Dear White America (12 page)

In any event, Nottoway was a manse with sixty--four rooms in all, including its most unique and striking—a ballroom for dances and other high society events, washed in bright white paint from floor to ceiling. Each of the dozen Randolph children was assigned a personal servant—this is how the docents put it, but in truth we are talking about chattel, make no mistake—and when the children needed to call one of their “servants” (perhaps to feed them, clean up after them or wipe their behinds after a particularly difficult bowel movement), they could use for the purpose a bell system rigged to levers in each room, the levers connected by string to bells on the servants' “waiting porch,” as it was called. There were
dozens
of different bell tones, each one signaling that help was needed in a particular room. Of course, those enslaved by the Randolphs, who were thought to be the intellectual inferiors of those whom they served, had to know exactly which bell went to which room, so as to make sure they could come quickly in case one of the Randolph brood needed assistance with something they could never, naturally, be expected to do for themselves. That a family would go to such lengths to avoid
work
—even the effort required to simply go and
find
the black person whose help they needed so badly, rather than to simply flick a lever and thereby exert no more effort than might have been be required to pick one's own nose—may stand as the most exquisite example of laziness in the history of either white people or slackers (histories that have tended to overlap considerably, especially at the upper end of the wealth spectrum).

Once slavery was abolished and Randolph had to actually pay for the labor on his property—which is to say, once he had to make a go of it without the unfair edge of government intervention on his behalf, helping him to hold human beings in bondage—he failed miserably, ultimately losing most of his fortune and three-fourths of his accumulated acreage. Though he tried to maintain the plantation's former greatness—this time with Chinese labor, signaling once again an inability of the white and wealthy to do anything themselves—he could never recapture the antebellum glories to which he and his family had grown accustomed.

And it wasn't only the wealthy among us who grew dependent on people of color; no indeed, even working-class whites often employed blacks leased out by slave owners, or in other ways relied on their free labor to build up the economy from which they too benefited, if not nearly so much as the wealthy. The condition of black and brown labor marked the economic floor to which no white worker would be allowed to fall, an assurance that propped up white workers in relative terms and gave us a stake (however ultimately inadequate) in the system of white supremacy.

Beyond that, all whites depended on laws to defend slavery and segregation so as to elevate us politically, socially and economically. We were dependent on Mexicans to teach us how to extract gold from river-beds and quartz—critical to the growth of the economy in the mid-to-late 1800s—and had we not taken over half their nation in an unprovoked war, the Pacific ports so vital to the modern U.S. economy would have been not ours, but Mexico's. Then we were dependent on their labor in the mid-twentieth century under the
bracero
program, through which more than five million Mexicans were brought into the country for agricultural work, and then sent back across the border.
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And we were dependent on Asian labor to build the railroads that made transcontinental commerce possible. Ninety percent of the labor used to build the Central Pacific Railroad in the 1860s was Chinese, imported for the purpose, and exploited because the rail bosses felt that group was easier to control than white workers.
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Indeed, our dependence on people of color continues to this day. Each year, African Americans alone spend over $700 billion with white-owned companies: money that goes mostly into the pockets of white owners, white employees, white stockholders and the white communities in which they live.
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Even the mass incarceration of people of color (largely for nonviolent drug-related offenses) has resulted in the transfer of billions of dollars to white communities—money upon which those communities have come to depend. Because prisons are typically located in small, mostly white places, and because inmates count in the local community's population numbers, their transfer from large cities to rural prisons results in more federal funds for rural communities due to census-based budgetary allocations: up to $25,000 per inmate.
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And, of course, undocumented immigrants of color, about whom we make so much fuss, pump billions of additional dollars into the economy, well beyond the value of whatever benefits they manage to wrangle, in education, health care or other social services.

So make no mistake, the narrative of individualism and personal responsibility bears little resemblance to the reality of our lives, as a nation or as a people. Support from the state, and specifically
racialized
state policy and racially exclusive government intervention on our behalf, has been the norm. It's not that we haven't worked hard. Most of us have and do, every day. But some folks' hard work has been rewarded by access to an opportunity structure, while the hard work of others has been largely ignored, and certainly not rewarded with the same access. And that has made a difference.

Many of you may think all of this an academic matter, but it goes far beyond that. As conservatives abuse historical memory and take advantage of our anxieties and fears about a changing society in order to push their own agenda, the risks to the nation grow ever greater. And ironically, the likelihood that the very real insecurity many of us are currently experiencing—and even the very real economic pain we are feeling—will ever be addressed becomes more remote. This is the dirty little secret about which the right would have us remain unaware: they are selling us scapegoats and bogeymen, none of whom are really responsible for our plight, rather than dealing with the very real causes of our present troubles.

