Dear White America (6 page)

Only slightly less blatant are the ways right-wing commentators have stoked the fires of white anxiety by portraying the president as somehow being out to get us. To wit, the claim that President Obama's health care reform legislation is really just a backdoor way to obtain reparations for slavery on behalf of black Americans, an argument forwarded by wildly influential media personality Glenn Beck—wildly influential because millions of us made him so.
70
Along the same bizarre and yet politically astute line, consider Rush Limbaugh, who has claimed that the president is deliberately trying to destroy the economy and is “happily” presiding “over the decline of America” as “payback” for the history of racism and slavery.
71
Though these kinds of arguments are absurd on their face (what kind of reparations, after all, require one to get sick first, in order to get paid?), they are effective tools for whipping up anxiety and anger in a time of social change and insecurity.

Or consider Eric Bolling of Fox
Business News
, who recently accused the president of hosting “hoodlums in the hizzouse”—using hip-hop slang to characterize the first family's home—all because Obama had met with the leader of Gabon in the White House and had invited rapper Common (whose lyrics are anything
but
gangsterish) to a presidential event a few weeks earlier.
72
This was close on the heels of Bolling's prior remarks that Obama should stop “chugging forties” in Ireland—a reference to forty-ounce bottles of malt liquor stereotypically associated with African Americans—and come home to check out the devastation wrought by tornadoes in Missouri.
73
Though the president had indeed been photographed having a pint of beer in an Irish pub, it most certainly had not been a “forty,” as Bolling had to have known. The use of the imagery was deliberate, a dog whistle to those of us who still can't quite deal with the presence of a black man atop the nation's political system.

So too, Donald Trump's recent critique of the president, which, rather than focusing on his policies, took aim at his academic credentials. Despite Barack Obama having graduated
magna cum laude
from Harvard Law, Trump floated the idea (shortly before deciding not to run for president himself) that perhaps Obama hadn't deserved to get into the Ivy League schools from which he'd graduated with honors.
74
Indeed, Trump noted, he had many friends with kids who'd been turned down from those institutions despite “fantastic” test scores. This slam on the president—essentially a way of characterizing him as just another affirmative action beneficiary who probably only got into good schools because of race, thereby bumping some white kid from a slot they deserved—was nothing if not transparent. And coming from a man who had openly and proudly supported the McCain-Palin ticket
75
—whose members, respectively, graduated fifth from the bottom of their class and attended five schools in six years, barely graduating at all
76
—it reeked of hypocrisy and racial resentment.

None of these attacks by leading members of the conservative cognitariat have been accidental or incidental; neither are they the only examples of blatant appeals to white racial resentment and anxiety that have been seen in recent years. They are, however, a good indication that we are far from the post-racial moment that so many saw fit to proclaim after the election of the nation's first president of color. Just as sexism failed to disappear in India, Pakistan, Great Britain or Israel following the election of women as heads of state in those places, so too, racism remains a reality in the United States, irrespective of the color of the nation's president.

And for those of us who consider ourselves liberal, left or progressive—and perhaps voted for President Obama—we can't be smug either. The truth is, a poll taken just a month before the election in 2008 found that a large percentage of white Democrats who intended to vote for Obama nonetheless admitted to holding any number of racist stereotypes about blacks to be true.
77
So the fact that many were willing to carve out an exception for this one black guy, while still viewing the larger black community negatively, hardly acquits us of the charge that we too may have some stuff to work on. Research on subconscious and implicit racial bias has found the vast majority of us, myself included, have internalized certain racist and prejudicial beliefs about people of color.
78
Not because we are bad people, let alone bigots, or even because we are “racists” at our core, but simply because we are
here
, and advertising works, and we've been subjected to a lot of negative advertising, so to speak, when it comes to those who are not white in this society.

For instance, news coverage of crime overrepresents people of color as criminal offenders, relative to the percentage of crime such persons actually commit,
79
thereby contributing to widespread stereotypes about black and brown criminality.
80
As a result of years of conditioning, research has found, when whites are hooked up to brain-scan imaging machines and exposed to even subliminal images of black men, flashed on a screen for mere milliseconds, roughly nine in ten show dramatically increased activity in the part of the brain that is activated when a person is afraid.
81
The fact that we are four to five times more likely to be criminally victimized by another white person than by a black person doesn't appear to change our assumptions about who poses the greatest risk to our safety and well-being.
82

Other research shows that we are far more likely to perceive aggression and violence in a person of color than in a white person, even when both exhibit similar behaviors. So, for instance, in one classic study, groups of whites were shown a video in which two men—one black and one white—were arguing. When the white man (who was an actor) shoved the black man at the end of the argument, only 17 percent of whites viewing the incident said they perceived the act as violent; but when the black actor administered the shove, three of four whites said they perceived the act as a violent one.
83

In fact, sadly, even people of color sometimes internalize negative views about themselves. A recent study—mirroring similar research from more than a half century ago—found that African American children tend to prefer white dolls to black dolls, because they view the former as “good” and “nice” while they see the latter as “mean” and “stupid.”
84

In many ways it's not surprising that we would all be susceptible to internalizing these types of racial biases. Even without any direct instruction or conditioning, adopting views that are racially prejudicial comes easily in a nation such as ours. If we grow up in a culture where we are told that everyone can make it if they try, and yet we can see that many have
not
“made it,” and that certain groups are far worse off than others, it becomes almost logical to conclude that there must be something defective about those groups and something
better
about the groups at the top of the ladder. In other words, the combination of subjective ideology (the myth of meritocracy) and objective inequity (race-based stratification) creates the perfect recipe for the adoption of racist views as well as class bias. That so many of us would fall into that kind of cognitive trap hardly makes us bad people, let alone bigots. But it does mean we have issues. And it also means that unless we address these issues, the problems of institutional inequity will continue to fester.

