Tim Wise's Blog, page 14

The Poor Have It Easy? Wealth, Inheritance and Right-Wing Statistical Fraud

(The following is a slightly altered and far more sarcastic version of a section of Tim Wise’s forthcoming book, Culture of Cruelty: How America’s Elite Demonize the Poor, Valorize the Rich and Jeopardize the Future)

Perhaps you think you’ve heard everything.

Perhaps you’re one of those folks who feels that comparing criticisms of growing wealth inequality to Nazi propaganda is so obviously absurd that nothing can top it.

Perhaps you’ve found yourself thinking, “Wow, ya know, 85 people owning as much wealth as the bottom 3.5 billion people on the planet really doesn’t seem to be about merit,” and perhaps you worry about the rationality of anyone who thinks otherwise. Perhaps you wonder how anyone could seriously believe that those who question this level of inequity might be planning their own personal Kristallnacht, or preparing ovens for the roasting of the rich; or at least you figure, “Hey, the only person who might actually believe that kind of puerile nonsense would be a cretinous toad like venture capitalist Tom Perkins, who was once married to that shitty novelist Danielle Steel, and who once killed a man by running him over with his yacht,” because after all, that would make perfect sense.

But if you find these kinds of suggestions preposterous, or even evidence of a serious cognitive disconnect between the world of fantasy and that of reality (or the kind of thing that could only be believed by a convicted yacht-killer who was once married to that shitty novelist Danielle Steel), rest assured, there will soon come yet another round of right-wing media fanaticism to make it seem downright amateurish by comparison.

And so it was this week when the conservative cognitariat served up another heaping dose of anti-intellectual dumbshittery posing as serious analysis; this time, arguing — seriously, this is what they said — that poor people rely too much on inheritance from family, and the rich don’t inherit enough. Rather, the latter work for their money, while the working class is coddled by hand-me-down wealth, allowing them to sit around all day doing nothing.

No, seriously, why are you laughing? Are you claiming not to know that poor people inherit lots of money? Have you not been paying attention?

But unlike the comparisons between critics of wealth inequity and Hitler — which lack even a patina of respectability among remotely awake humans — this argument about the poors inheriting while the rich toil absent help from anyone else (let alone other rich relatives), was presented this week as if it were the pinnacle of respectable social science. Which just confirms, if this needed further confirmation, that conservatives either cannot read social science research, or they can, but seek to openly deceive others about what that research says (and doesn’t say), secure in the knowledge that most people will never bother to actually take a peek for themselves.

And so, in order to attack the notion that the wealthiest Americans owe their fortunes to unearned inheritance, and to reinforce the conservative narrative that they deserve their riches because of greater effort, the right-wing media has recently dusted off a 3-year old study on the role of inheritance in wealth inequality, which they believe proves the legitimacy of the current national income and wealth distribution. The study, by economists at NYU and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, shows that over the past 20 years, the relative importance of inheritance as a percentage of personal wealth has declined a bit, and that (to their own surprise), wealth transfers tend to slightly reduce overall inequality because those at the bottom receive inheritances that amount to more (as a share of their wealth) than those at the top.

However, the study’s conclusions and especially the way in which the study has been interpreted both leave much to be desired, and hardly vitiate the notion that the wealthy enjoy unearned head starts relative to the rest of us. Needless to say, the authors do not conclude that the poor are inheriting too much and the rich too little, or that the poor should work harder, like the rich, and stop living off wealth handed down to them by family, as suggested by right wing media mouthpieces.

So How Important is Inheritance to the Wealthy?

Although the authors of the study present data showing that the relative importance of inherited wealth to the rich has declined (as a share of one’s overall personal wealth) from the late ‘80s to the present, this claim actually has little to say about whether those inheritances still provide a substantial head start. Given the housing and stock market booms that occurred in the ‘90s, and early 2000s, and which only finally collapsed by 2008 (after the period examined by this study), one can obviously imagine that inheritance as a share of overall wealth would fall. After all, if I inherited $2 million, allowing me to make substantial investments in high-growth stocks and real estate during the go-go ‘90s, which then ballooned my net worth to $10 million, the wealth transfer would only represent 20 percent of my wealth, as opposed to inheriting the same $2 million during a period of a down market, during which I might sit on the money, or invest it quite cautiously, only increasing my wealth to $2.5 million. In the latter case, my inheritance would represent nearly all of my wealth, as opposed to the former example, for which it would only represent about a fifth. But the fact that inheritance fell as a share of overall wealth — during a period when outrageous amounts of money were being made in the stock market — does nothing to diminish the importance of inheritance to that process. In the above example, had I not inherited the $2 million, I wouldn’t have had the money to risk in the stock market in the first place, and the massive windfall I enjoyed after investing my newfound (and totally unearned) inheritance, would never have materialized.

Although the study concludes that perhaps a fourth of household wealth emanates from intergenerational transfers — not a seemingly huge share of the total — this fact ignores that, but for that transfer, many of the investments and opportunities that subsequently became available to inheritors might not have occurred. If I make a lot of money, in large part because of an initial bump from my family, the fact that that bump goes on to represent but a small portion of my total at the end of my life, hardly acquits the head start of the charge that it was implicated in my end result and overall success.

Take an obvious example to make the point: Consider two men, both of whom find themselves at the age of 60, with wealth holdings totaling $10 million, and who, in both cases, received inheritances worth $2.5 million, or one-fourth of their total wealth. The first man started out in business after college, relatively low on the corporate ladder and worked his way up, finally becoming an executive in his late 40s, and profiting from stock options at his company, before cashing out and retiring early to enjoy his later years in relative luxury, with a net worth of $7.5 million. Then, his father, at the age of 85 drops dead and leaves him $2.5 million more, bringing his total wealth to $10 million. The second man also starts out in business after college, and after about 5 years his father dies at the age of 50 and leaves him $2.5 million, in fungible properties of one sort or another. The young man invests $2 million of that in starting his own business, which ultimately proves to be successful, and by the age of 60 is worth $10 million, at which point he decides that’s plenty to live on, and he too retires. Now, both men are worth the same amount, and in both cases, their inheritances represent the exact same portion of the overall wealth holdings. But can we reasonably conclude that those intergenerational transfers were equally important to both men? Of course not. In the first case, the $2.5 million was a nice little bonus, the financial icing on an already well-frosted (and at least to some extent “self-made”) cake; but in the latter, the $2.5 million was the yeast that allowed the cake to rise in the first place. So simply noting that roughly one-fourth of one’s wealth is attributable to inheritance, even if true, begs the question: which fourth was it? The first or the last? Because the answer matters.

Even more to the point, the question is not “What percentage of one’s overall wealth is represented by an inheritance?”, but rather, “How much of one’s wealth would one have been able to accumulate, but for the head start offered by that inheritance?” The study neither asks nor attempts to answer that question.

Indeed, the authors acknowledge in a footnote on page 4 of the study that they cannot answer it using the data source they rely upon. If anything, Wolff and Gittleman understate the importance of inherited wealth by way of their methodology, which (by their own admission) involves counting returns on investment that are above a normal rate of return as the product of one’s personal savings, while only considering the normal rate of return as being connected to the inheritance itself. But this is problematic for two obvious reasons. First, it allows those who inherited wealth transfers to essentially be given personal credit for better-than-normal returns on those transfers, even though had they not inherited in the first place, there would have been nothing to invest, and no return on investment whatsoever. If I inherit nothing, I get no normal rate of return, let alone excess rate of return, or indeed, any rate of return; so properly interpreted, anything I make on inherited wealth should be seen as owing to the inheritance. And secondly, if I inherited wealth that I could then invest throughout the extraordinary ‘90s, when investment returns to capital were through the roof, crediting my savings and investment strategies for my excess returns on those investments would result in crediting me for my work effort, even though the results that obtained were largely due to a stock market bubble that had little to do with my own investment brilliance, and even though the investment decisions that made me so much money were probably made by stockbrokers, not me, sitting at a computer doing E-trade all by my lonesome.