And so they will seek to discredit the notion of the public good, whether represented by guaranteed health care access or publicly supported economic stimulus and job creation programs, and instead insist on budget cuts, forgetting the fact that millions of us are out of work too, and lack affordable health care. Yet many of us fall for it, openly admitting on camera that we'd rather go without health care than have it provided by the government. But how many of us would continue to feel that way when in need of care after surviving a heart attack, or at the very moment when our spouse or partner or a parent suffered an exploding brain aneurism, or the next time one of our children has a fever of 105 and goes into convulsions? In the face of those harsh realities, how many of us would continue to insist upon the evil of big government, were we devoid of adequate private insurance?

No matter how much we've been encouraged to ignore it, the fact remains that the public good is
our
good, for we are part of the public too. And unless we can see the fates of all those black and brown folks that the right has been encouraging us to fear and loathe as our brothers and sisters, we're in for some rough years ahead. Indeed, had we allowed ourselves to see the commonality of interests early on—and this is the truly sick thing, the thing that should
really
keep us up at night—the pain and anxiety so many of our number are currently experiencing may never have manifested at all.

For instance, consider the current housing meltdown. Although the crisis is now being felt nationwide, in communities that are urban, suburban and rural, and by people across the color spectrum, things weren't always that way. More than fifteen years ago, Michael Hudson detailed in his groundbreaking book 
Merchants of Misery
the way that poor folks—mostly of color—were being gouged by high-interest lenders on the secondary mortgage market, thanks to discriminatory practices.
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Likewise, in the late 1990s and early 2000s community-based groups in places like North Carolina were taking on predatory lenders like Citi, which was caught charging black families hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional mortgage payments over the life of their loans, steering them into loan instruments that were more costly than necessary even when those families could have qualified for lower interest rates.
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For years prior to that time, lenders had been notorious for “redlining” low-income communities (especially those of color)—literally drawing lines around entire census tracts on city maps, prohibiting lending to anyone within the line, no matter their individual creditworthiness—and thereby starving whole neighborhoods of needed capital investment, wealth and stable home ownership.
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As a result, by the early 1990s such communities had been made so desperate by these policies that they were ripe for abuse by “reverse redlining,” in which lenders targeted people living there for loans (albeit at high interest). Had lending been balanced and fair from the start, the targeted communities would not have been in such dire straits to begin with, and families would have been less vulnerable to the enticements of unscrupulous lenders preying on their desire to take part in the “American dream” of home ownership.

Yet consistently, when activists would raise these issues, decry the racial and class unfairness inherent to these practices and call for regulations, most of the media, public and lawmakers, and most of
us
routinely ignored them. No national politicians campaigned on platforms to crack down on such policies, to strengthen fair lending laws, or to rein in the interest that lenders could charge. The market, they would insist, was sufficient to regulate these matters.

Of course, once it became apparent that lenders were not going to be heavily scrutinized or regulated when it came to these activities, high-cost mortgage instruments became even more prevalent, and began to spread from the communities of color and poor communities, where they had begun, to solidly middle-class and largely white spaces too. As a result of the spread of high-cost mortgages, folks in middle-class and mostly white counties like Suffolk and Nassau, on Long Island, are now facing higher foreclosure rates than residents in Brooklyn or Queens.
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Although the overall impact of the busted housing bubble continues to fall most heavily on people of color—indeed, the wealth gains of the past thirty years by African Americans have been all but wiped out by the collapse—the rot is spreading, to be sure, and many of us are finding ourselves vulnerable in ways we could never have imagined.

So in a very real sense, our ambivalence to the suffering of black and brown folks opened the floodgates to even more risky economic activity, and this time, in the very places where so many of us live. Had racial inequity and injustice been seen as a problem early on, perhaps the market for such predatory loans would have been shut down or at least heavily regulated, thereby staving off crisis. Clearly, millions of us who got roped into these instruments by lenders promising that everything would be all right are suffering today precisely because the pain was not taken seriously when it belonged to someone else. Not to mention that even if our own neighborhoods and communities haven't been hammered by the collapse, and even if we're having no problems paying our mortgages, the credit crunch that has resulted from the larger crisis can affect our ability to refinance, sell our own homes or buy new property. In short, the housing collapse hurts most all of us, and it was the indifference to the pain when localized in black and brown communities that helped bring us to this point.

Additionally, there is now a significant body of research suggesting that the reason the United States has such a feeble social safety net—a weak system of unemployment insurance, limited cash-based support, paltry food subsidies, inadequate public health care initiatives—is due to the perception on the part of large numbers of us that black folks will abuse such programs if they are too generous.
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In other words, our racial resentment of folks of color (perceived as the ones taking advantage of any form of assistance for the needy) leads to less support for strong safety net programs. Yet when the economy craters and millions of us find ourselves struggling to survive, we too end up without the programs needed to support our families.

For instance, according to research by Martin Gilens in his classic book 
Why Americans Hate Welfare
, it was only after media imagery of the poor switched from mostly white to mostly black and brown (beginning in the early 1970s) that public anger about social spending began to explode.
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Prior to that time, most people understood the importance of safety nets, and they had been highly supportive of assistance to the poor from the period of the Great Depression well into the 1960s. But once the public came to view aid recipients as people of color, that support waned.