Tim Wise's Blog, page 21

John Bracey Jr. on How Racism Harms White Folks – From “White Like Me” Film

Here is an excerpt from an interview with John Bracey Jr. of U Mass Amherst, who is featured in my upcoming film (from the Media Education Foundation), “White Like Me.”

We are still trying to wrap up the Kickstarter campaign for the film, and closing in on our goal! Help put us over the top, if you’d like to support the effort, by going to the official kickstarter page, and contributing however much you feel you can. Thanks!

Bullying Pulpit: Racism, Barack Obama and the Selective Call for Personal Responsibility

Sometimes, white privilege isn’t about stuff. It’s not always about better opportunities, or more money, or even greater access to those things than people of color.

Sometimes, white privilege is as simple as knowing that, generally speaking, if you’re white, you’ll be perceived as competent and hard-working until proven otherwise, while people of color — even those who have proven themselves competent and hard-working — will still be subjected to presumptions that they just might not be, and that somehow, they (but not you) need to be reminded of the importance of hard-work and personal responsibility, lest they (but never you) revert to some less impressive group mean.

To wit, President Obama’s commencement address today at Morehouse College — one of the nation’s preeminent institutions of higher learning, and perhaps its most famous historically black college or university — during which, among plenty of rather standard commencement speech boilerplate, the president lectured this year’s graduates about the importance of taking personal responsibility for their lives, and not blaming racism for whatever obstacles they may face in the future.

It’s hard to know what’s more disturbing.

Either that President Obama thinks black grads at one of the nation’s best colleges really need to be lectured about such matters; or, alternately, that White America is so desirous of exculpation for the history of racial discrimination that we need him to say such things, and he knows it, thereby feeding us the moral scolding of black men we so desperately desire and love to hear.

Either way, the result is tragic.

If the former, then Barack Obama has for once and all revealed himself to be not nearly the deep and analytical thinker so many have long believed. After all, Morehouse men like the ones to whom the president delivered his commencement address today, are not the type to slack off, or make excuses for their shortcomings, or wait for others to do things for them. They earned admission to an amazing school, and have now graduated from said school, on the basis of their own merit and hard work. To hector them like supplicants looking for a handout is crass and beneath the dignity of a President of the United States, and especially one who shares the coloring of most, if not all of those graduates.

Barack Obama knows how demanding a school Morehouse is. So to preach hard work to these men, as if they had never heard of it — as if they now intended to kick back and wait for things to be handed to them — is to not only insult their intelligence, but also to feed every vicious stereotype already held by too many white Americans about black males, no matter how educated. It is to give us fuel for our already too-well-stoked racist fires, made ever hotter now by the ability to say, “See, even Obama knows the truth about black men! Even he knows they’re always making excuses for their failures.”

And if the latter — if the President thought it necessary to upbraid this year’s Morehouse graduates about not being lazy or using racism as an excuse for their shortcomings, because he thinks (or perhaps knows) that white folks love that shit — then that too is pitiable.

First, that Barack Obama sometimes seems to think he still needs to go out of his way to please white people is maddening. The white folks open to liking him don’t need him to serve as black folks’ moral scold, and the ones who need that will never be satisfied until he does the full Herman Cain: which is to say, until he is prepared to basically lay all the problems of the nation at the feet of folks of color and sing Negro spirituals in white churches while little old white ladies, either literally or figuratively, rub his head.

To the extent the president no longer needs white folks to like him for the sake of re-election, that he regularly panders to our biases about the black community — as with his repeated lectures to black men, but only black men, on multiple father’s days to be better dads (cuz God knows white men need no similar instruction!) — suggests that perhaps it is he whose views of the black community are to blame here. Perhaps it is he who has internalized the idea that black people, even highly educated ones, are would-be malingerers, just waiting for a reason to go soft and “blame the world for trying to keep a black man down” (yes, he actually used that phrase in his speech).

Needless to say, Barack Obama will never tell white people at a traditionally white college or university to stop blaming affirmative action for every job we didn’t get, or every law school we didn’t get into, though we’ve been known to use both of these excuses on more than a few occasions.

He won’t tell white graduates at a traditionally white college or university to stop blaming Latino/a immigrants, for “taking our jobs,” which excuse we’ve also been known to float from time to time.

He would never tell graduates at a mostly white college to stop blaming immigrants, or so-called welfare for our supposedly high tax burdens, even though these remain popular, albeit incorrect, scapegoats for whatever taxes we pay.

