Dear White America (11 page)

As it turns out, when I had asked her the question—when I had asked her to give me a year that was, in her mind, emblematic of a time when taxes had been at their proper level and the size of government appropriate—but before she had had the chance to write me back, I had scribbled a note on a piece of paper on my desk. It was a note meant to serve as a guess, on my part, as to what she would say. I've never been much of a gambler, but had there been a bookie prepared to take bets on the answer she was going to give me, I could have cleaned up, because I nailed it.

The answer came back in a matter of minutes: 1957.

It was a fascinating answer, because it just so happens that in 1957 the top marginal tax rate in the United States was
ninety-one percent
.
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In other words, after a certain income level—which in those days was $200,000 for a single person, and $400,000 for a married couple—ninety-one cents of every additional dollar earned was taken by the government: more than double the highest rate in existence today, even if all the recent tax cuts were allowed to expire. There were actually
eighteen
tax brackets in 1957 that were higher than anything we have today, and corporate taxes were much higher then, as a share of overall revenue and as a share of the larger economy.
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So to say that the nation needs to go back to the mid-to-late 1950s because
that
was a time of lower taxes makes no sense whatsoever. It suggests that there must be something other than the tax burden of that time which makes individuals like those in the Tea Party so wistful. Might that “something else” be related to the white-dominated racial hierarchy that existed during those days?

Many might argue that she just didn't realize—and perhaps many on the right simply were unaware—that the tax rates had been so high in those days. Might not such people be operating merely from ignorance as opposed to racial resentment? Maybe, but again, let's dig a bit deeper. Why, after all, might so many people remember the pre-1960 decades as a time of lower taxation? Why is it so common (and it really
is
quite common) to perceive the era before the 1960s as an era before the explosion of taxes and government spending? Is it because the people who perceive the 1960s and beyond as a time of onerous taxation are reflecting critically on the space program, or the taxes raised to finance the Vietnam War, or the rising defense budgets of the 1980s? Surely not. I think we know what comes to mind when one mentions the 1960s, especially when we think of that decade in relation to government programs for which taxes may have been used. And I think we know, white America, if we allow ourselves to be honest, the color of the people we perceive to be the beneficiaries of all that taxation, and the color of the victims of the same.

Which then brought us to the part about “smaller government.” She had said after all, that the conservative desire to “take the country back” meant no more than the desire to limit the degree of government intervention in our daily economic lives. But government had not been small prior to the 1960s, far from it. For whites it had always been huge, in fact, and we rather liked it that way. Although the debate about the size of government has been a long-standing one, dating back to the earliest days of the republic, for almost the entire national history, it was a debate between political and economic elites. Some believed in a more activist government and some believed in a far smaller one, but the persons lining up to participate in that argument were always those at the pinnacle of the social order. Among average everyday folks—work-aday peoples—there was
never
much of a debate about this matter. Working-class folks, including virtually all working-class white folks, believed without a doubt in the necessity and legitimacy of government intervention in the economy to help those in need, to create opportunities and to make lives better.

That's why, white America, we had no objection to (and indeed supported mightily) the “big government” intervention known as the Homestead Act, passed in 1862, which gave over 200 million acres of essentially “free” land to white families: land that had been confiscated from indigenous people or from Mexico and was then made available to white settlement.
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Millions of us today still live on that land, procured thanks to government intervention, or we have in some way benefited from the sale of that land and the passing down of the assets intergenerationally; and I haven't seen one among us go to Washington and, in a fit of self-conscious embarrassment, offer to give back the house, the ranch, the farm or the money gleaned from their sale, out of a concern that were we to keep them we might be partaking in a form of socialism.

Likewise, average, everyday white folks had no objection to (and indeed, supported quite stridently) the New Deal programs of the 1930s. The rich didn't like them much, as they offered poor people alternatives to exploitative pay in the private market—whether government jobs or various forms of social insurance to serve as a safety net for the desperate—but among the masses they were almost uniformly popular.

Average everyday white folks loved the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) home loan program, and later the Veterans Administration (VA) home loan programs—both huge government interventions in the workings of the private housing market—and with good reason: they were largely responsible (along with the GI Bill—another big government initiative) for creating the American middle class. The FHA and VA programs alone financed over $120 billion in home equity for our people from 1934 to 1962, and by 1960 were responsible for nearly half of all white mortgages in the country.
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And we loved the Interstate Highway program—more big government—because it made long-distance travel on the open road possible for so many of us, and because it made it easier for us to run to the suburbs, where only we could live, and which were being created thanks to low-cost, government-subsidized loans.

In other words, for most of the nation's history, white folks like the ones participating in Tea Party rallies—average, somewhat middling white people—absolutely
loved
government intervention. But somewhere along the way, things changed. And when that change happened (and why) is the critical point for us to interrogate, for it tells us a lot about how race has influenced even philosophical matters that seem at first glance to have nothing to do with it.

