THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

On December 25, I will be celebrating Christmas.

This makes me anaziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews.

If I were not anaziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews, I would not use the "The C Word" here. I would be celebrating The Season, as in "Season's Greetings."

I do not appreciate receiving a card, on the holiest day of my faith, which wishes me, "Season's Greetings" or "Happy Holidays." But then again, I'm a white gentile, and white gentiles don't have feelings, right?

Have you ever considered what a rabbi would think if you sent him a card at Passover that said, "Season's Greetings?" I don't think he would appreciate it.

I am told the people who send "Season's Greetings" cards don't want to offend anybody. After all, I might be Jewish.

A name like Robert Walker Whitaker might easily be a Jewish name, right?

I have known a lot of Jews in my long life. I got along with most of them, just as I got along with most gentiles. But I never met any Jews who were particularly desperate to claim me as a long-lost relative. They are happy enough to consider me a goy, so why can't the people who send me greeting cards?

The Jews I get along with best wince if somebody says, "Jewish person." Subtlety has never been my strong point, and subtlety has seldom been characteristic of people I got along with.

One of the people I used to pal around with put it best: "Greenish means a little bit green. Bluish means a little bit blue. I'm not Jewish, I'm a Jew." The Jews I get along with are JEWS.

What I am saying is that I get along with Jews, or anybody else, who depend upon their own pride in their own identity for dignity. By the same token, I do NOT get along with people whose personal dignity requires them to destroy my holidays or my identity.

Now that we have gotten rid of The C Word, what will be next to go? Nowadays, no business would DARE wish its customers a Merry Christmas. They wish everybody Happy Hanukkah and Happy Kwanzaa all the time, but never, never Christmas. That would be Hitlerite, you know.

But, like all Evil Bigots, businesses still have a code symbol for the Hitlerite Holiday

Despite all the Happy Holidays and Season's Greetings and Happy Kwanzaa's and Happy Hanukkahs, the stores manage to slip in a SANTA CLAUS!

Now we all know that Santa Claus is a code term for Saint Nicholas, a CHRISTIAN Saint. Here we have a store brazenly putting forth a code saint on The Day Of The C Word!!

But we are wise to their game.

You and me BOTH know what they are talking about when they show Santa Claus. They are hinting at The C Word. HITLER celebrated Christmas!! How many poor Jewish children see that Santa Claus and feel excluded from the mainstream of American society?

I am sure that there will be a movement to get rid of that Santa Person. Alan Dershowitz will be brought onto national talk shows to explain how so many of his childhood traumas came directly from memories of that Evil Red Man and all that was associated with him.

This may sound absurd -- for the moment. But I remember when people used to laugh when we said integration would lead straight to racial quotas. I remember when no one thought that a Southerner who flew a Confederate flag was doing anything unusual, much less evil and fascistic.

In the real world, something that all liberals and respectable conservatives say is absurd one day is absolutely required by liberals the next day. Respectable conservatives not only forget it was once considered ridiculous, but they beg liberals to forget that they ever questioned it.

We used to say that integration would lead to removing antimiscegenation laws. But all the cool people agreed that integration had nothing to do with intermarriage. Now respectable conservatives BEG liberals to forget they ever questioned this.

Remember, nobody is as fanatical today about getting that Confederate flag down as Jack Kemp or George Bush, Senior and Junior. And when the liberals want Santa Claus out, nobody will demand it more loudly than the Christian Coalition.

Santa Claus is clearly, unambiguously a symbol of The C Word, and we all know it. It is only a matter of time.

Unless, of course, we drop this nonsense and go back to the old way of being an American. In the old days, you knew someone had arrived in the American Mainstream when they turned the old insulting term into their own brag word.

Like "rebel," for instance.

Yankees called it The War of the Rebellion. They called us Rebels. So by the time I was raised, I was proud to be a Rebel. The University of Mississippi proudly called itself the Rebels. In fact, they got so proud of being rebels that black students at Ole Miss now demand they get rid of THAT title!!

Let me give you a little list. It is a very, very partial list. It is a list of the names that some groups now call themselves. Every one of these names was once used as an insult by their enemies. Because of their pride in themselves, each group took the name and have used it as a term of pride for so long it is now official

Methodists Lutherans

Cajuns Rebels

British Tories Tarheels

Sandlappers Yankees

British Whigs Sooners

Mormons Crackers

In the days before respectable conservatives took over the opposition, what each new group in America did was to meet the insults with its own pride. The Irish did not demand that all Anglo-Saxon symbols in America be torn down. They added their own Saint Patrick's Day. If you hear them use terms like "Mick," it's as a term of pride now.

We Rebs and Irish allowed them to keep their symbols and we gloried in the words they tossed at us. My pride in myself does not depend on making someone else tear down their flag.

I cannot make blacks feel equal. I cannot make liberal Jews feel American. No matter how completely these groups rip down all of my most precious symbols, it will not make them a whit more secure in themselves.

I don't live or die by whatever term some Yankee decides to use to refer to me.

Blacks and liberal Jews must learn this lesson. Until they can learn to live with The C Word, the Fat Red Man, and the Confederate flag, blacks and liberal Jews will remain outsiders, because, in the end, their alienness is not in my mind, but in their own.