In short, the study being used by the right to “prove” that great wealth is earned, not inherited, shows nothing of the sort.

Are the Poor Sponging off of Dead Relatives? Uh…No

As for the other claim made by the authors — and then even more grossly distorted by conservative commentators — to the effect that the poor and working class actually owe more of their well-being (as it were) to inheritance than do the wealthy, the data presumably showing this is not only “surprising” (the term the authors give it), but altogether preposterous, for reasons that should be readily apparent.

First, it stands to reason that if someone who is in the bottom fifth of the income or wealth distribution inherits virtually anything — even a few thousand dollars from a CD account at a bank, or a small house from a deceased parent — that such a transfer will represent a larger portion of their overall wealth, than would be represented by an even much larger bequeathment to an affluent person, as a share of their personal wealth. This is because even a small number, added to a small number, has a bigger relative impact than a large number added to a large number. As the authors of this very study conclude, “a small gift to the poor means more than a large gift to the rich.”

Someone whose net worth is zero, for instance (perhaps they rent, and although they have no credit card debt, also have no fungible assets to speak of), and then inherits $20,000 after the death of a grandparent, is now worth $20,000, and one-hundred percent of their wealth would be due to inheritance. Meanwhile, someone with a net worth of $1 million who then inherits another $500,000 (a much larger amount), would be worth $1.5 million, only one-third of which would be represented by inheritance. But can anyone honestly believe that the $500,000 will provide no greater advantage to the already-well-off person, or at least not one that is any better than the advantage now gained by the working class person now worth $20,000?

My own mother, for instance, was earning an income at the time of my grandmother’s passing that would have placed her in probably the fourth quintile of earners (lower-middle income), and had a net worth that would have placed her squarely in the 4th quintile out of 5 as well. Upon her mother’s death, she inherited a home that, although not palatial, is worth probably 6 times as much as her initial wealth prior to the inheritance (almost of which was due to a small 401k). So, in her case, 6/7 of her wealth now would be represented by inheritance. By contrast, if someone in the top quintile of earners and top quintile in terms of wealth holdings inherited an estate worth several millions of dollars, that might well represent less of their overall wealth than the share of my mother’s wealth represented by inheritance, but would anyone actually say that my mother was now somehow in the same boat (or an even better one) than the millionaire? Doubtful. And if the millionaire’s millions owe to an early inheritance (as noted above), which facilitated their wealth accumulation due to a substantial head start, while my mother’s inheritance came as she was already nearing retirement, after 40 years of labor market experience, during which she had to support herself and me, largely on her own, can we really say that the millionaire had worked harder and my mother less hard, since, after all, more of her wealth at age 65 was due to inheritance than that of the millionaire? Surely not. Such a claim would be the height of statistical and intellectual folly.

Furthermore, there are certain anomalies in the data ascertained by the study, which call into question any conclusion that inheritance plays a substantial role in the lives of the poor and working class, and especially relative to the affluent. For instance, as one can glean from Table 5 of the report, something strange happened in 2004, which tends to skew the average inheritance numbers — and their relative importance — specifically for persons at the bottom of the income pyramid. So, for instance, the mean (or average) inheritance for persons earning $15,000 or less, who despite their meager incomes managed to inherit in 2001, was about $156,000. Fewer than 1 in 10 persons with income this low inherited anything, of course (as noted in Table 4), but this amount was the average for those who received a transfer of some sort that year. Not bad, but three years later, that average had skyrocketed to over $800,000 in average inheritance, among the roughly 15 percent of low income persons receiving a bequeathment that year. Clearly, this average must have been skewed dramatically upward by a handful of truly massive inheritances that year, especially considering that by 2007, the average had come back down to about $243,000 among the 17 percent of low income persons who received an inheritance that year. But because of that one anomalous year, 2004, the average inheritance of those in the lowest income bracket who managed to inherit over the 18 years of the study, ended up far higher than it would have otherwise been.

This is especially true because the median value of transfers to those in the lowest income group in 2004, actually fell from its 2001 level, suggesting that the typical low income family didn’t make out so well that year in terms of inheritance value, but a handful of outliers managed to scoop up big fortunes thanks to the deaths of some especially well-off relatives. This is why, in Table 8 of the study (about which conservatives have been especially animated), one finds that the average share of low-income folks’ wealth attributable to inheritance from 1989-2007 was so high — about 65 percent — while the percentage for those earning at the top of the pyramid was much lower. In 2004, due to some obviously anomalous inheritances by low-income heirs, the share of wealth at the bottom attributable to wealth transfers ballooned from 26.5 percent to over 180 percent of wealth at that level! But how can inheritance represent more than the combined total of a groups’ wealth? How can it represent more than 100 percent of the wealth held by low income persons? Simple: the typical net worth of such persons is negative, and only because of the outlier effects of a few, can the importance of wealth on the aggregate group as a whole seem so large.

No Need to Pity the Rich: More Proof That Conservatives Are Professional Liars

Conservatives also conveniently ignore aspects of the study’s findings that contradict their pity-the-rich spin on the data. For instance, although the share of wealth represented by inheritance is certainly higher for lower-income persons, on those occasions when they actually inherit something, it is still very much the case that they are far less likely to inherit in the first place. So, for example, according to the study, nearly 4 in 10 households in the highest income bracket report an intergenerational wealth transfer of some kind, while only about 1 in 7 in the lowest income bracket do. In other words, richer folks are about 3.5 times more likely than low-income folks to receive an inheritance at all.

The inheritance gaps are even larger when we examine persons in different quintiles of wealth, as opposed to mere income. So, for example, among persons in the top wealth bracket (those with over $1 million in assets), nearly half received an inheritance of some type, compared to fewer than 1 in 10 in the lowest wealth category (those with less than $25,000 in assets). The wealthiest Americans, in short, are about 5 times more likely than the least wealthy to receive an inheritance, and even this is an understatement, since the cutoffs for the wealth quintiles in the data ($1 million as a minimum for the top and $25,000 as a maximum for the bottom) flatten out vast disparities among the super-wealthy (those worth billions), and among the poor (most of whom are worth nothing, or have negative wealth, and almost never inherit anything tangible at all).

But the differences between those at the top and those at the bottom when it comes to inheritance concern not only the relative odds of inheriting itself; rather, there is also the substantial difference in the values of the inheritances received at different economic levels. So the median inheritance for households in the top income group was 7 times greater than the median for those in the bottom income group who inherited; and the median for those in the top of the wealth distribution was 17 times larger than that for households in the bottom wealth group who inherited. The median value of inheritances for those in the wealthiest 1 percent of wealth holders was a full 26 times that of persons in the bottom quintile who received some form of transfer.

But remember, even these ratios between the value of inheritances at the top and the value of inheritances at the bottom are deceptive because they only compare the relative values of inheritances among the already restricted numbers of persons in each income and wealth group who actually received an inheritance. When we simply look at the average amount of inheritance received, per member of the highest income group and compare that to the average amount of inheritance received for a person in the lowest income group (which is a more direct way to determine the relative positions of persons in each group, in terms of odds of inheriting and value of the inheritance), the study finds that those in the top income group inherit 40 times more, on average, than persons in the bottom group; likewise, those in the top wealth group inherit 109 times more, on average, than those in the lowest wealth grouping. In 2007, the nation’s lowest income group inherited only about $6,000 per household, compared to over $2.7 million inherited per household among those in the wealthiest 1 percent. In other words, if persons at the bottom had to distribute their inherited wealth among each household in their income group, each household would only have about $6000 to play with, while each household among the wealthiest 1 percent would have $2.7 million in assets, with which to make use. So which group is benefitted more by inheritance, exactly?

