses of cultural group patterns, on the other hand.

The latter is what goes on typically among American cultural or ethnic groups-among the Irish on St. Patrick's Day and related events, among Chinese Americans in Chinese New Year, etc. Even non-natal ethnic persons can participate in these pragmatic solidarity, as I have done in Irish and Italian solidarity events, for they are civic solidarity in character, not sacred solidarity.

In other words, pragmatic solidarity patterns do not compel their non-natal members to retreat from the broader culture-the manufactured culture-of the American national society. Rather, pragmatic solidarity patterns permit and encourage natal-ethnic members to be both American-and-Irish, American-and-Jewish, etc.

In short, there was a scary layer of cultural ignorance underlying Pacheco's letter. The kind of cultural ignorance about his own American society that leads him to talk in almost jocular terms about the white supremacist and anti-Semitic prone World Church of the Creator-a core Christian identity group-as if it were just some silly old bunch or "group of horrible people." -Martin Kilson, Frank G. Thomson Professor of Government