He won’t tell white grads at white colleges to reject the entreaties of their right-wing radio hosts and talking heads, who keep blaming the Community Reinvestment Act and other fair housing laws for the mortgage and larger economic meltdown, even though such things were not to blame.

In short, to Barack Obama, it is only black people who need lectures about personal responsibility. Only they who make excuses when things don’t go their way. Only they who need to be reminded to do their best, because white graduates — like the majority of the grads at Ohio State to whom he also spoke recently — have got all that on lock. Their work ethics are unassailable. They would never make excuses for their failings. They would never blame a 35 percent tax rate, or capital gains taxes, for instance, for causing them to not invest their money, or create jobs. They would never blame gay marriage for threatening their own heterosexual marriage.

Because white people never make excuses for anything.

And so we get to remain un-lectured, un-stigmatized, un-bothered, and un-burdened with a reminder of our own need to be responsible. We get to remain, in short, privileged and presumed competent, presumed hard-working, presumed responsible, until proven otherwise, while even some of the best and brightest black men in America will start their careers having been weighted down with the realization that even the president, at some level, doesn’t really trust them to do the right thing, unless reminded to do so first, and by him.

Quite a mixed blessing, such a graduation gift as that.

Terrorism, Inequality and the Mentality of Disposability (AUDIO)

A 20-minute portion of my speech at Emerson College in Boston, one week after the terrorist bombing there.

Terrorism, Profiling and White/Christian Privilege – Emerson College 4/22/13

Here is a segment from my speech at Emerson College, Boston, MA, delivered one week after the bombing there during the Boston Marathon.

Whine Merchants: Privilege, Inequality and the Persistent Myth of White Victimhood

But what about us?

It’s a question of which white folks seem never to tire when discussing subjects like affirmative action, or other diversity initiatives intended to expand opportunity and access for people of color in higher education and the job market.

Whenever these matters are broached, the vast majority of us rush to protest: How dare schools or employers consider race in hiring or admissions. They should be colorblind, we insist, merely admitting or hiring the most qualified! And more to the point, we proclaim, targeting folks of color for opportunities, by definition, means discrimination against us. Such efforts make us the victims, even, on some accounts, treating white people “exactly” like blacks were treated under Jim Crow segregation (1).

So, yes, it remains the case that even when black folks have college degrees they’re nearly twice as likely as comparable whites to be out of work; and Latinos with degrees are about 50 percent more likely than comparable whites to be out of work; and Asian Americans with degrees are about 40 percent more likely than comparable whites to be out of work (2). And yes, even whites who claim to have criminal records are more likely to be hired than equally qualified blacks without records, but still, can anti-white lynchings be far behind?

And yes, blacks and Latinos combined only represent about 13 percent of students at the most selective colleges and universities — the only ones that actually practice any kind of real affirmative action for admissions — and there are twice as many whites admitted to elite schools with less-than-average qualifications as there are people of color so admitted, but still, can any rational person doubt that whites will soon be limited to mere token representation at the nation’s best educational institutions?

That such hand-wringing about so-called reverse discrimination reeks of intellectual mendacity should be obvious by now. Despite years of so-called reverse racism, whites remain atop every indicator of social and economic well-being when compared to the African Americans and Latinos who, it is claimed, are displacing us from our perch: employment data, income, net worth; you name it, and we are the ones in better shape without exception.

Indeed, in some regards the gaps between whites and folks of color have grown in recent years, as with wealth gaps, which have actually tripled since the 1980s, now leaving the typical white family with over 20 times the net worth of the typical black family and 18 times that of the typical Latino family. Even when comparing families of middle-class income and occupational status, whites possess 3-5 times the net worth of middle class blacks, suggesting that even African Americans who have procured good careers and obtained college degrees lag well behind their white counterparts, due in large measure to the inherited disadvantages of past generations, affirmative action efforts notwithstanding.

This is why, despite affirmative action — which may well be eradicated (at least so far as higher ed is concerned) by the Supreme Court within the month — white racial advantage remains a real and persistent phenomena in American life, and one with which fair-minded persons should still be prepared to grapple.

To claim that affirmative action not only disproves white privilege, but indeed suggests its opposite — black and brown privilege — as many have argued to me via email exchanges, is to ignore the entire social context within which affirmative action occurs.