In all, the study’s authors do not reach conclusions anywhere near those being pushed by the right (and indeed, one of the authors, Ed Wolff has long been one of the economists most loudly trumpeting the disturbing reality of wealth inequality in America). Rather, they note several explanations for what they discovered, in terms of why inheritance had become less important as a share of overall wealth for those at the upper-range of income and wealth, none of which involve greater work effort or merit on the part of the rich. Rather, the authors note that extraordinary capital gains in the housing and stock markets (both of which reached historic highs in the period under review) could explain the result; so too might relative death rates and life expectancy be the culprit. So, since life expectancy rose during the period under review (and since the wealthy live longer), the net number of bequeathments may have declined at the top in the study period, while lower income folks die earlier, and as such, might have been passing on assets more readily during the study. Of all the reasons offered by the authors to explain their results, none involved evidence of greater productivity or work effort at the top, or declining effort at the bottom.

In short, conservatives are wrong about what the study says and doesn’t say; and even where they read the study accurately, the conclusions they draw from it are inconsistent with the conclusions drawn by the authors. In other words, the people who actually conducted the research would consider the FOX personalities and Rush Limbaughs of the world, who twist their words to justify their own reactionary agendas, to be buffoons of the first order. Which just goes to show it isn’t only numbers that economists are capable of reading, if you know what I mean.

…But How Dare You Complain to Me: Ani DiFranco, White Obliviousness and Historical Memory

Imagine for a moment that an artist of some sort — perhaps for lack of a better example, a folk singer — decided to host a writer’s retreat, at which interested and aspiring artists might gather so as to pool their collective energy. And let’s imagine that said folk singer, not being an expert at locating inspirational retreat locations, turned that job over to a promoter. And let’s say that said promoter then came back to said folk singer, excited to announce that such a location had been secured. And let’s imagine that said location was Dachau: the legendary Nazi concentration camp.

Still imagining for a moment, can we envision said folk singer thinking to herself (or himself, after all, since we’re still imagining here), “Whoa!” But then, and this is the important part, going on to think, despite the exclamatory thought bubble just mentioned, that perhaps “the setting would become a participant in the event,” and so rather than objecting to the location and holding the retreat elsewhere, moving full speed ahead so that “a dialogue would emerge organically over the four days about the issue of where we were.”

Oh, and can we imagine this “organic dialogue” emerging on the site of such suffering, when those gathered to “emerge” it have all paid $1000 for the privilege?

That the answers to these questions are self-evidently negative should be obvious. And yet, this is exactly what famed singer — and noted progressive and feminist — Ani DiFranco just did, by scheduling a retreat at Nottoway, one of Louisiana’s largest slave plantations, which at one point engaged the forced labor of over 400 African descended persons. And although she claims to have been at least mildly taken aback upon realizing where her promoter had scheduled the event — thus the “Whoa!” mentioned above (no doubt the most wildly understated reaction ever to one’s pending professional sojourn to a fulcrum of genocide) — she never once thought better of having the retreat; well, at least not until it became a PR catastrophe of epic proportions.

Despite realizing that, as she put it, “tragedies on a massive scale are not easily dealt with or recovered from,” and that “pain is stored in places where great social ills have occurred,” DiFranco insists that her intentions were noble. Rather than utilizing Nottoway so as to forget the past, she was utilizing it so as to remember, because, and these are her words: “I believe that people must go to those places with awareness and with compassionate energy and meditate on what has happened and absorb some of the reverberating pain with their attention and their awareness.”

Sure, like Dachau, where I’m quite certain she would never have thought to schedule a writer’s retreat, even if she were in the middle of a European tour at the time, such that getting there would have been a cinch.

That not only DiFranco, but indeed most white people, would flinch at the analogy between Dachau and Nottoway is predictable and largely suggestive of the problem with white people, or at least our propensity for blinkered historical memory. That we cannot recognize the similarities between a forced labor camp in the U.S. — which Southern plantations were, by definition — and a forced labor camp like Dachau (which, unlike the more deliberative death camps operated by the Nazis, was mostly a site of detention rather than extermination), indicates our inability to squarely face the genocide, physical and cultural to which our people mostly assented for hundreds of years on this soil. We do not allow for the pain of black peoples to equate in our minds — or the larger national imagination — to the pain of European Jewry, no matter that the transcontinental slave trade resulted in the deaths of millions (on the forced marches to the African coast, at sea, and once in the so-called new world), and no matter that the system of white domination that was central to enslavement still operates, albeit in a different form, and that the legacy of slavery itself is still evident in patterns of wealth accumulation (and its opposite) very much operative in the 21st century.

While Germany has long confronted the horrific truth of its history, we still have not, principally because most white folks aren’t, by and large, up to the task. Indeed, in one of the most deliciously repulsive ironies in curricular history, one is far more likely to find an American classroom ruminating on the tragedy of the European Holocaust than its American counterparts, be they perpetrated against black folks or indigenous persons. In fact, and as I’ve noted elsewhere, one isn’t even allowed to equate these things, or even use the same words, like “Holocaust” (with a capital H, no less, and perhaps even a trademark symbol) or “genocide” to describe them, unless one wishes to face the wrath of American apologists, who equate nicely with the current operators of Nottoway, all of whom insist upon how humanely the slaves owned by John Hampden Randolph were treated.

But as with the old saying in criminal investigations — that the coverup is always worse than the crime — it was DiFranco’s reaction to the outrage of many of her own fans and others that so compounded the initial act of moral blindness. After all, that a white person would underestimate the symbolic importance and weight of such a place as Nottoway (or, for that matter, Monticello, or Jamestown, or Wounded Knee), while tragic, is not particularly shocking. Just as those who are neither Jewish, nor Roma, nor members of the LGBT community might well fail to appreciate the full gravity of a place like Dachau — and no matter how sincerely they try to understand — so too, those for whom enslavement was not our story can never fully “absorb the reverberating pain” (again, DiFranco’s words) of such a place as Nottoway.

I have been to Nottoway. And I have walked those grounds. And I have recoiled in horror as the docents described the elaborate doorbell system that Randolph had rigged for his chattel, each with a different tone, such that the enslaved would know exactly in which room they were needed, so as to do whatever work the Randolph family was too craven and lazy to do for self. And I remember thinking how telling it is that a people deemed inferior to their owners were capable of discerning even the finest variation in bell tones so as to complete these tasks, knowing that punishment would follow if they guessed wrong, and God forbid went to the kitchen to help Miss Jane when it was really little Master William in need of having his fetid chamber pot emptied. Yet, and however aghast I was, walking those grounds, listening to the puerile revisionism of the home’s operators, there is no way I could have fully taken in the depths of the depravity visited upon black bodies there. That DiFranco also doesn’t really get that is not the issue. No one expects her to.

But her reaction upon being called out? That most certainly is the issue.

She could have simply said, “I screwed up. Badly. I underestimated the significance of holding a retreat at Nottoway because, sadly, as a white person, and despite my best intentions, I didn’t fully get it. But I know now that my obliviousness on this matter is not acceptable, and it has been the source of real pain. I resolve to listen, to hear, to challenge myself as much as I challenge others, and to do better from this point forward.” As someone who has made my share of serious mistakes as an aspiring antiracist ally, I know full well that these are the kinds of apologies I too should issue when I drop the ball, and will strive to make in any such future cases.