Almost all of those big government programs I just mentioned, which retained such high levels of support from the white masses, had been racially exclusive in design and implementation. In fact, the only way President Roosevelt could get most of the New Deal passed was by capitulating to the racist whims of white Southern senators who insisted that blacks be excluded from most of its benefits.
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Social Security was, in effect, racially exclusionary for its first twenty years, thanks to language that blocked agricultural workers or domestic workers—about 80 percent of the black workforce—from participating. The FHA program operated with underwriting guidelines that essentially kept anyone who wasn't white from receiving the government-guaranteed loans for the first thirty years of its existence. Even the GI Bill, theoretically open to all returning veterans, worked in a racially discriminatory way, with persons of color far less likely to receive substantial job or educational opportunities under its aegis than our people were. Employers and colleges were allowed to exclude people of color from their ranks, no matter the latter groups' “right” to use GI Bill benefits; hence those veterans of color who could make use of the benefits were still relegated to the lowest-rung employment opportunities and limited to a small number of potential educational institutions.
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In other words, government had always been big for people like us, and we were fine with that. But beginning in the 1960s, as people of color began to gain access to the benefits for which we had always been eligible, suddenly we discovered our inner libertarian and decided that government intervention was bad, perhaps even the cause of social decay and irresponsible behavior on the part of those who reaped its largesse. Indeed, even cash welfare—created as part of the 1935 Social Security Act—was originally supported as a way to help white women whose husbands had died or left home to look for work during the Depression, so they could stay home, raise their kids, and not have to work in the paid labor force.
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Interesting isn't it? Cash welfare was originally conceived and defended on these grounds: as a way to foster benign dependence on the state. And virtually no one balked. But as soon as women of color gained access to the same benefits, those programs came to be seen as the cause of all that was wrong with the poor. They made you lazy, encouraged you to have babies out of wedlock (forget that the states with the most generous welfare programs always had the lowest rates of such births), and needed to be cut back, perhaps even eliminated.

Doesn't it seem convenient that growing opposition to government intervention in the economy, the housing market, the job market and other aspects of American life parallels almost directly the racialization of social policy, and the increasing association in the white mind between such efforts and handouts to the undeserving “other”? Are we to believe that this correlation is merely coincidental? That people who had long reaped the benefits of big government simply came to a deeper understanding of the inherent dangers of such a thing, only
after
they had ridden the wave of such benefits for generations? Surely we can't expect anyone to believe that. No, the backlash against government was directly related to the increasingly common belief that
those people
were abusing the programs. And so, beginning in the early 1970s—even as antipoverty efforts had helped bring down poverty rates by roughly half between 1960 and 1973, and by a third in just the first eight years of the Great Society programs
138
—safety net programs began to be cut, or frozen in place, their benefits eroded by inflation over the years, guaranteeing that whatever potential they had to work would be eroded as well.

So it isn't that opposition to an activist government is racist
per se
. There are surely many of us who would stake out the limited government position even in a society where everyone looked the same. But in
this
society, where the debate about the size and scope of government has been intrinsically bound up with the debate about race—and the negative perceptions of racial others—it is patently impossible to suggest with any intellectual integrity that the two can be fully separated. That is why the Tea Party narrative, and the narrative of the American right, is properly considered one of white racial resentment and anxiety.

But getting back to my email correspondence with the Tea Party member, let us explore the last of her claims. It is one with which many would perhaps agree, to the effect that the country has somehow (in just the past few years of the Obama administration) been led away from the notion of individual responsibility, and down the road of dependency. Perhaps many would echo her view that we've lost our way, that America has forgotten the importance of personal responsibility, and so things like publicly supported health care programs are a dangerous imposition on an otherwise straightforward national narrative of individualism.

But putting aside how that belief clearly fails to jibe with the long history of government intervention in the economy—which intervention was, again, supported by the vast majority of white Americans—there is this larger and perhaps more uncomfortable truth: At no point have we who are white been particularly enamored of the concept of independence and hard work. We have
always
been dependent, and have always relied on others to help us, however much we've managed to craft a fictional narrative about our self-reliance and sell that to the world as if it were real. And on a racial level, we have certainly been far more dependent on people of color than they've ever been on us. I know it's a touchy subject, but the history is really quite clear, and worth remembering.

We depended on the indigenous of this land to teach us farming and harvesting skills that we largely lacked upon arrival. Indeed, had it not been for the wisdom of native North Americans, the first attempt at European colonization would have failed entirely. We were starving in droves, perishing in Jamestown because we had spent so much time looking for gold that we'd forgotten to plant crops that could sustain us through the harsh winters. Four hundred–plus years later that folly has been repeated, at least metaphorically, in an economy so focused on the chasing of wealth for wealth's sake that it has failed to re-sow its crops, to invest in the future, to actually produce anything of value as it opts, instead, to chase financial fortunes and immediate riches.

We relied on the slave labor of African peoples to build the levees that protected our homes and farmland, to harvest and cook our food, to care for our children, to chop, and hoe, and sweat, and sew, and nurse us back to health, while we aspired to be persons of leisure, or at least to leave the really brutal work to them.

For a visceral example of what I mean, I really do recommend that you take a trip to the Nottoway Plantation, located on Louisiana Highway 1, along the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Known as the “White Castle” by the family of John Hampden Randolph, for whom it was constructed, Nottoway and its history—about which the tour guides will gladly speak without the least sense of irony—stands as a testament to white dependency and incompetence, however obscured by great wealth and power.
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Randolph grew rich as a producer of cotton and then sugar, relying in large part on the mortgaging of slaves he had inherited from his own family and that of his wife, so as to establish the plantation at Nottoway. Once established, the plantation and another he owned ultimately held in bondage as many as four hundred persons of African descent. Without the labor of those he enslaved he could not likely have made a go of the land for one week, given as he was to spending his time hunting and going for long rides in carriages, or hosting parties for others of the elite with whom he associated—this according not to me, but to the official plantation website history. That his leisurely indulgences and utter lack of personal work ethic do not cause us to perhaps reconsider the rugged individualism upon which we are told white men have always relied, should tell us something about both that mythology and the white men in whose service it has been so regularly employed.