Campaigning in Beaumont, Texas, in February 2008, Obama told a predominantly Black audience that they should not give “cold Popeyes” to their children for breakfast, provide a bag of potato chips for lunch, or let them drink eight sodas a day. In chiding Black parents for these alleged nutritional failings, he did not mention food deserts that tend to plague Black neighborhoods nor offer any proposal to redress them. He also accused them: “When that child comes home, you got the TV set on, you got the radio on, you don’t check their homework, there is not a book in the house, you’ve got the video game playing.”82 The same year, he gave a Father’s Day address on the South Side of Chicago at the Apostolic Church of God—twenty thousand members strong. He decried “the national epidemic of absentee fathers” and pledged to address it with legislation to step up child support enforcement. He drew on his personal mythology as a boy whose own father was absent and presented it as broader truth. Obama said of “too many” impliedly Black “AWOL” fathers: “They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.”83
Prolific author and professor of African American studies, Michael Eric Dyson had taken comedian Bill Cosby to task in a book three years before, calling him out for his public crusade against the alleged failings of poor Black parents.84 The day after Obama gave his Father’s Day speech, Dyson criticized him in Time, suggesting it was aimed at ambivalent white voters and grounded in stereotypes that had endured since the Moynihan Report. Dyson cited a study by social psychologist Rebekah Levine Coley showing that Black fathers who did not live with their children were more likely than fathers of any other race or ethnicity to maintain contact with their offspring.85 In 2013, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report that found Black fathers were more involved on a daily basis with their children than white and Hispanic fathers, the other groups studied. Black fathers do naturally what society stereotypes them as not doing.86 Obama could have told a different, more nuanced story, of those who fall down in the face of systemic forces and the heroic efforts of those who father despite all challenges. Some of President Obama’s second-term policies would begin to attack structural forces descendants face. But campaigning on Father’s Day in 2008, it was mainly the absent Black daddy’s fault.
One critic argued that when Obama lectured Black folk, he was inoculating himself, perhaps, from appearing too aligned with Black Americans, still president of all the people, as he regularly said.87 Obama had to overcompensate for being a Black man in the White House. He, too, was constrained by long-established national habits and ideas about Blackness. On those occasions when he mildly entered Black pain, noting that if he had a son, he would have looked like slain Trayvon Martin or stating that the police behaved “stupidly” when they arrested Dr. Henry Louis Gates on his own front porch, many whites took umbrage.88
Obama was caught between the optimistic possibilities for multiracial coalition that propelled him into office and an old politics animated by anti-Black feeling. After being elected to a second term, he was emancipated, and his administration took steps to chip away at the follow-on institutions of supremacy, though he did not talk about it in this manner. He was the first modern president to visit a prison. He promoted policies of decarceration and reentry and the federal prison population began to decline on his watch. In the final two years of his presidency, his secretary of Education, John King, began to actively promote and incentivize school integration, and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development issued a series of regulations designed to promote residential mobility and integration. Obama also granted commutations and pardons to more inmates than any president since President Harry Truman—1,927 by the time he left office.89 And his Department of Justice founded the Smart on Crime Initiative that, among other efforts, instructed federal prosecutors to pursue fewer low-level drug offense cases.90
Donald Trump was perhaps the most transparent president to use ghetto mythology to benefit very rich people. A Twitter president, with eighty-eight million followers in 2020, he used his cellphone-pulpit to bully. Of course, he was ecumenical in attacking individuals and institutions that did not serve his personal interests, including the press, national security agencies, the Federal Reserve, and the FBI. He frequently stereotyped entire groups and in his first three years in office attacked minorities more than 850 times on Twitter.91
Among numerous calumnies, he cast Mexicans as “rapists” in his first speech as candidate for president. He regularly described asylum seekers at the Mexico-US border as dangerous invaders, words invoked by a domestic terrorist who shot at a crowd of people at an El Paso Walmart—injuring twenty-six and killing twenty-two.92 He repeatedly used stereotypical and inciting language to describe the Islamic community, once declaring on NBC: “They are not assimilating . . . They want sharia law. They don’t want the laws that we have.” He said Jews who vote for Democrats were “very disloyal to Jewish people and very disloyal to Israel,” which is insulting to Jews who lean Democratic and trades on an anti-Semitic stereotype that Jews pledge allegiance first to Israel.93 In a closed-door meeting with congressional leaders about immigration reform, Trump said that he did not want more immigrants from Africa and Haiti, which he categorized as “shithole countries,” and said that he preferred more immigrants from places like Norway.94 Racist stereotypes animated and propelled some of Trump’s most discriminatory or inhumane policies, including caging immigrant children at the southern border and travel bans targeted at Muslim countries.