But she didn’t say this, or anything remotely like it. Instead, she tried to rationalize the event as some kind of “reclamation,” during which the pain of human bondage would somehow be almost magically exorcised, or at least rhythmically absorbed by persons affluent enough to pay the cost of admission. And she tried to rationalize it as such, even though her initial promotional materials for the event — which were circulating right up until the controversy exploded — said absolutely nothing about the meditative value of the gathering, or about using the location’s history as part of the creative process. Rather, they encouraged folks to come together at the plantation “to play” with her and her artist friends. To play. At a forced labor camp.

Oh sure, she has now canceled the event. But in her statement announcing this fact, her tone suggests someone who sees herself as the biggest victim in the drama. To wit, her insistence that although she knows “the pain of slavery is real and runs very deep and wide,” nonetheless, she thinks it is “very unfortunate what many have chosen to do with that pain.” In other words, not only will she profess the right to tell black people what to do with their pain — since it is indeed their pain about which we speak when we speak of enslavement — but more to the point, she will consider it not at all troubling to insist that criticizing her for her lack of discernment is an inappropriate focus of said pain.

When she then says, as she did, that she is canceling the retreat because she wishes “to restore peace and respectful discourse between people as quickly as possible,” and when she says, “I entreat you to refocus your concerns and comments on this matter with positive energy and allow us now to work together towards common ground and healing,” she suggests, at least implicitly, that others are to blame for the pain because of their unfocused or badly focused anger, that others created the negative energy, and that she is the one most committed to healing, even as it was she, by her actions, who initiated the shit storm in which she now finds herself embedded.

Then, in the ultimate attempt at exculpation, DiFranco reminds us — as if any of those engaged in the critique of the retreat really need a history lesson on white supremacy from the likes of her — that Nottoway is not, after all, the only location of human suffering out there. As she puts it:

one cannot draw a line around the nottoway plantation and say ‘racism reached it’s depths of wrongness here’ and then point to the other side of that line and say ‘but not here’. i know that any building built before 1860 in the South and many after, were built on the backs of slaves…i know that indeed our whole country has had a history of invasion, oppression and exploitation as part of it’s very fabric of power and wealth. i know that each of us is sitting right now in a building located on stolen land. stolen from the original people of this continent who suffered genocide at the hands of european colonists…

All of which is quite true, and quite beside the point. Of course, there are other blood-soaked pieces of property. Just as there were other such places in Germany and throughout Europe, besides Dachau. And yet, there is still the simple truth that at places such as Nottoway — and quite a bit more so than, say, the land on which most of us live, upon which so many indigenous peoples perished — there is a particularly venal and calculated attempt to revise, to lie, to deceive, to exonerate, to make everything OK, and cheerful, and the site of Goddamned parties, where visitors come to the place in question precisely because it is the place in question, and then get fed fiction in an attempt to re-wire their minds, to prevent them from grappling even with that history they have paid cash money to see.

Oh, and make no mistake, the fault is not mostly DiFranco’s here. It is ours, for allowing former slave plantations to exist as tourist attractions on these terms. At least at Dachau, the guides don’t waste time ruminating on the vicissitudes of life as a camp guard, or the architecture of the prison wings. There, the purpose of the visit is to horrify, to remember without deflection or protection from the evil that envelops the place even now. But in America, we turn our chambers of horror into historical amusement parks, into places where more is said about manners, and weddings, and cotillions, and carriage rides, and ball gowns, and Doric columns and parasols, than about the system of white terrorism that made all of those things possible.

John Hampden Randolph is remembered not as the racist he was, but as the gentleman he fashioned himself to be. Not as the monstrous and incompetent businessman he was in life — so incompetent that once his property was emancipated he couldn’t make a go of the plantation without their free labor — but as a gracious and courteous socialite. And that is on us as a nation, and more to the point on white America collectively, not Ani DiFranco, in particular. We have allowed these lies to be elevated to the level of national myth. We insist on their retelling, on the sanitizing, on the self-deception, in our textbooks, in our politics, and in our own family histories.

Rest assured, none of that is the fault of one folk singer. But unless that folk singer is prepared to place herself squarely in the middle of that problem — our problem — rather than insisting upon her location in some righteous and elevated place above it, which she and some of her fans believe she deserves, apparently, because of her gender and sexual politics (along with several truly strong antiracist songs), then the future does not bode well for the notion of solidarity and allyship in the struggle against racism. And we will all be the worse off for it.

…But How Dare You Complain to Me: Ani Difranco, White Obliviousness and Historical Memory

Imagine for a moment that an artist of some sort — perhaps for lack of a better example, a folk singer — decided to host a writer’s retreat, at which interested and aspiring artists might gather so as to pool their collective energy. And let’s imagine that said folk singer, not being an expert at locating inspirational retreat locations, turned that job over to a promoter. And let’s say that said promoter then came back to said folk singer, excited to announce that such a location had been secured. And let’s imagine that said location was Dachau: the legendary Nazi concentration camp.

Still imagining for a moment, can we envision said folk singer thinking to herself (or himself, after all, since we’re still imagining here), “Whoa!” But then, and this is the important part, going on to think, despite the exclamatory thought bubble just mentioned, that perhaps “the setting would become a participant in the event,” and so rather than objecting to the location and holding the retreat elsewhere, moving full speed ahead so that “a dialogue would emerge organically over the four days about the issue of where we were.”

Oh, and can we imagine this “organic dialogue” emerging on the site of such suffering, when those gathered to “emerge” it have all paid $1000 for the privilege?

That the answers to these questions are self-evidently negative should be obvious. And yet, this is exactly what famed singer — and noted progressive and feminist — Ani Difranco just did, by scheduling a retreat at Nottoway, one of Louisiana’s largest slave plantations, which at one point engaged the forced labor of over 400 African descended persons. And although she claims to have been at least mildly taken aback upon realizing where her promoter had scheduled the event — thus the “Whoa!” mentioned above (no doubt the most wildly understated reaction ever to one’s pending professional sojourn to a fulcrum of genocide) — she never once thought better of having the retreat; well, at least not until it became a PR catastrophe of epic proportions.

Despite realizing that, as she put it, “tragedies on a massive scale are not easily dealt with or recovered from,” and that “pain is stored in places where great social ills have occurred,” Difranco insists that her intentions were noble. Rather than utilizing Nottoway so as to forget the past, she was utilizing it so as to remember, because, and these are her words: “I believe that people must go to those places with awareness and with compassionate energy and meditate on what has happened and absorb some of the reverberating pain with their attention and their awareness.”

Sure, like Dachau, where I’m quite certain she would never have thought to schedule a writer’s retreat, even if she were in the middle of a European tour at the time, such that getting there would have been a cinch.

That not only Difranco, but indeed most white people, would flinch at the analogy between Dachau and Nottoway is predictable and largely suggestive of the problem with white people, or at least our propensity for blinkered historical memory. That we cannot recognize the similarities between a forced labor camp in the U.S. — which Southern plantations were, by definition — and a forced labor camp like Dachau (which, unlike the more deliberative death camps operated by the Nazis, was mostly a site of detention rather than extermination), indicates our inability to squarely face the genocide, physical and cultural to which our people mostly assented for hundreds of years on this soil. We do not allow for the pain of black peoples to equate in our minds — or the larger national imagination — to the pain of European Jewry, no matter that the transcontinental slave trade resulted in the deaths of millions (on the forced marches to the African coast, at sea, and once in the so-called new world), and no matter that the system of white domination that was central to enslavement still operates, albeit in a different form, and that the legacy of slavery itself is still evident in patterns of wealth accumulation (and its opposite) very much operative in the 21st century.

