To the editor
If Mr. Dartford’s goal in his letter to the editor titled “My ‘racist’ upbringing” was to get readers to understand why his “postings don’t match the prevailing opinions,” he has certainly succeeded with me. I understand why a man whose introduction to this world was in a British colony, where his father made a living by serving a regime whose only justification was white supremacy, and whose only contact with persons of African background growing up was through one housemaid in Brooklyn and another in Guyana (then a British colony) who was so important to him she goes by “black as the ace of spades.’’ I could understand why such a man would hold views contrary to prevailing opinions — such as George Floyd was responsible for his own death and BLM is a terrorist group. If I were in Mr. Dartford’s shoes, I, too, might want you to have some sympathy for me.
This is, of course, not to say that everyone who has experienced life like Mr. Dartford would think and act like him; I know enough people of his era and background that would find his views insensitive and unsophisticated at best. Those are the ones who have done the most difficult of works, which is being better than the society that raised them. Unfortunately, too many others — and Mr. Dartford strikes me as one — have not only failed to rise above their society, they are always eager to defend that society by projecting their intolerance onto anyone intolerant of their meanness.
The language of bigotry goes in and out of fashion like popular music these days. What is in fashion today is to brand bigotry as political incorrectness or conservatism. Thus, political incorrectness and conservative viewpoints have become a cover for out-in-the-open meanness. Mr. Dartford began his letter by saying that “because my postings don’t match the prevailing opinions in Massachusetts, I am branded ‘Racist.’ This does not really bother me because I know that this epithet is an automatic accusation applied to any conservative thinker.’’ He is unwittingly engaging in an act of projection of the simplest kind: Because he cannot separate conservative ideas from racist ideas, he thinks the rest of us can’t either.
Who are the other conservative thinkers of which Mr. Dartford speaks of? Leaders like Colin Powell and John Kasich? No one has accused those leaders of racism, not the least because they have proven themselves capable of differentiating between conservative ideas and racist ideas. And if some of us are skeptical of proud conservatives today, it is because they have stood by and watched as their brand has become the brand of choice for the most openly bigoted among us.
Finally, Mr. Dartford seems to employ that classic defense that one can’t be racist as long as one has had personal contact with people of color. Is there ever any truth to that argument? Perhaps. As a racist, one certainly isn’t eager to share the same space with a person he or she is racist against. But that alone does not make one a non-racist anymore than it makes a man non-sexist for having a wife. If he were so sexist, why would he share the same bed with a woman of all species? Perhaps because like a Black surgeon attending to a racist patient, she has other qualities that serve his interest. It is the quality of one’s relationship with others that count, not the mere fact of it.
Mr. Dartford’s letter left lots of images in my head: of Malay, Chinese, Indian, and Anglo kids playing in the sand in Malaya; an African American housemaid in Brooklyn shortly after the Second World War, giving her all in service of Mr. Dartford’s family at the expense of her own; and the “black as the ace of spades” caregiver in British Guyana who changed and fed Mr. Dartford during his first year of life, living as a colonial property in the land of her birth. And given the circumstances, I am sure it was important for both women to have had those jobs. Perhaps they were even happy with them, or perhaps they were just making the best of an outcome that God and race had decided for them.
Mohammed Adawulai
Great Barrington