And Trump’s inhumanity included a particularly long history of trading in ghetto mythology. Arguably the Central Park Five case of 1989, in which a white woman jogger was brutally beaten and raped and five teens of color were wrongly accused, marked Trump’s entry onto the national political stage. He ignited hysteria when he placed a full-page advertisement in four New York newspapers including the New York Times, under the outsized, bold heading “Bring Back the Death Penalty. Bring Back Our Police!” “What has happened to law and order,” he queried in the advertisement. He painted a picture of New Yorkers held hostage “to a world ruled by the law of the streets, as roving bands of wild criminals roam our neighborhoods.” In addition to demanding reinstatement of the death penalty, Trump called on politicians like Mayor Ed Koch to “unshackle” law enforcement “from the constant chant of ‘police brutality.’” In Trump’s advertisement, “thugs” were not “citizens,” and they deserved brutal treatment.
Even after the Central Park Five were exonerated, after the actual perpetrator, an adult serial rapist and murderer, confessed and his DNA matched that at the crime scene, Trump persisted with myths, asserting that “these young men do not exactly have the pasts of angels.”95 And yet none of them had ever been arrested prior to the jogger’s tragic case. The facts did not matter. He lied to suit his ends, a habit on full display during his presidency.96
When questioned about the case in June 2019, President Trump refused to apologize. There were “people on both sides of that,” he said, siding with a much-criticized prosecutor and police detectives.97 This utterance was eerily similar to what he said after a white nationalist plowed his car into a multiracial crowd in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing Heather Heyer. “You also had some very fine people on both sides,” he said.98 Trump’s signature politics required demarcating lines, nodding, signaling, or screaming out loud to those people he was with about those he was impliedly against.
In his first and second campaigns for president, Trump invoked “law and order,” the dog whistle Nixon had used in the wake of the urban uprisings of the 1960s. In the 2016 campaign, Trump associated all Blacks with the inner city, painting a vivid image: “Our inner cities are a disaster. You get shot walking to the store. They have no education, they have no jobs.”99 At a campaign rally, he encouraged police to be “rough” with “thugs” they arrest.100 The Black Lives Matter movement, rising in 2016, gave him a perfect foil to sig
nal his cultural and racial affinities. At campaign rallies, “all lives matter” was his consistent response to BLM protestors or anyone who had the temerity to express concern about police brutality.101
As president, Trump was particularly withering in his comments about Baltimore. On Twitter, he called now-deceased congressman Elijah Cummings’s district “dangerous & filthy” and a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.” He also said of Baltimore, “No human being would want to live there.” Trump once called the Atlanta district of the now-deceased civil rights saint Congressman John Lewis “crime infested” and instructed him to focus on “the burning and crime-infested inner-cities of the US.” He tweeted that the four congressional women of color and American citizens known as the Squad—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib—should “go back [to] the totally broken and crime infested places which they came from.”102 New York Times columnist Charles Blow contended that Trump’s rhetoric linking Blackness to criminality and “infestation” were part of his larger project of maintaining a supremacist hierarchy in which nonwhites are subhuman and whites are superior.103
Beyond Twitter rants, as with prior presidents, ghetto mythology shaped harsh policy decisions. The Trump administration proposed to eliminate food assistance for people stuck in high unemployment places who could not find a job, a new rule that would cut seven hundred thousand people from SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). Though this policy would hurt many poor whites in struggling areas, ghetto myths rendered the people on food assistance Black in the public’s mind and this likely insulated Trump from criticism from his base for proposing such cuts.104