It’s like protesting that sick people are privileged, relative to the healthy, because there are no hospitals for the latter.

It’s like complaining that the poor are privileged, relative to the well-off, because no one sets up soup kitchens to serve the affluent; nor does Habitat for Humanity ever show up to build mansions for the rich.

It’s like insisting that the disabled are privileged because they get bigger bathroom stalls, or because of all those special parking spaces, and that the able-bodied are oppressed because we have to walk a bit further when we go shopping at the mall or for groceries

It’s like complaining that women are privileged and men oppressed because of half-price Ladies Night specials at the local pub, or because of Breast Cancer Awareness wristbands that say “Save the Boobies” — after all, there are no “I love Prostate” wristbands — or because female porn stars and strippers make more than their male counterparts, or because hospitals don’t have paternity wards. Yeah, think about that one for a minute!

It’s like whining about how the LGBT community is privileged and we straight folks oppressed, since, after all, “the gays” have their own parades and bars that cater to their needs. Where’s our parade? Where’s our bar?

It’s like inveighing against the privileges enjoyed by Jews or Muslims, what with that Kosher or Halal certification you can find on grocery items nowadays. Obviously, going out of the way to make sure observant Jews and Muslims know what food is OK for them to eat is nothing less than naked favoritism! After all, where’s the little Jesus cross to let Christians know what food is holy for them?

It’s like rich people, who make millions or even billions (and as such, likely pay a pretty hefty tax bill annually) complaining about how working class folks who earn only $15,000 or so not only don’t pay income taxes, they actually get a refund in the form of the Earned Income Tax Credit! As such, it’s obvious that the working poor are the truly advantaged in society! And this is especially true when you think about all the thrift shops and discount stores that are established to serve them, and those check-cashing outlets and pawn shops! An entire infrastructure just for low-income people. Where are our food stamps? Where’s our government cheese?

For that matter, one might ask (and some, with no sense of irony do), where’s our White Entertainment Television? Because when one is white one has the luxury of ignoring that the entire cable broadcast spectrum represents whiteness: from Donald Trump to Honey Boo-Boo and everything inbetween.

Or, as others insist, where’s our National Association for the Advancement of White People? Because likewise, we don’t have to notice how there are several of these, implicitly, throughout the culture: the Fortune 500, the Chamber of Commerce, or your friendly neighborhood police force among the most obvious.

Or, where’s our White History Month? Which is the kind of imbecilic query that could only emanate from the lips of one who has had the luxury of glibly ignoring that we have several, though they go by the tricky names of May, June, July, and so on, and in which months white people’s historical narratives are given quite a bit more than a momentary consideration.

In other words, when whites critique affirmative action, we typically ignore everything that came before such efforts — and which unjustly skewed the historical balance of power and access in our favor — and even that which continues to favor us now, from funding and other advantages in the schools that mostly serve our children, to preferential treatment in the housing market, to ongoing advantages in employment.

For instance, with black and Latino students far more likely than whites to attend concentrated poverty schools, and with the typical black or Latino student attending school with twice as many low income students as the typical white student, and being twice as likely to be taught by the least experienced teachers and half as likely to be taught by the most experienced, it is more than a bit disingenuous to suggest that it’s black and brown kids receiving “preferential treatment” in education.

With companies filling up to half of their new jobs by way of recommendations made by pre-existing employees — a practice that benefits those persons connected to others already in the pipeline, who will disproportionately be white — and with informal, typically white-dominated networks providing the keys to the best jobs in the modern economy, and with research indicating that employers are more likely to hire people they’d like to “hang out with,” than those who are necessarily the most qualified (which will tend to replicate race and class homogeneity), and with blacks significantly underrepresented in management positions, even and especially in work settings that include large numbers of blacks, it stands as uniquely craven to complain about how persons of color are receiving unjust head starts in the labor market. That even middle class blacks, relatively protected by their economic and educational status from overt mistreatment, still suffer disparate rates of job dismissal (even when their performance indicators are comparable to those of whites), lower mobility when compared to similar whites, and regular harassment on the job, makes such arguments all the more repugnant.

With people of color significantly more likely than whites to be steered to subprime mortgage loans — even when their credit scores and incomes are comparable to (or better) than their white counterparts — makes it downright indecent to argue that it’s whites who are getting the shaft and people of color who are reaping the benefits of some iniquitous system of preference.