While Germany has long confronted the horrific truth of its history, we still have not, principally because most white folks aren’t, by and large, up to the task. Indeed, in one of the most deliciously repulsive ironies in curricular history, one is far more likely to find an American classroom ruminating on the tragedy of the European Holocaust than its American counterparts, be they perpetrated against black folks or indigenous persons. In fact, and as I’ve noted elsewhere, one isn’t even allowed to equate these things, or even use the same words, like “Holocaust” (with a capital H, no less, and perhaps even a trademark symbol) or “genocide” to describe them, unless one wishes to face the wrath of American apologists, who equate nicely with the current operators of Nottoway, all of whom insist upon how humanely the slaves owned by John Hampden Randolph were treated.

But as with the old saying in criminal investigations — that the coverup is always worse than the crime — it was Difranco’s reaction to the outrage of many of her own fans and others that so compounded the initial act of moral blindness. After all, that a white person would underestimate the symbolic importance and weight of such a place as Nottoway (or, for that matter, Monticello, or Jamestown, or Wounded Knee), while tragic, is not particularly shocking. Just as those who are neither Jewish, nor Roma, nor members of the LGBT community might well fail to appreciate the full gravity of a place like Dachau — and no matter how sincerely they try to understand — so too, those for whom enslavement was not our story can never fully “absorb the reverberating pain” (again, Difranco’s words) of such a place as Nottoway.

I have been to Nottoway. And I have walked those grounds. And I have recoiled in horror as the docents described the elaborate doorbell system that Randolph had rigged for his chattel, each with a different tone, such that the enslaved would know exactly in which room they were needed, so as to do whatever work the Randolph family was too craven and lazy to do for self. And I remember thinking how telling it is that a people deemed inferior to their owners were capable of discerning even the finest variation in bell tones so as to complete these tasks, knowing that punishment would follow if they guessed wrong, and God forbid went to the kitchen to help Miss Jane when it was really little Master William in need of having his fetid chamber pot emptied. Yet, and however aghast I was, walking those grounds, listening to the puerile revisionism of the home’s operators, there is no way I could have fully taken in the depths of the depravity visited upon black bodies there. That Difranco also doesn’t really get that is not the issue. No one expects her to.

But her reaction upon being called out? That most certainly is the issue.

She could have simply said, “I screwed up. Badly. I underestimated the significance of holding a retreat at Nottoway because, sadly, as a white person, and despite my best intentions, I didn’t fully get it. But I know now that my obliviousness on this matter is not acceptable, and it has been the source of real pain. I resolve to listen, to hear, to challenge myself as much as I challenge others, and to do better from this point forward.” As someone who has made my share of serious mistakes as an aspiring antiracist ally, I know full well that these are the kinds of apologies I too should issue when I drop the ball, and will strive to make in any such future cases.

But she didn’t say this, or anything remotely like it. Instead, she tried to rationalize the event as some kind of “reclamation,” during which the pain of human bondage would somehow be almost magically exorcised, or at least rhythmically absorbed by persons affluent enough to pay the cost of admission.

Oh sure, she has now canceled the event. But in her statement announcing this fact, her tone suggests someone who sees herself as the biggest victim in the drama. To wit, her insistence that although she knows “the pain of slavery is real and runs very deep and wide,” nonetheless, she thinks it is “very unfortunate what many have chosen to do with that pain.” In other words, not only will she profess the right to tell black people what to do with their pain — since it is indeed their pain about which we speak when we speak of enslavement — but more to the point, she will consider it not at all troubling to insist that criticizing her for her lack of discernment is an inappropriate focus of said pain.

When she then says, as she did, that she is canceling the retreat because she wishes “to restore peace and respectful discourse between people as quickly as possible,” and when she says, “I entreat you to refocus your concerns and comments on this matter with positive energy and allow us now to work together towards common ground and healing,” she suggests, at least implicitly, that others are to blame for the pain because of their unfocused or badly focused anger, that others created the negative energy, and that she is the one most committed to healing, even as it was she, by her actions, who initiated the shit storm in which she now finds herself embedded.

Then, in the ultimate attempt at exculpation, Difranco reminds us — as if any of those engaged in the critique of the retreat really need a history lesson on white supremacy from the likes of her — that Nottoway is not, after all, the only location of human suffering out there. As she puts it:

one cannot draw a line around the nottoway plantation and say ‘racism reached it’s depths of wrongness here’ and then point to the other side of that line and say ‘but not here’. i know that any building built before 1860 in the South and many after, were built on the backs of slaves…i know that indeed our whole country has had a history of invasion, oppression and exploitation as part of it’s very fabric of power and wealth. i know that each of us is sitting right now in a building located on stolen land. stolen from the original people of this continent who suffered genocide at the hands of european colonists…

All of which is quite true, and quite beside the point. Of course, there are other blood-soaked pieces of property. Just as there were other such places in Germany and throughout Europe, besides Dachau. And yet, there is still the simple truth that at places such as Nottoway — and quite a bit more than, say, the land on which most of us live, upon which so many indigenous peoples perished — there is a particularly venal and calculated attempt to revise, to lie, to deceive, to exonerate, to make everything OK, and cheerful, and the site of Goddamned parties, where visitors come to the place in question precisely because it is the place in question, and then get fed fiction in an attempt to re-wire their minds, to prevent them from grappling even with that history they have paid cash money to see.

Oh, and make no mistake, the fault is not mostly Difranco’s here. It is ours, for allowing former slave plantations to exist as tourist attractions on these terms. At least at Dachau, the guides don’t waste time ruminating on the vicissitudes of life as a camp guard, or the architecture of the prison wings. There, the purpose of the visit is to horrify, to remember without deflection or protection from the evil that envelops the place even now. But in America, we turn our chambers of horror into historical amusement parks, into places where more is said about manners, and weddings, and cotillions, and carriage rides, and ball gowns, and Doric columns and parasols, than about the system of white terrorism that made all of those things possible.

John Hampden Randolph is remembered not as the racist he was, but as the gentleman he fashioned himself to be. Not as the monstrous and incompetent businessman he was in life — so incompetent that once his property was emancipated he couldn’t make a go of the plantation without their free labor — but as a gracious and courteous socialite. And that is on us as a nation, and more to the point on white America collectively, not Ani Difranco, in particular. We have allowed these lies to be elevated to the level of national myth. We insist on their retelling, on the sanitizing, on the self-deception, in our textbooks, in our politics, and in our own family histories.

Rest assured, none of that is the fault of one folk singer. But unless that folk singer is prepared to place herself squarely in the middle of that problem — our problem — rather than insisting upon her location in some righteous and elevated place above it, which she and some of her fans believe she deserves, apparently, because of her gender and sexual politics, then the future does not bode well for the notion of solidarity and allyship in the struggle against racism. And we will all be the worse off for it.

No, I Haven’t “Changed My Mind” About Whiteness and Racism: Responding to Nazi Web Trolls

First, they tried e-mail threats. When that didn’t work, one of their number called me at home. Still no luck, and so a few years later they decided to visit the neighborhood where my family and I lived and pass out thinly veiled death threats and fliers. When that too failed to put a dent in my writing, speaking, and educational work, they organized protests at two of my speeches this fall.

Time after time, attempts to intimidate me have failed miserably, and so now, the white nationalists and supremacists who see it as their job to attack any of us who combat their ignorance and hatred, have switched gears. Now, they have decided to switch to disinformation tactics, intended to discredit antiracists in the eyes of a public they hope will be gullible enough to believe whatever it is they say about us.

