Dear White America

by Tim Wise

  It takes some nerve and a disturbing sense of entitlement to believe that our pain is the only pain that counts, that only our ground zero matters and should be memorialized in this way, or to suggest that we are the only ones who have known terror, and that having done so we now have the right to draw a circle around us, a bubble of specialness that can keep us warm and protected like some amniotic sac inside which we will forever be insulated from harm. But that is what our nostalgic and completely inaccurate remembrance of history practically guarantees: it allows us to rewrite the past and erase from our memories those aspects in which we come up a bit short in the greatness department.

  Anyone who dares reflect accurately upon that history is made a pariah for daring to question the nostalgic narrative. According to the right, for instance, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan is to be condemned because she dared concur with the opinion of former Justice Thurgood Marshall, for whom she once clerked. And what was Marshall’s opinion, the concurrence with which would invite such shrieks of indignation on the part of those out to discredit her? Simple: it was the part about how the nation, as originally conceived, was “defective from the start,” due to its enshrinement of enslavement and white supremacy.128 This is a position with which no intellectually honest or remotely informed person could disagree, but with which, apparently, millions of us do. Which says nothing about Thurgood Marshall or Elena Kagan, but volumes about those who would criticize either on this point.

  But what can we expect, in a nation where the likes of former Senator (and now Republican presidential candidate) Rick Santorum can chastise President Obama for making the point that America didn’t really begin to come into its promise until after the civil rights revolution of the 1960s and the creation of certain social programs like Medicare and Medicaid, intended to provide a modicum of health security to the American public? As Santorum recently bellowed on the campaign trail, America was a “great place before 1965,” a statement which is not even remotely true, and which stands as a slap in the face to every person of color who resided here before that time.129 Before 1965, this country was a system of formal white supremacy and institutionalized apartheid. It was not even decent, let alone great, for millions of Americans. That it had the potential for greatness is inarguable, but that is neither what Santorum said nor what he intended to suggest. He intended to obliterate, by his comments, the lived experiences of people of color, about whom he apparently could not care less. His memories of the past, and ours (as white folks), are the ones that matter to him.

  So too with Mike Huckabee, formerly the Governor of Arkansas and a Fox News personality, who has criticized the president for “not seeing America” the way “we do,” and specifically because while Obama was living in places like Indonesia for a brief period, or Hawaii (doing God knows what), “we” were going to Boy Scout and Rotary Club meetings.130 Really? We were? Who was? Not black folks on the South Side of Chicago. Not Latinos in East L.A. Not Lakota people on Pine Ridge. For that matter, not even most of us were living that small-town, Mayberry, cornpone kind of life. But by saying it, by suggesting that the real America is different from Obama’s America—and for that matter, folks of color generally, or urban types more broadly—Huckabee can play directly to that sense of national glory squandered, national identity under attack, and the need for some type of small-town (implicitly white) rebirth.

  Upon close reflection the attempt is transparent, but sadly, close reflection on such matters is not what we’re encouraged to engage in. Rather, those who brandish nostalgia as a political tool know that for people who are anxious, nervous about cultural, political, economic and demographic change, this kind of thing works. It primes the pump of racial insecurity, making it that much easier for those so primed to stand and declare their desire, above all else, to “take their country back.”

  Of course I know that many of us white folk get upset at this suggestion—at the notion that this mantra of national reclamation is somehow connected to a narrative of racial nostalgia or resentment. Two years ago I engaged in a rather lengthy email exchange with someone whose views no doubt mirrored those of many millions more. She was upset because of something I had said during a television interview on CNN regarding the Tea Party movement. Being a part of that movement, she took offense to what she perceived to be my position; namely, that the Tea Party was propelled forward by racial hatred of a black president. I tried to explain that, in fact, that was not my argument. I do not believe that the Tea Party movement, or its individual members and supporters, are operating necessarily out of racist motivations, nor have I ever claimed that opposition to the president automatically or even necessarily makes one racist. I had said, however, and do believe that the mantra of taking the country “back” contains an unhealthy degree of racial resentment as part of its “background noise.” It isn’t racism in the classic sense; rather, it is the rhetoric of white anxiety operationalized in a political movement. When white people—and especially older white people—speak of going “back” to an earlier time, it is not unreasonable to become a bit nervous about what they might mean. I know the kind of country that was theirs as children and young adults.

  The difference between racism and racial resentment was lost on her, and she continued to press her case. Race had nothing to do with the Tea Party movement, she insisted. The desire to take the country back is not about segregation, she assured me, not about going back to the days of overt racial oppression and Jim Crow. So I decided to play the game, and asked her quite simply what the Tea Party folks mean when they say they wish to “take their country back?” What is that about, if it’s not about race? Simple, she said: we mean that we want to go back to a time of lower taxes and smaller government. And more to the point, we’d like to return to a time when people were self--sufficient and didn’t rely on others to provide for them—when people believed in taking personal responsibility for their lives. This, she explained, was the kind of self-reliance that was directly at stake in the health care debate. If health care reform passed—even the minimalist reforms proposed by the Obama administration, which would have fallen far short of a guaranteed national health care system—the rugged individualism that had long marked our nation’s culture would be destroyed. People would become ever more dependent on others to take care of them, rather than relying on their own initiative and hard work.

  I suspect that many of you who consider yourselves conservatives—and even some who aren’t that far to the right—would echo her sentiments in this regard. Such conservatism, you might say, is largely about a philosophical belief in limited government intervention in the economic workings of the nation—a preference for individual self-sufficiency and independence—and a tax burden less onerous than what you experience today. So far so good. But might we dig a bit deeper? Because when we do, we begin to notice that the debate about the size and scope of government, about taxation, about “individualism” versus the “collective good,” has been implicitly about race for several years now. It is not merely a philosophical issue but an intensely racialized discourse.

  Take taxes for example. The Tea Partier insisted to me that she wanted to go back to a time when taxes were lower. Yet she failed to specify when that might be. I wanted to know exactly when in our nation’s history did she think we had more or less gotten it right when it came to the proper level of taxation, and so I asked her. Now, I suppose she could have said 1897, or 1909. Both were before the imposition of the federal income tax, and in relative terms, I suppose they were periods of “low taxation.” But I knew she wouldn’t say either of these. Children were working in factories and mines in those days, workers had no rights whatsoever, and unless you were one of a handful of rich white people or their kids, life was pretty rough. She could have said 1926, I suppose. Although this was after the imposition of the income tax, the rates of taxation were relatively low on most people, so was that perhaps, what she meant? But of course not. The 1920s were rather miserable for most
folks: not just people of color suffering under the weight of racial apartheid, but most whites as well, whose economic and social condition left more than a little to be desired.

  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.131 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.132 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.133 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.134 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.135 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.136

  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.137 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 programs138—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.