And yet, that’s what one can hear, over and again, from the very white Americans who regularly bemoan what they call the “victim” mentality of black folks and other “racial minorities.”

As in, “If I were just black, I’d have gotten into Harvard!” Or, “If my buddy John had been named Juan, he’d have gotten that construction contract,” which arguments brazenly ignore that whites still far outnumber blacks at places like Harvard and white owned businesses continue to receive over 90 percent of government contracts (3). Oh, and such idiocy also, and conveniently, ignores one more not-so-minor matter: namely, that if one had been black, or if one’s friend had been Latino, one’s life and that of said friend would have been completely different, and not only on that day that you or he applied to Harvard or for that particular contract, but every day before that.

Which is to say that long before you sent in your college application, you’d have been a black child, born in a country where black children are twice as likely to die in infancy as the white child you actually were.

You’d have been a black teenager, in a country where black teens who are actively seeking jobs have unemployment rates that regularly hover around 40 percent, and are 2.5 times the rates for white teens, like the one you actually were (4).

You’d have been living in a black family, whose parent or parents would have been twice as likely to be out of work and three times as likely to be poor as the white parents you actually grew up with.

And if you had committed a crime as a youth, you’d have been six times as likely to be incarcerated for that crime than your actual white self, even if the crime details and your prior record were no different than they had been in your actual, white world.

In short, claims of white victimhood only make sense if one has so imbibed a mentality of entitlement that one actually believes whites earned all that extra stuff, that we earned our better health, or the relative wealth status we merely inherited from our families (which inherited it from theirs), or preferential treatment from cops. Which is to say, it’s the kind of thing that can only make sense to those lacking the most basic capacity for critical thought, and anything remotely resembling that which we might call, perspective.

Sadly, this is precisely the mentality adopted by several members — and now perhaps the majority — of the Supreme Court: persons who lash out at any effort to balance out opportunities for people of color, as evidence of unlawful and unfair preference, but ignore the persistent and institutionalized advantages of whiteness, referring dismissively to such things as “societal discrimination,” against which they claim to be powerless.

Such is the face of white privilege in the twenty-first century: a systematized reality so normalized and taken for granted by the majority of whites, that any deviation from its totalizing script becomes cause for alarm in the eyes of millions.

That such a weak, hypersensitive and over-indulged group as this should wield such power would be funny were it not so dangerous.

_______

(1) Yes, I realize that there are more sophisticated arguments against affirmative action than this kind of white victimhood argument, and I have responded to them elsewhere. First and foremost in my 2005 book, Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White, but also in numerous essays. To wit, here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here.

(2) See Table 6, pages 14-16. Note, the white unemployment figures are artificially inflated because roughly 93 percent of Latinos are racially classified as white in Labor Department data, as noted on page 1 of the report. Because Latinos and Latinas tend to have higher unemployment rates than non-Hispanic whites, including them in the white totals skews white unemployment upwards at higher levels of education. While Latino/as with little education actually tend to fare slightly better than comparable whites (likely because they are hired specifically by employers who seek to take advantage of their limited language skills or immigration vulnerability, and thus, inability to complain about bad work conditions, low pay, and no benefits), among Latinos with high school diplomas or college educations, employment status is worse than for comparable whites. Once Latino males are extracted from the white totals for persons with college degrees, Latino unemployment for degree holders is 44 percent above that for whites, while unemployment rates for Latina females with degrees is 59 percent above the rate for comparable white women. For Asian Americans, in the aggregate, unemployment among degree holders is 37 percent higher than for comparable whites, including a whopping 68 percent higher for Asian American women, relative to white women with degrees.

(3) According to the data in this article, black- and Latino-owned small businesses received about $15 billion, combined, in government contract dollars in 2011, out of approximately $433 billion in overall contracts granted by the government that year, for a percentage of only about 3.5 percent of all contract dollars. This more comprehensive analysis indicates a total of about $36 billion overall in contract dollars for minority-owned businesses that year (including other persons of color, not black or Hispanic), out of $537 billion in overall contract dollars, for a percentage of about 6 percent. Either way, it is safe to say that over 90 percent of contract dollars continue to flow to businesses owned by whites.

