by Tim Wise
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.153 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,154 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),155 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.156
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.157 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.
When one’s illusions are shattered, it is never a pretty thing. To come to realize that everything we assumed about our society was a lie is nothing if not discomfiting. That people of color almost always saw things for what they were points out another irony of the current moment: the fact that the folks being hit hardest by the downturn (who are indeed still people of color) are perhaps the most prepared to deal with it, cope and survive; meanwhile, those who had been able to count on the system more or less working for them may be the ones least prepared to do so.
It brings to mind the Great Depression, during which it was never the poor or folks of color who went to the tops of buildings and threw themselves off, unable to face the prospects of financial ruin. Rather, it was the white and wealthy who saw a bump in suicide rates, so unprepared were they to deal with setback. Likewise, consider the way that adult children of parents who decide to divorce after forty years of marriage so often take the news harder than even the pre-teen whose parents do the same. The pre-teen has had nowhere near enough time to construct a mythologized image of his or her parents, or their love for one another. But when you have grown up assuming the sanguinity of the home in which you were raised, only to learn that perhaps things were not as they seemed, it can seem as if the whole world is collapsing.
This, it appears, is where many of us find ourselves now: unmoored, untethered, adrift on a sea of shattered illusions. Interestingly, had the society been less committed to the myth than to creating a reality of equity and opportunity for all, perhaps what Jeremy and millions of us are experiencing right now would never have come to pass. Had the culture not set white men up to expect the world, precisely because they were deemed superior to everyone else, the mental anguish and esteem-battering currently under way could have been prevented. Perhaps if we had been serious about making the deed match the word, and had we encouraged the kind of unity needed to make a society livable for all, things would have been different. If we had understood our job to be the achievement of our national promise as a real and living thing, rather than merely the recitation of a handful of platitudes, devoid of animation, much pain could have been circumvented altogether.
One thing is certain: we will have to allow ourselves to wake up now to the harsh realities that we have been so assiduously encouraged to ignore. For a long time, and for most of us, life was a matter of simply following the directions on a roadmap, confident that if we paid close enough attention and followed them religiously, we’d likely end up at our preferred destination. Play by the rules, work hard, study hard, plan for the future and put away some reserve monies for a rainy day. But the truth is, we never believed in rainy days, I mean never really believed in them, and never this much rain. People of color knew the weather, made sure in fact never to leave home without at least a metaphorical umbrella close at hand, but we didn’t. Rain was what happened to others, but not to us. Or if it did touch us, it was but a temporary shower, just sufficient to remind us to stay on our toes, but never enough of a downpour to make us question the larger forecast we’d been given by the meteorologists of our culture.
Now, as the economy implodes and the future creeps up on us as thick and murky as chowder, those directions we’ve been following seem no longer to suffice. They are akin to the instructions barked out at us from a GPS device sitting atop our dashboard, but which, sadly, were programmed long ago, before the terrain had changed. So now we’re doing as the stern voice suggests we should, but we’re finding ourselves lost, realizing that the turn she told us to take hasn’t brought us to the place we thought it would. There are new roads, new subdivisions in the society we thought we knew, detours that hadn’t existed before, dead ends that now choke off the path that just a few years earlier seemed so simple and straightforward.
Of course, our first inclination when led astray by an outdated GPS is to curse the machine, forgetting that it was programmed by fallible people just like us, who thought they knew every twist and turn but had actually missed the changes about which we would have done well to know. At some point, we realize, and hopefully not too late, that we have to look inward and question our reliance on the machine in the first place. The GPS does what the GPS was made to do. It has no brain separate and apart from those of the men and women who built it. It will pick the route and instruct us to take it, and even if it manages to give us multiple choices—the shortest path or perhaps the one with the least traffic or the one that is the most scenic—it can only do this because some flesh-and-blood human being told the machine which options existed, which is to say, the machine is merely selecting from a pre-prepared set of possibilities provided by a person whose own horizons may well have been limited. The machine cannot, literally, choose.
But we had a choice. We have one now. And that choice is whether we are going to continue to rely uncritically on an outdated set of directions, barked at us by a machine of our own making, or perhaps question those directions, perhaps create a new set of instructions for how to thrive and arrive at that destination of personal and collective accomplishment we euphemistically call the “good life.” Perhaps we can fashion a set of collective goals that will move us toward the place we were meant to be, toward the promise that has always been this nation, however unfulfilled and half empty the promise has long been.
I know this much: if we, white America, do not quickly relinquish the remaining grip exercised by the national mythology, it will continue to batter us, to insult us, to mock our hard work and suffering, and to reinforce the self-loathing that has been its primary product for generations. And it will render ou
r nation utterly unworkable in years to come. How, after all, can the United States remain an economically viable nation if we get to that place thirty years from now where people of color are half of the population, and yet still twice as likely as whites to be unemployed and three times as likely to be poor? How can we remain an even remotely productive and functioning society when half of our population has nine years’ less life expectancy, double the rate of infant mortality and children born with low birth weight, and one-twentieth the net worth, on average, as the other half? The answer is that we cannot, and will not. Equity is the last, and only, remaining hope for this experiment we call the United States.
The good news is that we can change. Redemption, both for us as white folks and for the nation as a whole, is possible. In fact, the path for that change has already been laid out before us, long ago and for many generations, by some within our own group, following the lead of people of color and working in solidarity with them to build a better and more just society. However much we may have been unaware of this path, it is incumbent upon us to discover it, or rediscover it, now.