To wit, today, a website operated by white nationalists (but which fronts as a site focused on Diversity, and which gives no clear indication of its political slant on the homepage), published an article claiming that I had announced that I had “changed my mind” about racism, and was now embracing their white supremacist worldview, anti-immigrant nativism, and other aspects of their toxic and bigoted agenda. Written up as a news story, the blog post said I had made this announcement at a speech, in which my newfound embrace of white racism was met with the “hisses and boos” of my “former supporters,” and that police were needed to protect me from the mob afterward. Though a nice job of creative writing, and although it would have even been amusing had it been labeled as parody, the fact is, the neo-Nazis in question were seeking to pass it off as entirely real.

Two points here:

1) It is bogus. I have not changed my mind on matters of race, nor will I. I reject white nationalism, white supremacy, and indeed, the very concept of “the white race,” which I see as a scientific and cultural fiction, created by people of various European descents, so as to subjugate non-European/non-white peoples. The very concept deserves eradication. Note, I said the concept of whiteness deserves eradication, not the people currently called white. And;

2) Because this piece was not labeled as a parody, and because its author’s intent was obviously to discredit me professionally by making people think this “change of heart” was real — and that I was now endorsing white supremacy — it is legally actionable as libel. Libel laws allow a lot of leeway for skewering public figures, but not when fake words are put in their mouths, and suggested as being real. Had it been labeled parody or snark, they could pretty much say whatever they wanted, within reason, and not violate libel laws. But they did not do this. As such, I will begin legal proceedings against them, in the aftermath of the holidays.

I will not link to the piece here, nor mention the site’s name. They want me to do that so as to boost their pathetic traffic, I’m sure, but it isn’t going to happen. Just make note that if you hear something about me now rejecting my lifelong antiracism in favor of some retrograde white racist bullshit, it is indeed bullshit. And soon, it will be bullshit that costs its authors whatever pathetic financial resources they have managed to muster up…

Tim Wise on “Racism in Legal Services” (Speech to Massachusetts Legal Assistance Corporation, 9/27/13)

My speech to the Massachusetts Legal Assistance Corporation, 9/27/13

Tim Wise at Google (September 17, 2013): Race, the Workplace and Silicon Valley

My speech at Google, September 17, 2013

Tim Wise on CNN 12/16 Discussing White Jesus/Santa Imagery and Racist Iconography

Here is the full clip from my appearance on CNN’s OutFront with Erin Burnett (hosted by Jake Tapper) on December 16th. Sorry for the quality of the video. CNN didn’t see fit to post the full clip, but I feel the entirety is needed to grasp the most important aspects of the discussion. Thanks to MD Brooks for posting the full clip on YouTube…

Dreaming of a White Jesus (and a Real Santa): Reflections on Conservative Derangement

To be perfectly honest, I find it quite shocking that anyone would be, well, shocked, by Megyn Kelly’s recent insistence on her FOX show that Santa Claus and Jesus are both white men, or even — and perhaps this is the bigger point — that Santa Claus is real. After all, when one works for a news outlet devoted to the daily propagation of fiction, fabricating such nonsensical details as these can’t exactly be seen as a deviation from an otherwise reality-based norm. These are people for whom man-made climate change isn’t happening but the “War on Christmas” is. People who will no doubt soon proclaim said war to be clear evidence of growing anti-white hatred, given the “verifiable” whiteness of the holiday’s two primary figures, as Kelly put it late last week.

Oh, and yes, I know, she has tried to rationalize her comments, to explain them away as a joke, a mere stab at open mic night perhaps, presuming for herself the mantle of a comedian — a profession for which she is no more qualified than the one she currently inhabits. She was just kidding, and oh yeah (as even she admits), she spoke too soon when demanding that “Jesus was white,” so, ya know, sorry about that one! It is at this point that dear Ms. Kelly should probably be reminded that one cannot, in moments like this, have it both ways: it cannot be both a joke, and at the same time, something you meant so literally as to then necessitate a retraction on the Jesus part. It’s like a criminal suspect saying they didn’t shoot the other guy, and anyway, it was self-defense.

No indeed, humor doesn’t require correction when the subject matter turns out to be absurd, because absurdity was the point. Retraction is for self-professed news people when they get the facts wrong, as she did. She was just supposing that none of her audience would notice, or care, as none of her guests did that day: people who sat there smiling all around, and raising nary a syllable of objection when she said that Santa “just is white.” One wonders if such silence would likewise have obtained had she chosen to proclaim equally rational positions, such as the “verifiable fact” that the Easter Bunny just is fluffy, or that the Tooth Fairy, just is the most beautiful winged creature in the known Universe.

Now don’t get me wrong, if there were a Santa Claus, there is very little doubt that he would have to be white. After all, no black man could manage to work only one day out of the year and not be called lazy; and surely no black man could get away with breaking into millions of homes, even if he was bearing presents. Some cop or neighborhood watch captain would surely have taken him down long ago, convinced that the red suit he was wearing signified gang colors. So, and let me be the first to admit it: in a world where Santa actually existed, along with unicorns, pixie dust and the Lorax, Megyn Kelly would have a damned good point. Note, this is how one can make a joke about Santa being white, without reinforcing white racial normalcy: but of course no FOX personality would choose to make the joke this way, because such a joke would require, first, an acknowledgment of the reality of racial profiling and anti-black racism, neither of which conservatives can afford to countenance. This is why conservative race humor isn’t funny, just racist; please take note of it. Thank you.

Some of course might proclaim that even her half-hearted backpedaling was too much: after all, St. Nicholas, on whom Santa Claus is based, was white, they insist, and that’s all Megyn needed to say. But such an objection strays so far from the rational mark as to be almost laughable. To begin, and let us be clear on this point though it should hardly need saying, there are literally no children who will go to bed on the night of December 24th, anxiously awaiting the arrival of the actual Bishop of ancient Myra. The Santa they believe in — and the one Kelly took such pains to assure them is white — is not believed to actually be the 4th century Bishop, nor a resurrection of said holy man. Rather, he is thought to live at the North Pole, surrounded by elves, among them Hermey, who desperately wishes to be a dentist, and once set out with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer to the Island of Misfit toys, during which journey — beautifully narrated as it was by a talking snowman whose voice strangely resembled that of Burl Ives — they encountered other historically verifiable figures like Yukon Cornelius and the Abominable Snowman.

And in any event, the actual Saint Nicholas was not white, or at least would not be thought of as such in modern terms. Though part of Greece at the time, Myra is on the Mediterranean coast of what is modern day Turkey. And according to forensic anthropologists, whose reconstruction of what St Nick is believed to have looked like is endorsed by none other than the St. Nicholas Center, the Bishop would have been decidedly darker than anything Megyn Kelly would be comfortable with, and actually would have looked quite a bit like the kind of person who might manage to coincidentally (and randomly, of course) be stopped by the TSA every time he tried to fly commercial.

Which brings us to Jesus.

In some ways, one can’t blame Megyn Kelly for so quickly having insisted that Jesus was white. That is, to be certain, the image to which most of us have been exposed, and the blue-eyed, blondish Christ is the one reproduced over half a billion times, literally, in Warner Sallman’s famous “Head of Christ” painting. So if Megyn Kelly and the FOX faithful have come to believe that “A Child is Born in Bethlehem” was a reference to modern-day central Pennsylvania, we ought not be surprised I guess.

