The Teflon Theory of American History says that anything that took place over 30 years ago is Ancient History. It has Absolutely No Effect on the present. Or not much. Unless it was something good like the light bulb or the Declaration of Independence. Therefore those who make a big deal of the bad stuff in the past, like slavery, are Living in the Past and need to Get Over It.
For example:
Jim Crow laws were overturned by the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Therefore according to Teflon Theory the Jim Crow period is now Ancient History. It has Absolutely No Effect on how White Americans alive today think and act. None whatsoever. Or not much. So racism is pretty much dead.
Instead of Jim Crow’s effect slowly weakening over time like you would expect, Teflon Theory would have you suppose that it just disappeared like magic one afternoon sometime in the late 1960s. Even though many White Americans alive now were alive back in Jim Crow times. Even though many others were brought up and shaped by those who were alive back then: parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, writers, film directors, television producers, news editors and so on.
Few sit on a mountain top to come up with their beliefs all on their own. Instead most people pretty much go along with what everyone else already believes with maybe a few twists here and there. Such beliefs come from the past.
So then why is Teflon Theory believed?
- Because of how American history is taught:
- American history is taught as dates and people and facts that have little to do with each other. Sometimes the Effects of the the Civil War or Industrialization are studied, for example, but not so for the evil stuff – like how slavery and genocide led to present-day White American wealth, power and racism.
- American history as taught rarely comes up to the present day. History becomes something in the past, in a book, not something we live in right now.
- Because of the needs of White American self-image:
- White Americans want to think they are Basically Good and their society is Basically Just. Without Teflon Theory that becomes laughable since it flies in the face of history, common sense and human nature.
- White Americans avoid honestly facing up to their past because deep down they know it is ugly. Teflon Theory acts as a guard against having to take it seriously.
- Because middle-class whites are protected from the ugly present:
- Those who live in Apple-pie America rarely see first-hand the injustice that their comfortable lives are built on. And what injustice they do see on occasion, like black ghettos or wars on television fought overseas in their name, they have already learned to not see as injustice. But being protected from the ugly present makes the ugly past seem like another world, like it truly is ancient history with no bearing on the present.
See also:
Abagond 
1964, to be exact. The Civil Rights Act outlawed racism, and so therefore it did not exist from then onwards.
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Nice breakdown! I’d even suggest this “Teflon theory” can apply to events no older than 10 years, especially when considering the gnat-attention spans some folks have.
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What do you mean by the “ugly present”? I agree that there are alot of injustices in the present world, but I don’t believe that the “man” is responsible for all of those injustices.
Are non-Whites not also responsible for some of the injustices that exist today? Or are we blameless victims 100% of the time?
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Thanks for expanding on this, Abagond! I love how it ties right back into the wall of the white self!
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So you and Ank have a different relationship to the wars fought overseas in your name, Abagond? One which doesn`t involve television…?
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This Teflon tendency is no better displayed in America, in my opinion, than discussing Slavery/Confederacy.
The same people that wave the confederate flag today, hold it up as a hallmark of southern achievement and pride, and claim it had left an indellible mark on their identity, tend to be the same ones taking issue with those who include slavery in to factors that explain Americans prosperity, specifically White prosperity.
Sometimes, history matters. Sometimes, it doesn’t. Funny.
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I briefly wrote about the ‘Get over it’ argument whites love to use when confronted with the kind of history they dont like which is true history. This blog goes well with what I wrote.
Patricia, the point of this blog is that, as you’ve demonstrated, is that most whites do not want to face the sins of the past let alone the present. Instead, most of them prefer to bring up or blame the sins of nonwhites rather than facing their ugly past or present.
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After the first four pithy, witty paragraphs damning the “get over it/it’s all in the past” view of history, Agabond, you slid into an argument almost as ludicrously simplistic as the one you just took down.
It’s poor people in the US who have to ignore both the past and the outside world in order to keep believing jingoistic myths, to take pride in low-paid, insecure, dangerous jobs, to join in invasions of other countries, and to keep giving unstintingly of themselves without much material reward.