(4) According to Table 3 (pp 7-9) of this report, black teen unemployment rates in 2011 averaged 41.2 percent, compared to 19.5 percent for white teens, once Latinos classified in the data as white are removed from the white totals. It was important to remove Latinos from the white totals, because Latino teens are about 60 percent more likely than white teens to be unemployed, thus, keeping them in the larger category of whites (and as noted on page 1 of the report, about 93 percent of Latinos are found there), artificially inflates the “real white” unemployment numbers, whether for teens or adults. For an explanation of how I extracted Latinos from the data, here and in note 2 above, write for details at timjwise@mac.com. The procedure isn’t complicated but is too lengthy to explain here.

Kickstarter Campaign – White Like Me (The Film) – Support Needed!

Here’s the Kickstarter campaign for the upcoming White Like Me film. We’re close to making it happen, but any support we can get from longtime supporters and readers (or new ones!) would help tons…

To contribute, go here:

WHITE LIKE ME brings the work of anti-racist author and educator Tim Wise to the screen, exploring race and racism in the United States through the lens of whiteness and white privilege. The film’s baseline aim is to make sense of the seemingly abstract concept of white privilege, and to show how our failure as a society to properly acknowledge and confront the psychological, social, and political effects of white privilege continues to perpetuate racial inequality and race-based political resentments. WHITE LIKE ME represents the first attempt to bring the full range of Wise’s work to the screen, to tell a single compelling story about how white privilege continues to shape individual attitudes, public discourse, electoral politics, and government policy in ways most white people have never stopped to think about.

In addition to Tim Wise, the film will feature:

MICHELLE ALEXANDER | Ohio State University Law School, Author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

CHARLES OGLETREE | Harvard Law School, Author of The Presumption of Guilt: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Race, Class & Crime in America

IMANI PERRY | Center for African American Studies, Princeton University, Author of More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States

MARTIN GILENS | Department of Politics, Princeton University, Author of Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Anti-Poverty Policy

JOHN H. BRACEY, JR. | Afro-American Studies, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Author of African American Mosaic: A Documentary History from the Slave Trade to the 21st Century (with Manisha Sinha)

NILANJANA DASGUPTA | Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, National Science Foundation Grant winner for research on implicit prejudice.

OUR GOAL: WHITE LIKE ME aims to help change the national conversation about race and racism, especially among white people. It aims to show how the best way forward is not to try to transcend race in pursuit of a color-blind society, but to talk openly, honestly, and without defensiveness about race, racism, and racial identity, especially white racial identity. With Tim Wise as the guide, we think this film has a good shot at doing just that.

Tim Wise, “Fighting the Normalization of Inequality,” All Saints Church, Pasadena, 4/28/13

My presentation at All Saints Church, Pasadena, CA, 4/28/13, to discuss the normalization of inequality, and the intersectionality of race, sex, class, militarism, terrorism and environmental catastrophe

Tim Wise Speech, “Beyond Diversity,” at Missouri State, April 18, 2013

Terrorism and Privilege: Understanding the Power of Whiteness

As the nation weeps for the victims of the horrific bombing in Boston yesterday, one searches for lessons amid the carnage, and finds few. That violence is unacceptable stands out as one, sure. That hatred — for humanity, for life, or whatever else might have animated the bomber or bombers — is never the source of constructive human action seems like a reasonably close second.

But I dare say there is more; a much less obvious and far more uncomfortable lesson, which many are loathe to learn, but which an event such as this makes readily apparent, and which we must acknowledge, no matter how painful.

It is a lesson about race, about whiteness, and specifically, about white privilege.

I know you don’t want to hear it. But I don’t much care. So here goes.

White privilege is knowing that even if the Boston Marathon bomber turns out to be white, his or her identity will not result in white folks generally being singled out for suspicion by law enforcement, or the TSA, or the FBI.

White privilege is knowing that even if the bomber turns out to be white, no one will call for whites to be profiled as terrorists as a result, subjected to special screening, or threatened with deportation.