Tradition is, after all, the conservative guidepost; it is their very raison d’être. So once the image of a white Jesus has become established — as with Santa — that, and only that (rather than other niceties like historical accuracy) is what matters. This is why Rush Limbaugh’s defense of Megyn Kelly, which rested upon the simple exhortation that Santa (and presumably Jesus too) has “always been” white, strikes most right-wingers as perfectly sufficient. Facts are irrelevant. Tradition and the way things have always been are what matter. Tradition is what gives conservatives meaning. They are rudderless without it. And so to change (or even challenge) religious iconography, or even that of secular symbols like Santa takes on much grander psychological meaning for a bunch such as this. They long for the past, and fear change, so much so that it becomes the harbinger of their own doom. Tradition trumps fairness: so because heterosexual and monogamous marriage has been the norm for so long — though not nearly so long as they would have us believe — any attempt to “redefine marriage” is seen as a threat to their entire way of life. If Christianity has been the dominant and “normal” faith in the U.S., religious diversity becomes not a social good but a tainted and monstrous evil, the growth of which suggests that the oppression of Christians lies just around the corner. A greeting of “Happy Holidays” at the Wal-Mart, rather than one that prioritizes and presumes the supremacy of the Christian particular, becomes tantamount to the Nazis inviting Jews into the showers: a set-up, said with a smile, all the while hiding the pernicious intent of these peddlers of pluralism. This, and it really must be said, is derangement of a most disturbing kind.

What this means for most white people is simple enough. Even though no anthropologist or historian of first century Galilean Jews — which is to say Palestinians — would believe that Jesus could have been white, if that’s the image in the stained glass of one’s church, or on the Christmas card sent to you by your great-aunt Millie, well then, what do anthropologists know anyway? What is science compared to what makes us feel better? Indeed, this is the irony of Megyn Kelly’s rant last week: while she was lambasting an African American essayist who had argued that a white Santa was insufficiently inclusive — by telling her that “just because something makes you uncomfortable doesn’t mean it has to change” — the fact is, it is Megyn Kelly and white conservatives the world over who apparently need Jesus to be white. Which is why they changed him so as to make him such, even though many of the earliest depictions of him hewed more closely to the logical and historical truth. This truth is one that, it should be noted, has been explicated clearly by forensic anthropologists based on the available period-specific evidence, in their reconstructions of the face of Jesus. Suffice it to say that their scientifically more compelling image is one that would not only be rejected by most whites (and surely most who rely on FOX for their news), but would likely provoke them to deep and abiding anger.

Which brings us to the far more important point: namely, why do white people apparently require white heroes, icons and saviors? Because we quite obviously do. Surely one cannot think it coincidence that Jesus has been so rendered ever since Christianity came to be used in the service of European supremacy? Surely one cannot find it a capricious and fanciful whim — or mere artistic contrivance — that would cause Michelangelo, Mel Gibson and thousands more between to envision Jesus as essentially one of ours? Likewise, and on a far less serious note, do we really believe that Santa has “always been white” as Limbaugh put it — or as Kelly herself did in her defense, when referencing films like “Miracle on 34th Street” — because there were no darker actors capable of chortling “ho ho ho,” and rubbing their prodigious bellies?

No indeed, there are no coincidences here, and however much Megyn Kelly now wishes to play victim, proclaiming herself the unjust target of “race baiters,” such a conceit is rich and even precious coming from her: someone who spent several hours a few years back hyping an entirely nonsensical story about the New Black Panthers, and how they were intimidating white voters at a polling place in Philadelphia in 2008. And this she did, even though in all the hours of coverage she could produce not one actual voter at the precinct who claimed to have been intimidated (and indeed, there were none), and although even the leading conservative on the Civil Rights Commission, which investigated the charge called it much ado about nothing.

Megyn Kelly is not the victim. And it is not race-baiting to suggest that there might be something troubling about the racialization of Jesus as a white man, or that there might be something even more troubling about a grown and well-paid news figure insisting that Santa is anything. Whether one wishes to address it or not, there is a reason these icons have been rendered white, especially Jesus. It would hardly have done, one supposes, to allow the more historically accurate Jesus to predominate in the church paintings, as Europe branched out, seeking to conquer the globe in the name of money and power and land, proclaiming the inferiority of the darker types all the while (and most ironically, their spiritual inferiority). It would have been decidedly more difficult, one might imagine, to enslave and brutalize and rape and murder the black and brown, if those who did the deed had then to enter their churches on the Sabbath and pray to a savior whose visage bore an uncanny and haunting resemblance to the man they had just lynched the night before, as the Romans had done on a cross with another brother so many years before.

To make the savior of the universe (at least in Christian eyes) a white man is to make possible, literally, the enslavement of brown and black peoples, the evisceration of still others and the conquest of their land in the name of white superiority. These historic crimes are almost unthinkable in a society where truth and historical accuracy were valued more than white skin. Which is to say, when conservatives insist Megyn Kelly’s comments — and the beliefs of millions — that Jesus was white are only a matter of personal preference without consequence, they write and speak as if history didn’t happen. But it did, and it matters, however painful it might be for white people to face.

Because to admit that such a man as Jesus would have been brown — at least the color of, say, Osama bin Laden, if not darker — would be to admit that the very foundations of this country, and its normal operating procedures for most of its history — were a sin not merely against our professed civic and political principles, but a sin against God and the very Christianity upon which conservatives, at least, insist, this country was begun. And given the tendency of conservatives to view their God as particularly vengeful and given to wrath, one can quite easily understand why they might prefer to ignore their own transgressions in his eyes, and to change the subject — or at least the object of their theological affections — as quickly as possible.

But know this. If there be a God, it is quite certain that such a being is not nearly so gullible as the typical FOX News viewer, and therein lies the eternal problem for Megyn Kelly and all others like her.

May she (and they) sleep well at night.

For Their Own Good? Contempt, Compassion, and the Conceits of Class Status

I’ve always been wary of those who insisted they were doing something — especially something harsh and perhaps hurtful — for the good of the person who has to bear the potential injury. When a parent swears to their child that the spanking they intend to shortly administer is “going to hurt me more than it hurts you,” and that it’s for the child’s own good, they are lying in the first instance and almost always terribly wrong in the latter. Likewise, when politicians say we should cut or eliminate various safety net protections for the nation’s poor “for their own good,” you can bet they haven’t a clue as to what would be in the best interest of such persons, seeing as how they’ve never gotten to know them or anything about the lives they lead, beyond the media-induced stereotypes and their own well-nurtured classist bigotries.

I found myself thinking about the fundamental absurdity of the “for their own good” mantra again recently, while in Boston, after being approached by an apparently homeless man on the street, who asked me for change. My general rule has always been that if I have a few bucks on me, I’ll give it to someone who asks, without much hesitation. After all, begging for money must be incredibly draining and emotionally difficult for most everyone who does it, especially given the contempt with which this culture views people who are poor and struggling (and/or mentally ill, as many on the streets are). So if someone has reached a place where they are desperate enough to endure the possible (and even likely) sneers of passersby and those to whom they make their usually unrequited entreaties for spare change, I’ve always felt as though a little kindness — though it will hardly ameliorate their economic condition — will at least compensate somewhat for the terse comments and side-eyed looks of others.

Not to mention, I’ve always figured that if my Christian friends are right about Jesus returning, he’s a hell of a lot more likely to return as a homeless man, looking for signs of compassion on the street than as a conquering avenger or two-bit evangelical preacher begging for millions on television, and so perhaps it would be advisable to hedge one’s bet, so to speak.

