Dear White America (13 page)

Likewise, Jill Quadagno points out in 
The Color of Welfare
that the nation's most promising antipoverty initiatives and programs have been routinely undermined by racism aimed at those perceived to be the disproportionate beneficiaries.
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Indeed, racist opposition to the empowerment of blacks was among the principal reasons that President Nixon's proposal for a guaranteed minimum national income was rejected. Kenneth Neubeck and Noel Cazenave put forth a similar analysis in their book 
Welfare Racism: Playing the Race Card Against America's Poor
. Neubeck and Cazenave document the way that politicians have used racial resentment and racism to limit public assistance of all kinds, and have been more focused on using welfare policy to control black and brown labor mobility and even reproduction, than on providing real opportunity and support.
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Again, the irony should be clear: because of the racialization of social policy, those of us who are struggling will now have less of a safety net to catch us than might otherwise have been the case.

In fact, a comprehensive comparison of various social programs in the United States and Europe found that racial hostility to people of color better explains opposition to high levels of social spending here than any other economic or political variable.
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If we read our history carefully we can see how this process has played out. It used to be the case that most of us had sympathy for those who were poor and struggling. While the wealthy have long been given to questioning the character of the poor—think Ebeneezer Scrooge's famous soliloquy from Dickens's
A Christmas Carol
—such judgmentalism has not been the norm for average, everyday folks until relatively recently. For most of our history, we understood that people sometimes found themselves the victims of circumstances beyond their control. So in the 1930s, for instance, most of us understood that millions were poor and desperate not because there was something wrong with their character, their work ethic or their morals, but because of structural economic conditions like the stock market collapse or the Dust Bowl droughts in the Midwest. Thus we supported assistance to people in need. Even if we were managing to keep our heads above water, we saw those who were struggling as ourselves, or at least as metaphorical brothers and sisters about whom our concern
was genuine.

Even in the 1980s, when thousands of farmers were losing their land to foreclosures, again in large part because of economic factors beyond their control, we believed in bailing them out. We saw the enemy in those cases as greedy banks, taking advantage of struggling farm families who were the backbone of America, and corporate farmers who were snapping up land and pushing family farms out of business to amass mega-profits. We did not, by and large, blame the small farmers for their station.

But when we speak of urban poverty and the conditions of life facing millions of low-income people of color, our rhetoric is quite different as is our level of compassion and forbearance. For them, characterological judgment and condemnation is our first reflex. Whereas white folks are the innocent and deserving poor, black and brown folks are guilty (of something) and undeserving; their condition is believed by most of us to be the fault of their own pathologies and dysfunctions.

And this is not to say that those pathologies are never real. Of course they are. Intense poverty primes personal dysfunction in any society. Desperate and defeated peoples often fail to put their best foot forward. But the question is, which of these came first? We tend to give our own poor the benefit of the doubt—their pathological behaviors stem from the conditions to which they have been subjected, but deep down, they remain good people—while for persons of color, we presume that it was their pathology that caused their poverty, and so little compassion need attach. We become indifferent.

But the fate of the poor and working-class—disproportionately of color—is directly tied to the fate of the rest of us, however much we may have ignored that truth for years. Growing economic inequalities in America, which have long had a racial cast to them, are a key contributor to the nation's economic crisis and a principal reason it appears so hard to pull out of the mess. When vast numbers of people can no longer afford to purchase goods and services, those who make goods and offer services can't sell them either. So they cut back on production, which means they cut back on hiring, and choose instead to sit on massive reserves of cash. As of now, corporate America is hoarding over $2 trillion in cash reserves—and banks are hoarding trillions more—rather than creating new employment opportunities or lending out that money for the purposes of investment and production.
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Although we might ascribe such actions to simple greed, the larger truth is that unless average, everyday folks have the income to buy what those companies might otherwise produce, the companies themselves can't really do much else. While the negative demand-side effects of inequality could be finessed for a while thanks to building consumer debt all throughout the 1990s, as the credit crunch spreads and the borrowing bubble bursts, the phony promises of a credit-card economy have come crashing down around us.

Sadly, those of us who have fallen prey to the siren song of the right are lining up behind a political and economic agenda that offers no way out of this mess, and indeed would make it worse. Conservatives propose only to slash taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals, or to reduce regulations so as to ostensibly free up more potential investment dollars with which those companies and persons could create jobs. But if these folks are already flush with cash, what good will tax cuts do? How can such policies spur economic development, hiring and growth when incomes for most workers remain stagnant, and have been so for nearly
three decades,
thereby depressing demand? Corporate profitability is at its highest point in fifty years,
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and nearly 90 percent of the nation's recent income growth has gone to corporate profits (while only about one-tenth of one percent went to worker wages),
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suggesting that if all such entities needed was more money to restart the engine of employment, they would have done it long ago. If $2 trillion in cash reserves fails to spark a hiring spree, why would anyone assume that another $300 billion or so would make the difference? Rather, such tax cuts would simply reduce revenues for vital programs in education, health care and public sector job creation. They would result in the further evisceration of the safety net at the very moment when millions of people are increasingly in need of it.