Wealthier people have financial motivation for their faith and loyalty. Their ignorance of history isn’t as important to the continued functioning of the system because they’re not the ones who need to be persuaded en masse to work (or die in wars) for little reward.
I reckon you used the passive voice in the subhead “why is Teflon Theory believed?” to avoid mentioning this, and cut to some very simplistic white blaming, which is crowd pleasing and possibly cathartic, but undermines your original argument.
At the risk of annoying you and everybody else by bringing up the outside world again, I’ve got to tell you your first four paragraphs illustrate beautifully the attitude of Britons who say the Afghans and Iraquis who cross France without applying for asylum and gather at the entrance to the Channel Tunnel are only trying to get to Britain for its welfare system. The reasons that these men speak English and not French seem to completely escape them. It’s as if they’d never heard of the British Empire.
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Maruja de Lujo:
American history is a skinhead’s wet dream come true. To think class affects one’s view of it more than one’s race goes against common sense.
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True, but to claim class doesn’t play any role at all also goes against common sense.
The ways these things interact are way too complex, perhaps even chaotic.
But speaking of Teflon theory: you are right, Abagond. 100% I might get flamed for saying this, because I’ve never been in the US. But America sure presented itself that way- everything that happened 30+ years ago, especially if it’s something unpleasant, is ancient history.
“People should just get over it and stop living in the past!” trope.
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All debate stops when someone brings up Hitler, but ……
Hitler actually formulated a lot of his ideas on things that he thought were positive about US history and then-recent govt. policy:
– Trail of Tears/treatment of Native Americans (this plus the Turkish Armenian Genocide made him think he could get away with the Holocaust.)
– various US federal and state eugenics policies — including my home state of Virginia
– treatment of blacks
– rise of the KKK
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….also I love the whitewashing of Ronald Reagan into the living saint of the GOP.
His return to the detente-esque polices of the Nixon-Ford-Carter years in his second term had many of his former neocon sychophants up in arms (i.e. Frank Gaffney and the other clowns responsible for Iran-Contra).
Newt Gingrich even compared some of arms control treaties as a ‘nuclear Munich.’ Then again, Newt only has three types of arguments — calling his opponents un-patriotic, appeasers, or socialist.
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a good post once again abagond!
“What do you mean by the “ugly present”? I agree that there are alot of injustices in the present world, but I don’t believe that the “man” is responsible for all of those injustices.”
Ööh, like the war in Irak, a country that had nothing to do with 911 but The One Man heard from his God that he must gove those towel heads some ass whippin. Few hunderd thousand civilians dead, the whole infastructure smashed, the whole society in chaos etc. Not to mention some thousand of american guys dead and wounded.
Oh, I think The Man is very much responsible for many injustices around the globe and back home indeed.
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“To think class affects one’s view of it more than one’s race goes against common sense.”
I’ve heard people justify white supremacy by saying “it’s common sense”. It’s not much of an argument.
Britons often say that Americans use race to talk about class. My take on that is that one of the advantages to slave owners of buying slaves from Africa is that the members of the slave class were easily distinguishable from non-slaves and were marked out as such for generations. So they created an underclass using visible difference which would last longer than accents or social and family relationships. I don’t know how much of it was intentional, but it goes some of the way to explaining why US Americans talk about race and not about class.
This post ends up saying that our whole political and cultural landscape (I say “our” because we in the rest of the world can’t escape its influence) has an end goal of keeping white people happy. Whites benefit from it more than most people, and there is a lot of dishonesty about that, but its end goal (as far as billions can have a common goal) of is to make rich people richer, and the correlation between riches and white skin is not a permanent, biological phenomenon. Four or five hundred years of colonisation mustn’t be ignored (that’s the part of your post that I liked so much), but it’s not the whole of history (as the latter part implies).
It might have made a bit more sense if you’d said who it is you think believes Teflon Theory. Only whites? Or other people as well?
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@ Jaime
The same people that wave the confederate flag today, hold it up as a hallmark of southern achievement and pride, and claim it had left an indellible mark on their identity, tend to be the same ones taking issue with those who include slavery in to factors that explain Americans prosperity, specifically White prosperity.
