"Ungrateful" is the new "uppity"

It shouldn't come as a surprise that Republican Speaker Mike Johnson is having some trouble with the female members of his caucus. Here's what Annie Karni reported in the New York Times (emphasis mine): 

Some of [the Republican women] said privately that the speaker had failed to listen to them or engage in direct conversations on major political and policy issues, suggesting that doing so was a cultural challenge for Mr. Johnson — an evangelical Christian who has often voiced firm views about the distinct roles men and women should play in society.

"Cultural challenge" is an interesting euphemism for sexism. But there you have it.

One of the Republican women in Congress who has been feuding with Johnson is Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, who called the speaker a "habitual liar." Here is how an anonymous Republican congressional aide (probably coached by Johnson) responded:

...after Mr. Johnson had provided Ms. Stefanik with office space and a budget for what the aide described as “a fake job and a fake title,” he would have expected her to be more gracious.

"How dare you not bow in gratitude to the man in charge who patronizingly gave you a fake position?!"

I was immediately reminded of all the times VP Vance has demanded gratitude (or bemoaned the lack thereof).

1. Former VP Kamala Harris wasn’t fit to lead the country because she wasn’t “grateful for it.”  
2. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy didn't say "thank you" to Trump often enough 
3. Democratic mayoral candidate for New York City, Zohran Mamdani didn't feel gratitude to this country 
4. Joy Reid was advised to "show a little gratitude."

It's no coincidence that - other than Zelensky - all of these people are women and/or people of color. Of course, the Black woman who is most likely to be accused of being ungrateful is Michelle Obama.

Just like all of the other forms of racism/sexism we're seeing from MAGA these days, this one is nothing new. The trope dates back to our founding, as was pointed out by George Boulukos in "The Grateful Slave."

Slaves in the Americas had much to be angry about. One thing that must have particularly annoyed them was that masters and mistresses expected the enslaved to appreciate all that was done on their behalf. From the second quarter of the eighteenth century...the sentimental notion of the grateful slave had so permeated the minds of slave owners that the latter imagined that those they oppressed thanked them for the various indignities forced upon them.

Diana Butler Bass calls this "malignant gratitude."

In American history, the most vicious use of malignant gratitude was in the slave system. Slaveholders believed that those they enslaved “owed” them gratitude — for the “gifts” of food, clothing, housing, and work that the “benevolent” masters had given them. The greatest of all the gifts bestowed by masters on the enslaved was Christianity — and white southern preachers regularly regaled those held in captivity to appreciate the goodness of their overlords. For the enslaved, if you failed to be sufficiently grateful in your attitude and your hard work you were an ingrate. And ingratitude...resulted in punishment by both the whip and the law.

In a twisted way, this kind of malignant gratitude presupposes that it is the oppressed who are indebted to their oppressor.

What is being asked of marginalized people is not gratitude. It is debt. We are being asked to feel indebted, because debt is what maintains racial and social hierarchies in the US. 

That is the assumption behind the state of Florida's history standards claiming that enslaved Black people “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their benefit.” It is a lie meant to imply that Black Americans should have some level of gratitude for their enslavement.

I have nothing against gratitude, if for no other reason than I have an awful lot to be thankful for in my life. But that is gratitude freely given. It is a whole other thing for someone to demand, or even expect gratitude. 

White men like J.D. Vance and Mike Johnson play identify politics by assuming that they are in charge and the rest of us should not only shut up about how they exclude us, we should be grateful for their dominance. They are only a hair's breadth away from calling us "uppity" if we do otherwise.