The Trump administration also announced a vague plan to lower the official federal poverty line, a stealth move that, if established, would purge millions from safety-net programs like Medicaid, free-school meals, and energy assistance. David Super, a legal scholar and expert on social welfare policy, claimed that the only discernible motive for such cruelty to poor people, including children, was to help pay for a $2 trillion tax cut, mainly for the super wealthy and corporations, that our nation could not afford.105 Trump proposed to obliterate the social safety net by cutting $4.4. trillion in government expenditures over ten years.106
In addition to tearing at an already tattered social safety net, as described previously, the Trump administration repealed or suspended housing rules that the Obama administration put in place to promote residential integration. The Trump administration also proposed deregulatory “reforms” that steered investment and lending away from historically redlined, disadvantaged communities to luxury development, benefiting wealthy investors and corporate interests. From Reagan to Trump, mythologizing to promote tax cuts for rich people, deregulation, and government shrinkage, except for military spending and border walls, became vulgarly transparent.
To his credit, Trump did support and sign the First Step Act of 2018, a bipartisan effort to reduce the size of the federal prison population and improve outcomes for returning citizens. The act retroactively reduced mandatory-minimum sentences and the harshest penalties for nonviolent drug offenses and gave judges more discretion to depart from the mandatory-minimum, three-strike harshness that fueled mass incarceration. Trump celebrated this achievement as a correction of the excesses of the 1994 Crime Bill that Bill Clinton championed. President Trump invited a rainbow of beneficiaries of the act to the White House and humanized their stories, showing that he was capable of applying a different lens than “thug” to formerly incarcerated people.107
And yet Trump leaned on law-and-order tropes in his 2020 reelection bid, more like George Wallace than Richard Nixon in stoking racial division. Trump deployed federal jackboots against citizen protestors, inciting tensions to orchestrate the reality show he wanted. Whether raising a Bible after a night in which federal forces tear-gassed citizens protesting for Black lives, sending forces to duel with protestors in Portland, Oregon, or unconditionally defending Kenosha, Wisconsin, police who shot an unarmed Black father, Jacob Blake, seven times at point-blank range as his three sons watched, Trump cast himself to suburban white voters as their protector against anarchy, riots, and racial integration of their neighborhoods.
Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden had been a lead drafter and shepherd of the 1994 Crime Bill and had a lengthy record of supporting tough criminal policies. In 2020, candidate Biden pointed to the 1994 Crime Bill’s ten-year assault weapons ban, prohibitions on violence against women, and funding for drug treatment and background checks for gun purchases.108 Biden, historically a political moderate, also made racial reconciliation and racial justice a central tenet of his campaign. We reached a tipping point, it seemed, in Democratic Party politics. Anti-Black dog-whistling was now a political nonstarter rather than de rigueur for the party that had once dominated the South as a defender of white supremacy. The choice for voters in 2020 was stark, pitting an emerging multiracial coalition open to racial reckoning against an enduring contingent prone to vote their resentments. For five decades, and centuries, whether and how to incorporate descendants as equal, valued citizens remained a central subtext of American politics. Antitax, racial capitalism wrought profound inequality, and Trump attempted to tap the rage of those locked out, which is most people, not with dog whistles but a bullhorn. That Biden won—with a record eighty-one million votes—along with Kamala Harris, suggests real possibilities for a multiracial democracy that values Black lives and brings all people along.