Once again, none of this is merely an academic point. If we allow ourselves to become indifferent to the suffering of some, because we view them as responsible for their own plight or as bad people, then the programs and efforts we might otherwise have supported (and once did) for those in need will cease to exist as effective measures. Then, having allowed our biases to cloud our judgment and influence our public policy decisions, we will find ourselves—as we are now—without those very safety nets needed for our own support: their pain and our pain become one.

Meanwhile, having become inured to the suffering of others, we find that others become inured to
our
suffering, too, and look down on us just as we long looked down on others who were hurting, unemployed or poor. As millions of us face the prospects of long-term unemployment, the conservative politicians behind whom we have increasingly lined up offer nothing but condemnation and contempt. They suggest that if you're out of work it's because you aren't looking hard enough for a job, never mind that there are routinely dozens if not hundreds of people applying for each available job opening. They bash you for relying on unemployment insurance and insist that such “handouts” encourage sloth, even though the amount of the benefits (for which many unemployed people don't even qualify) are nowhere near sufficient to replace an actual salary. Presidential candidate and conservative stalwart, Newt Gingrich, for instance, has recently argued that there is something “inherently wrong” with paying people something for not working, as if to suggest that unemployed persons are to blame for having lost their jobs and that it would be more moral to force them into even greater desperation than to aid them, by cutting off unemployment benefits, so as to presumably teach them a lesson.
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In that
Newsweek
cover story I mentioned earlier, back in spring 2011, concerning the job troubles facing even well-educated, white-collar white men, one of the former executives interviewed mentioned how shameful his current situation is, and how every time he's out looking for work he feels like he's got a neon sign around him that says “unemployed bum.” But how did it come to this? And why? When did we decide that the unemployed, or those losing their homes, or those who were struggling were bums? Was that the operative mindset during the Great Depression? No. But it is today, and it is a mindset that is part and parcel of the Tea Party mentality that has infected so much of our community.

Remember, it was CNBC business reporter Rick Santelli who first conjured historical tea party imagery in opposition to government support for struggling homeowners. Santelli, who is still credited by Tea Party activists as having issued the “rant heard 'round the world,” and is very much seen as the godfather of the movement, aimed his vitriol not at Wall Street fat cats who had tanked the economy, not at lawmakers who had run up deficits to support wars for which they hadn't seen fit to pay, but rather at those he termed the “losers,” who had gotten in over their heads with their mortgages.
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Standing on the floor of the commodities exchange in Chicago, Santelli bellowed about the injustice of bailing out people who had taken out loans they couldn't afford, ignoring the fact that lenders had preyed upon millions of borrowers with dishonest claims about their loans, or written loans with far higher rates of interest than what the borrowers should have qualified for. To Santelli, and the wealthy white male brokers with whom he communed as he issued the rant, the working-class and middle-class folks who were now following the poor off the economic cliff were to be scorned, rebuked, made the butt of a joke. They—and that means many of
you
—are losers to the business class, as represented by the likes of Santelli. The Tea Party movement was not born of concern over deficits, or taxes, or adherence to the strict wording of the Constitution. Rather, it was born of deep-seated contempt for the pain of average, everyday people. It was born of a temper tantrum thrown by a spoiled, rich white man, surrounded by other spoiled, rich white men who do not see those who struggle to pay their bills as their equals, as Americans worthy of concern or compassion. They view them as hardly human. The seeds of the Tea Party movement, in other words, were sown in the soil of cruelty. Are we not capable of better than that?

But there is one more thing that helps explain the depths of the trauma that so many of us seem to be experiencing at present. And by trauma, I am speaking of the psychological blow of the great recession, rather than merely its financial impact.

A little over a year ago, I engaged in a rather lengthy and generally quite constructive email exchange with a man named Jeremy—white and unemployed at that time for twenty-six weeks—who was especially thrown off stride by the realization that although he had done “everything right” and “played by the rules” and “stayed in school” and “worked hard,” he was still unable to find a job. That Jeremy felt a special kind of injury based on his having worked hard and played by the rules, yet still found himself in the position he was in, is worth exploring at length. This part of his story was, to me at least, especially telling, for it portended a sense on Jeremy's part that he deserved better than this and should have been able to expect better. People like him are not supposed to be out of work and struggling. Perhaps others are (those who haven't his work ethic, for instance), but not people like him.

What is so interesting about this narrative of expectation and entitlement is how contingent it was on Jeremy's race, whether or not he realized it, and whether or not most of us would see it as such. The fact is, people of color, no matter how hard they've worked, and no matter their level of education, have
never
been able to take for granted that their merit and initiative would pay off. They have never had the luxury of buying into the narrative of meritocracy the way we have, because they have seen family members, friends and others in their communities work hard every day and get nowhere fast. In this sense, the white mythology of America, which people of color have had no choice but to question and have always know to be only a partial truth on a good day, is one that has set up Jeremy and others like him. By convincing white men that all they had to do was work hard, that mythology—and white men's privilege of being able to buy into it, and their privilege of having it work most of the time—has let them down doubly hard. It's one thing to suffer. But to suffer when you were told by the culture that suffering was not, by and large, the lot of people like you, is to experience a psychic blow that is magnified tenfold.