By Victor Davis Hanson
Monday, August 12, 2019
A great deal of
controversy has continued the past few days over Robert Francis O’Rourke’s
longtime use of a nickname given to him at birth (albeit temporarily jettisoned
while in prep school) — especially in the wake of his recent sensational and
unfounded charges that Donald Trump is directly responsible for the mass
shootings in El Paso, Texas, and that white supremacy defines America, past and
present, and explains Trump’s culpability.
The point of the amused contention is not that
O’Rourke was given such a nickname at or near birth. Rather, the controversy is
over his continued use of the sobriquet for cynical political advantage in a
somewhat related manner to Senator Elizabeth Warren’s longtime false cultural
appropriation of a Native American identity for careerist purposes. After all,
we live in a progressive era in which “cultural appropriation” is a mortal sin
and non-minority university students are routinely chastised for wearing
clothing or hairstyles associated with minority groups or appearing in dramas
playing the roles of characters of a different ethnic background.
According to the Dallas Morning News, a quite
prescient senior O’Rourke once explained why he had given the shortened form of
the Spanish “Roberto” to his son as a nickname. And he seemed to imply that
such naming was for political reasons in addition to avoiding confusing young
Robert with his maternal grandfather of the same first name:
In the backdrop of the city’s
multicultural community, his father, Pat O’Rourke, a consummate politician,
once explained why he nicknamed his son Beto: Nicknames are common in Mexico
and along the border, and if he ever ran for office in El Paso, the odds of
being elected in this mostly Mexican-American city were far greater with a name
like Beto than Robert Francis O’Rourke.
While congressman and would-be Senator Beto apparently
found the Hispanic nickname advantageous in some ways in local and statewide
Texas races (ironically, sometimes in contests opposed to those of authentic
Latino ancestries), his continued use of Beto suggests that he thinks it also
resonates, at the least, an empathy for assumed marginalized peoples, and at
the most offers some confusion to less well-informed voters over whether he is
in fact Latino himself.
Add in the fact that Beto is also a child of both
inherited and maritally acquired wealth and what he would call “white
privilege” that likely kept him as a sometimes reckless youth out of jail on
one occasion for a serious crime. Thus, in a bizarre way, the misleading
nickname offers some concrete authenticity to his chronic resentment of the
very privilege he has for so long enjoyed.
Certainly, a number of Hispanic politicians and opinion
writers have chided Beto for cynically giving incomplete impressions to
voters — that
he might be ethnically as well as linguistically Latino. Again, one could
cite cruder efforts at gaining some sort of political or careerist traction in
the minority misrepresentations of Senator Warren, Ward Churchill, or Rachel
Dolezal. Warren, after all, who makes the same sort of serial allegations of
dominant and endemic white supremacy that Beto does, did not choose to assume a
false Finnish or Irish identity to propel her legal and academic career,
although, given her appearance, it would have been an easier distortion.
But why his nickname is again in the news and
additionally matters is because Beto himself is on record recently of damning
Trump as a white nationalist and a racist who is responsible for the El Paso
shootings. According to Beto, Trump apparently seeks to resonate with kindred
white supremacists. Beto additionally goes further in damning the United States
as essentially governed by ideas of white supremacy both now and in its past.
But again, Beto is no longer running a local
congressional or even a Texas-wide race. He has far transcended the clairvoyant
predictions of his father that the nickname would come in handy in the
anticipated borderland politics of southern Texas.
Rather, Beto seems to think that the current and
continued Hispanicizing of his nomenclature (remember, at times Beto has
dropped his nickname) will pay dividends in a national race. Yet according to
his own logic, it should not, given his prior denunciations that America is
incurably racist.
Given that all politicians entertain a degree of cynicism
and opportunism, if we truly lived in a culture of white supremacy, we would
more likely see candidates fabricating European dog-whistle names and
identities than the sad efforts of a Churchill, Dolezal, O’Rourke, or Warren.
And in fact, in a far different America of the past, many minority celebrities
and politicians did assume Anglicized names on their unfortunately
all-too-accurate assumption that too many white racists would ostracize them
for their minority status.
Yet the opposite linguistic dynamic has been in play for
some time. A young and politically ambitious Obama brilliantly understood that
political reality when, in a twist to authenticity, he ceased going by his
teenage nickname Barry and reverted to his actual birth name, Barack.
In terms of linguistic contortions or just simply
adaptations, the force of compound names, accent marks, and ethnic sobriquets
is to suggest perceived difference from, not homogeneity with, the majority
population — to the extent that, in a racially intermarried and assimilated
population, anyone’s ethnic heritage is clear.
In other words, O’Rourke’s use of Beto seems ipso facto
to suggest that he privately believes in general that Americans of all
backgrounds (including a supposed 70 percent white electorate) either do not
care whether a candidate is so-called white or, more likely, are intrigued by
or admire those who are not — again, sort of refuting Beto’s entire premise of
an intolerant and all-powerful white-supremacist society.
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