And yes, I know it's not easy to hear any of this right now. Millions of us are hurting as well. As the economy has imploded in recent years, we too have been caught up in the maelstrom of financial insecurity: long-term unemployment, lack of adequate health care, foreclosed houses or mortgages we struggle to pay on time, or an inability to afford our kids' college education. I get it, I really do. Even if we sympathize with those persons of color who continue to face unequal opportunities and discrimination—be it overt or subtle—so long as we're facing serious economic setbacks and uncertainty ourselves, many among us may not feel like focusing on such matters. But we must, because the inequities faced by people of color, and the way we have long disregarded those inequities or assumed they weren't our problem, have led us directly to this current moment. In other words, our pain and their pain are connected, far more so than many of us may believe. Only by addressing the one can we ever hope to address the other.

To understand why this is so, we'll need to closely examine this particular moment and how we got here. Specifically, we'll need to interrogate some of the things that we as whites have long been able to take for granted, how those normative assumptions are being challenged at present, and how those challenges, and the social changes they portend, have intensified our insecurity, our fear and our anxiety about the future. In large part, the crisis of the current moment is only partially a material one; it is only partly about economic insecurity. More than that, it is about how a people can be set up by their own myths, their own internal narrative of their society—the story they tell themselves and others—in such a way as to leave them (us) ill-prepared for a changing and dynamic social reality. That is where we find ourselves today. It is at once a dangerous and yet portentous place to be.

The fact is, things
are
changing in America, and in many ways we haven't been prepared for those changes. To be white has been to take a lot for granted over the years, and to assume that
our
normal was everyone's normal; that our way of seeing the country and the culture—and that our experiences within both—were the ones that mattered, and were normative for all. We could take for granted that the political leaders would look like us, as would the cultural icons: they would all have salt-of-the-earth biographies and chiseled jaws and wear cowboy hats like John Wayne, or for that matter, Ronald Reagan riding horseback on his ranch. They would all be Christians. We could take for granted that our communities would be filled mostly with people who looked like us, and whose cultural and religious traditions were similar to our own. We would not have to see or think about people of color too often, let alone rub shoulders with them daily, on the job or in the supermarket. We wouldn't see signs printed in languages other than English. We wouldn't even have “ethnic food” sections in our groceries. And a lot of us rather preferred it that way. Above all, we could take for granted a certain level of economic security, and rest assured that our narrative about the country—what makes us great and what we stand for—would be a narrative over which we would have ultimate control.

As harsh as it may sound to some of us, Toni Morrison had it right when she suggested, “In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.” When it came to understanding and envisioning the ideal American, to be white long meant to be the prototype, the floor model, of that national species. True enough, there were hundreds of indigenous nations within the borders of what we now call North America, long before the arrival of the first Europeans. So too, the Spanish brought and then abandoned a group of Africans off the coast of what is now South Carolina in the late 1500s, several decades before the Jamestown colony and even further in advance of the Mayflower. So yes, one could make the argument that there are persons of color who were and are more “American” than the Anglo colonists who, in the early seventeenth century, began the process of conquest, believing as they did in their God-given right to lay claim to lands beyond their shores.

One could make that argument, could have been making it indeed for hundreds of years, but to what effect? No matter who was here first, whiteness and American identity have been joined at the hip for centuries; the sons and daughters of England, Ireland, Germany, Scotland and the like, have long been able to look in the mirror and see ourselves as the living embodiment of the American ideal. No matter their prior presence on these shores, the black, brown and red have forever and always had to lobby, petition, plead, scrape, fight and even die for the right to lay claim to that ideal as their own. They have been as perpetual outsiders, standing at the gates looking in, never as fully American as the lighter-skinned who resided within the walls of the national mansion and who—if not always immediately, certainly within a generation or so—were accepted as part of the family, jumping those who had been in line long before them.

Even the oft-heard and generally liberal cry that we are a “nation of immigrants” has presupposed that European identity and American identity were one. After all, indigenous people did not enter the country via Ellis Island, and neither did people of African descent. They were not immigrants except under the most tortured definition of that term. And so, in the classic
Schoolhouse Rock
cartoon “The Great American Melting Pot” we get the line: “America was the new world and Europe was the old,” delivered merrily and without the slightest misgiving. America's melting pot concept was always conceived as a way to take people from various backgrounds and melt them into a new unitary whole, with the European taste predominating among the ingredients.