It has always appeared to me that those who profess an unwillingness to give money to the homeless, out of a stated concern for the well-being of such street-bound beggars are deluding themselves as to the real motivations for their financial apostasy. To insist, as many would, that giving cash in such cases only enables alcohol or drug abuse — even if it turns out to be true — is still a somewhat bizarre position upon which to rest one’s refusal to assist those in need. After all, if you were an employer who knew that one of your employees had a drug problem, or drank too much, you would hardly refuse to pay them their weekly wages out of such a concern for where they might spend the money. You would pay them, regardless of what you supected they might do with the proceeds, because you felt you owed it to them; they had earned it. But with the homeless, the real sticking point for those who refuse to give such folks money is a sense that they haven’t. They are not morally deserving of assistance, or so the assumption goes. Likewise, if you offered a homeless person $100, but only on the condition that they came and cleaned out your gutters for you, or raked the leaves in your yard, you would never then refuse to uphold your part of the bargain, simply because you had come to the conclusion that the person who just performed chores for you might buy a half-pint of cheap whiskey with your cash. And you would pay them as promised, not merely because you had a contract, be it written or verbal, to which you felt tethered, but because of the presumption that they had morally earned the payoff. Even in a society without enforcement of such legal contracts as might obligate you to pay up, you would likely do so because of your own sense of propriety.

In other words, to suggest that one is withholding money from homeless people or beggars “for their own good” is a dishonest and preposterous conceit. If you feel that the poor don’t deserve your support because of their presumed moral failings, so be it. But at least be honest enough to admit that it is this — and not some ecumenical, altruistic and downright social-work-oriented rationale — that animates your decision. Your choice in these cases is about moral judgment: the idea that the poor have not done enough for you to justify the receipt of even your spare change. If they would just take out your garbage, they might be entitled to your dollar in alms, and the hooch that said dollar might help them obtain. But if they merely beg for it, without first performing some labor, then whether or not they have a drug or alcohol problem you will be free to presume they have both and refuse to aid them, all in the name of a self-righteous contempt with which you won’t even be confronted my most, so quick are they to take the same stance.

Again, this is not to say whether it be good or bad, on balance, to give cash to the homeless. I know that for some, they would prefer to limit their contributions to social service agencies that serve the homeless, in the hopes that those in need will receive assistance in a concerted and institutional way. Fine. But let’s not pretend that such contributions are truly palliative for the problems faced by those on the street. Such agencies often separate families (because shelters are typically sex-segregated), and have very little proven success at helping those with addiction issues get clean.

For others, they would prefer to give money only to those individuals who will offer them a product in return, such as the Contributor, which is the highly successful and genuinely well-done, twice-a month-paper produced and sold by homeless folks across the city of Nashville, where I live. And if that’s your thing — only giving to those who give you something back — so be it. It’s a good paper and the folks who sell it are deserving of our support. But let’s not pretend that those who sell street papers, either in Nashville or elsewhere, might not spend at least some of the proceeds on a drink from time to time. They well might, just like you or I might have spent some of our earned income on alcohol (or, I dare say, stronger drugs) at some point.

And frankly, I don’t care, nor can I understand why you should either. This idea, so common in the modern era, which holds that the poor should enjoy no indulgence, exhibit no vice, and partake in no pleasurable diversion whatsoever — be it a drink, a cigarette, color television or a cell phone — while still expecting our sympathy, comes very near the definition of sadism, or so it seems to me. Are we really suggesting that the poor should be so miserable, so benighted, so prostrated before we, their presumed betters, that their only happiness should be an occasional blast of warm air from a steam grate in the winter? Must we demand of the poor every last shred of dignity? Of normalcy? Are we really so petty that we begrudge the homeless an occasional Bud Light or Boone’s Farm, or candy bar, or pack of Marlboros, because somehow that amounts to taking advantage of our charity? Really? Are we so cruel as to suggest that unless we can have all that we desire, neither should the poor have even one thing that they covet?

The only person who would endorse such a vicious worldview is one who had decided that the poor and destitute are poor and destitute not because of local, national or global economic conditions, but because of their own moral failings and these quite alone; and that our own successes are likewise not due to inherited advantages, luck, connections, or other factors beyond our control, but are instead the predictable outcomes of our superior character. For if we didn’t believe this — if we didn’t believe at some level that we were simply better, and quite incapable of ever finding ourselves in the position of the beggar — we would never take the chance of adopting such a cavalier outlook on those who reside in that space presently, nor would we allow ourselves to believe that those who might refuse us their quarters outside Starbucks (where they just spent $3 for an overpriced espresso with steamed milk) were doing so for our own good.

They would be doing it — and so many of us are in the here and now — not for the benefit of those to whom they insist they would be teaching a lesson (or those to whom we believe ourselves teachers in the present) but rather, out of a sense of moral and ethical superiority, which the society — and not only its poor — can no longer afford, if we ever could.

Health Care, Government Shutdown and the Evil of Conservatism

I really can’t figure out what is so hard about this.

For Republicans to shut down the government — to cause real pain to hundreds of thousands of families whose members work for various government agencies, and who will now be furloughed, as if they don’t matter, because, ya know, they aren’t hedge fund managers or other truly vital employees — is the most venal thing I’ve seen elected officials do in my entire life.

And all because why? Because they don’t support a bill that was passed via the normal democratic processes that we use in this country, whether one likes them or not, and all of which could have been explained to these fools by Schoolhouse Rock, if not whatever Poli Sci class they skipped in college before deciding to be a politician. Apparently someone forgot to tell them that when a bill becomes a law, and then the courts uphold that law, and then voters go and re-elect the guy who pushed for the law, then you are done, son. That’s it. You don’t get to hold the country hostage so as to indulge your pre-teen temper tantrum. You have to actually run candidates and win (and not just for some backwoods, or exurban, white flight, Jeezoid congressional district where everyone thinks the same way and believes, against all evidence that Olive Garden is Italian food), but in an entire state, or — get this — a nation! And if you can’t do that, you don’t get to fuck with the rest of us so as to satisfy your church family. That’s not how this thing works.

And what’s pathetic is, most of the people who are railing against Obamacare can’t even tell you what it is, or how it will impact them, and hardly any of them are going to be in any way harmed by it. Quite the contrary. Most will be benefitted substantially. Especially those with pre-existing medical conditions, whom insurance companies, concerned not with health but money only, were free previously to exclude from insurance altogether. Anyone who thinks people with pre-existing conditions should not be able to get insurance (and note, this includes virtually all conservatives in America) are evil. The walking, talking definition of that word. And especially since insuring them (preferably with a real single-payer system, but for now, with the ACA) will only cost a few of us more money as a result.

Oh and yes, note, I said “us.”

Because, interestingly, I am one of the statistically few who probably will see my health insurance premiums rise thanks to Obamacare. Because my family and I are on a private-pay insurance plan (which is true for only about 5 percent of the American public, most of whom get insurance either through employers or through Medicare/Medicaid). And because our income is well above the cutoff for receiving any kind of subsidy from the government for our plan, the odds are, our premiums will rise.

And ya know what?

Good.

Because the fact is, as much as I think health care should be a right, guaranteed and paid for from general revenues — and so, yes, I believe in the utter destruction of the private health insurance industry — the fact is, so long as we maintain a private system in this country, to discriminate against persons with pre-existing conditions, and thereby artificially deflate the cost of my insurance just because you can screw other people and not have to assume the risk of insuring them, is fucking evil. Period. And I am not OK with having my health care costs made cheaper only because someone else isn’t being allowed to have care at all and therefore gets to die, or suffer horrible illness all in the name of the precious market. So if I have to pay more so that others can receive the care they need, so be it. I’d rather do it through tax revenues, yes; because that way, the profit motive would be removed entirely and worthless actuaries would have to get real jobs, involving actual skills. But for now. I’ll take it. And I’ll pay it.

And anyone who isn’t willing to do so, is very simply a horrible human being. No exceptions. Not one.