BELIEFS VS. FACTS
Despite politics, empirical evidence frequently debunks ghetto myths. According to an extensive body of social science research, many people associate Blackness with criminality.109 Social and political scientists document how local crime stories, particularly local news outlets prime watchers to conflate violence with being Black, activating subconscious fear and loathing of Black people.110 Not surprisingly, public beliefs about Black criminality far surpass reality. The vast majority of Black people are not violent criminals and rates of violent crime fell sharply after the mid-1990s, especially in poor Black neighborhoods. By 2010, rates of violent crime were half of what they had been at their peak.111 Inconveniently for mythologists, by 2015, whites in America were committing the largest percentage of violent crime.112 And yet the Trump administration intentionally downplayed the rise of white supremacist domestic terrorist groups and defunded law enforcement and national security investigation of them.113
Those who worry about violent crime should most fear their own race, particularly men they know.114 Most violent crime occurs between people of the same race. But discarding the lens of fear of Black people requires discerning which Black individuals, based on their individual behavior, actually warrant precaution—mental work regularly done for white individuals.
The facts also defy damaging stereotypes about who uses public assistance. Pre-COVID, in 2017, 28.0 percent of TANF recipients were white, 28.4 percent were Black, and 37.4 percent were Hispanic, with use of the program by Native American, Asian, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, or multiracial groups at roughly 1 to 2 percent respectively.115 These relative percentages of the rainbow of TANF beneficiaries have been fairly consistent since fiscal year 2011.116 Though historically Black participation in “welfare” has been higher, this historic discrepancy was not large, and “welfare” was never a majority-Black program. Meanwhile, since at least fiscal year 2010, white families have greatly outnumbered Black families in receiving SNAP food aid, comprising on average 36 percent of SNAP families. Black families are the second-largest group assisted by SNAP, comprising on average since 2010, 24.7 percent of SNAP families.117 Post-COVID, the US Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service reported difficulty getting reliable data from states on SNAP usage because of the pandemic.
Out-of-wedlock births are heavily associated with Black women and the alleged breakdown of the Black family. Despite this narrative, births to unmarried Black females have dropped dram
atically since 1970. Black teenage birthrates, which dropped by 63 percent between 1991 and 2013, are currently at an all-time low. Unmarried Black women are doing what conservatives have lectured them to do, having fewer children. Married Black couples have cut back on childbearing even more; it is their restraint that skews the ratio of married to unmarried Black births, making it appear that out-of-wedlock childbearing has been on the rise among Black Americans when in fact such births have been falling precipitously.118
Thankfully, a growing cohort of Americans has awakened and rejects stereotyping. Recent research suggests a gap of perception between culturally dexterous and nondexterous people. Cultural dexterity, a phrase I coined, is the quality of being able to accept, if not welcome, racial and cultural difference and not insist that one’s own cultural norms or race be dominant.119 A culturally dexterous white person accepts the loss of centrality of whiteness in America and is willing to work at accommodating if not embracing a variety of cultural and social norms. Culturally dexterous whites practice pluralism. They see race, or at least don’t pretend that they do not see it. The dexterous, in my view, are also willing to see and name racism. Some go further and actively resist it. A dexterous person has friends or loved ones of a different race, and this experience humanizes others in ways that can debunk stereotypes. Younger whites are more apt to be dexterous than their parents or grandparents, though it is easy enough to find images of white collegiate partiers dressing “ghetto” for the thrill of it.120
Gaps of perception about the prevalence of racism and structural barriers that hold Black Americans back show up in opinion polls. A 2019 study by Pew Research Center found that 68 percent of Blacks and 55 percent of whites believed that being Black generally hurts a person’s ability to achieve social and economic progress.121 Partisan identity influenced whether whites were willing to acknowledge structural barriers. White Democrats who acknowledge Black disadvantage identify racial discrimination (70 percent), less access to good schools (75 percent) or high-paying jobs (64 percent) as major obstacles while white Republicans tend to blame family instability, lack of good role models or lack of motivation to work hard.122
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