I actually use the “get over it” argument with white southerners re: the Civil War alot. 😀
It’s poor people in the US who have to ignore both the past and the outside world in order to keep believing jingoistic myths, to take pride in low-paid, insecure, dangerous jobs, to join in invasions of other countries, and to keep giving unstintingly of themselves without much material reward.
RIGHT ON MARUJA!
You tell those apolitical, declassinated Yankees! 😀
To think class affects one’s view of it more than one’s race goes against common sense.
Why? Because blood always wins out?
Abagond, the U.S. is practically alone among the western nations in believing that race and ethnicity are more powerful organizing principles than class.
@Mira
The ways these things [class and race] interact are way too complex, perhaps even chaotic.
You are exactly correct: it IS chaotic, in the physics sense of that term. However, as the physics of chaos shows us, one can discern patterns in chaotic systems by either increasing or decreasing one’s focus. Critical race theory increases one’s focus. Intersecctional theory decreases it. Both reveal quite clear patterns in the interaction of race and class.
I’ve heard people justify white supremacy by saying “it’s common sense”. It’s not much of an argument.
Yet more wise words from Maruja.
The “blood = politics” view of history is eminently common sense, and not in a good way. It seems to intuitively resonate with everything that people are taught as children in the U.S. – family is everything, like is more important than not-like, like needs to stick together, blood is thicker than water, etc. It is “intuitive” in the same way that the theory that the earth is flat is intuitive.
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^ Yes. Abagond and you are talking about conventional wisdom rather than real common sense.
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Really?
That’s funny, because I don’t blame modern Germans for killing my Polish brothers, and raping our women in WW2.
Maybe I should be more like you and keep the hate alive.
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Maybe you should read my posts instead of stereotyping what I think.
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“Maybe you should read my posts instead of stereotyping what I think.”
But, Abagond, that’s just what you’ve done to me. Rather than reply to my argument, you took a part of it, dumbed it down into a parody of itself, and then made a new post of the resulting straw man, called “It’s not race, it’s class”.
Rather shoddy behaviour, I must say.
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Maruja:
I answered your comment in this thread. I did not have to go and create a post about a strawman argument to do it. And when I wrote that post, I wrote it against the general argument, not anything you in particular said. There are at least three regular commenters on this blog who use that argument, so if it was directed against anyone personally, it was not you.
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Abagond, you answered a straw man, reducing various arguments to one silly phrase, ignoring everything else, leaving it at that, and thereby pretending in both your answer to men here and your “it’s not race, it’s class!” post that people really think like that. That’s the definition of a straw man.
Logic2.Zero, I can see how anyone would start to think of Abagond that way after reading some of what he writes.
I suggest something like “The Decline and Fall of the British Empire” by Piers Brendon as an antidote. The racist (that part of it is important) viciousness and cruelty visited on the rest of the world by European colonialists lasted centuries and shaped the modern world, unlike the Third Reich.
And, as Abagond says in this post, we have a culture of deliberately forgetting the parts of history that make us look vicious and bloodthirsty. By “us”, I mean white supremacist society. I know it sounds a bit over the top, but white supremacist beliefs and the accompanying violence and degradation formed present-day, white-majority societies such as the US. If we forget that, then it’s impossible not to retain racist attitudes in a multi-racial society where almost all of the wealthiest people come from one race.
That doesn’t mean that times don’t change, or that a racial superiority complex and the hideous behaviour that accompanies it is intrinsically connected to pale skin or light-coloured eyes. U.S. Americans of various races are now convinced that it is a noble duty to inflict violence and degradation on the rest of the world, rather as English people were in the days of the British Empire.
So, it is a bit frustrating to see a post about something important as historical memory descend into white-baiting.
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Maruja said:
“It’s poor people in the US who have to ignore both the past and the outside world in order to keep believing jingoistic myths, to take pride in low-paid, insecure, dangerous jobs, to join in invasions of other countries, and to keep giving unstintingly of themselves without much material reward.”
So according to you, since blacks are poorer on average than whites they are more likely to believe in jingoistic myths. Therefore they would like Fox News more than whites – after all, it is the cable news channel in America that is the most nakedly jingoistic. But even though America is 13% black, only 1.38% of the audience of Fox News is. They are TEN TIMES LESS LIKELY to watch it than Americans in general.
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Maruja:
In my post I tried to lay out what Teflon Theory is and why it is believed. I was not trying to appeal to either whites or blacks but simply tell it like I saw it, as clearly and as truthfully as I could.
I know that blaming whites undercuts my argument RHETORICALLY among whites, but I do not see how it undercuts it otherwise.
Some posts that might help you to understand this one:
https://abagond.wordpress.com/2010/09/29/why-american-history-gets-whitewashed/
https://abagond.wordpress.com/2010/05/26/can-white-americans-be-unracist/
https://abagond.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/the-education-of-angela-davis/
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abagond:
do you have a belief as to why blacks are so disproportionately low in the viewers of Fox?
a simple explanation (that i’m tempted by) is that the coverage is racist.
is there more to it than that in your view?
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Maruja:
Something that it seems like maybe you are not understanding is that blacks have a different relationship with American history and society than whites do. Because of racism most blacks are faced with a choice that most whites are not: they either believe that American society is profoundly screwed up at some level or that they themselves are profoundly screwed up at some level (or something somewhere in between). Most whites, meanwhile, seem to believe that they are Basically Good and that America is Basicallly Just:
https://abagond.wordpress.com/2010/07/08/basically-good/
https://abagond.wordpress.com/2009/10/27/just-world-doctrine/
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“That’s funny, because I don’t blame modern Germans for killing my Polish brothers, and raping our women in WW2.”
What if Germans continued to reap benefits from said rape and killing at the expense of the Polish to this day but wouldn’t admit it even though it was plainly obvious. Would you think it worth mentioning or would doing so be too “hateful”?
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Jason:
Excellent analogy.
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Abgond:
You said it best when you said “I do not see”. You just don’t want to see. Your reality is skewed to serve you and your purpose of division. No one can argue with you because you won’t open your eyes to real reality and only see this 60s version of American where white men and black men can’t drink from the same fountain. It is sad because you sound intelligent in your writing but your views are so misaligned that it is impossible to persuade you or introduce a new concept such as liberty and equality.
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[…] describes The Teflon Theory of American History: The Teflon Theory of American History says that anything that took place over 30 years ago is […]
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Seriously guys what are we going to do about this? I’m just casually browsing here and for some reason this post struck a chord. What are we going to DO about this issue- white supremacy?
We have analyzed it to death. There is nothing hidden. There is nothing unknown about racism and how it plays into how white people in general think about non whites. There’s nothing more to say on the topic now that we fully understand it. So, brothers and sisters, what’s our next move?
Abagond has single handedly dissected racism through and through and now all that’s left is to write about more of our people getting killed in this or that way. Or what the media says about us here or there. But to heck with all of that guys, what’s our plan of action?
Don’t say protest because we have seen where that leads us? Brothers and sisters we had the entire nation watching during the civil rights movement of the 60’s. They assassinated our leaders and then integrated us then called it good. What now are we asking for? That’s what we need to solidify. What ate our goals? The destruction of white supremacy right? Well white folks will not destroy that system. We already know that too. So, what then?
I am waiting for a signal. We need far more better organization. We need to talk to the masses. The blogosphere is nice and all, but we need to be reaching way farther than that. I’m not suggesting we need leaders and heroes, but I feel like everything has been said.
What’s our next big move?
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@jony
These people are making the next big step:
https://policy.m4bl.org/
They are committed to organizing, planning, making connections, and taking action. They know that harassment, snooping, smearing, beatings, arrests, and possibly years as political prisoners may be in their future. They are ready to make real change—-whatever the cost.
You and I need to decide if we are ready to move forward with them or continue expressing our frustration online.
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@afrofem
Thanks for this. The demands are uncompromising and steep. I like this, it’s the first I’ve seen of it.
A big leap, but nothing important is without risk.
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@jony
This article discusses some of those risks for activists (and sometimes for people not involved with protests). This passage is pretty chilling:
http://www.blackagendareport.com/cops_target_protesters_with_charges
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