White privilege is knowing that if the bomber turns out to be white, he or she will be viewed as an exception to an otherwise non-white rule, an aberration, an anomaly, and that he or she will be able to join the ranks of Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols and Ted Kaczynski and Eric Rudolph and Joe Stack and George Metesky and Byron De La Beckwith and Bobby Frank Cherry and Thomas Blanton and Herman Frank Cash and Robert Chambliss and James von Brunn and Robert Mathews and David_Lane and Michael F. Griffin and Paul Hill and John Salvi and James Kopp and Luke Helder and James David Adkisson and Scott Roeder and Shelley Shannon and Wade Michael Page and Byron Williams and Kevin Harpham and William Krar and Judith Bruey and Edward Feltus and Raymond Kirk Dillard and Adam Lynn Cunningham and Bonnell Hughes and Randall Garrett Cole and James Ray McElroy and Michael Gorbey and Daniel Cowart and Paul Schlesselman and Frederick Thomas and Paul Ross Evans and Matt Goldsby and Jimmy Simmons and Kathy Simmons and Kaye Wiggins and Patricia Hughes and Jeremy Dunahoe and David McMenemy and Bobby Joe Rogers and Francis Grady and Demetrius Van Crocker and Floyd Raymond Looker, among the pantheon of white people who engage in politically motivated violence meant to terrorize and kill, but whose actions result in the assumption of absolutely nothing about white people generally, or white Christians in particular.

And white privilege is being able to know nothing about the crimes committed by most of the terrorists listed above — indeed, never to have so much as heard most of their names — let alone to make assumptions about the role that their racial or ethnic identity may have played in their crimes.

White privilege is knowing that if the Boston bomber turns out to be white, we  will not be asked to denounce him or her, so as to prove our own loyalties to the common national good. It is knowing that the next time a cop sees one of us standing on the sidewalk cheering on runners in a marathon, that cop will say exactly nothing to us as a result.

White privilege is knowing that if you are a white student from Nebraska — as opposed to, say, a student from Saudi Arabia — that no one, and I mean no one would think it important to detain and question you in the wake of a bombing such as the one at the Boston Marathon.

And white privilege is knowing that if this bomber turns out to be white, the United States government will not bomb whatever corn field or mountain town or stale suburb from which said bomber came, just to ensure that others like him or her don’t get any ideas. And if he turns out to be a member of the Irish Republican Army we won’t bomb Dublin. And if he’s an Italian American Catholic we won’t bomb the Vatican.

In short, white privilege is the thing that allows you (if you’re white) — and me — to view tragic events like this as merely horrific, and from the perspective of pure and innocent victims, rather than having to wonder, and to look over one’s shoulder, and to ask even if only in hushed tones, whether those we pass on the street might think that somehow we were involved.

It is the source of our unearned innocence and the cause of others’ unjustified oppression.

That is all. And it matters.

Culture of Cruelty: An Interview With Tim Wise About His Forthcoming Book

Here’s my recent interview with Felicia Gustin of War Times, in which we discuss my upcoming book, Culture of Cruelty: How America’s Elite Demonize the Poor

March 14, 2013

Tim Wise is one of the most prominent anti-racist writers and educators in the United States. He is the author of six books including Dear White America: Letter to a New Minority and his highly acclaimed memoir, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son. His forthcoming book is Culture of Cruelty: How America’s Elite Demonize the Poor, Valorize the Rich and Jeopardize the Future (City Lights Publishers). Wise sat down with War Times to talk about the book’s focus that builds on his fierce critique of racial privilege to discuss a related issue: class disparity and a culture of cruelty that demonizes those in need.

Felicia Gustin: Tim, much of your work has focused on racism and white privilege though you’ve often looked at how these intersect with class inequities. Talk about how the idea for this book came about.

Tim Wise: In some ways, I think I’ve been moving towards this in the last three books I’ve done for City Lights (Dear White America, Colorblind and Between Barack and a Hard Place) that included a fairly heavy element of class analysis. The argument that I’ve been making is that in many ways the problem now confronting white America is the indifference that white America has had toward economic injustice because it was perceived that the only people getting hit by that were people of color. So there was a certain ambivalence and that is now starting to catch up with white people with the financial crisis and the housing meltdown.

We’ve also noticed over the last year to 18 months in particular this very steady stream of dehumanizing, overly cruel rhetoric aimed at not just the poor but also the unemployed, people who are out of work for 26 weeks and need an extension on unemployment benefits, or 52 weeks. Sure, it’s been coming for a long time and we’ve certainly noticed it for years but we’re seeing more of this steady drumbeat of rhetoric, of the takers vs. the makers; there’s the Mitt Romney tape during the campaign about the 47% of the American public who just don’t want to work.

You can hear this rhetoric regurgitated on Fox and on talk radio. There’s this constant stream of critique, not just about social safety net programs which had been critiqued by conservatives for years, but a real critique of the core humanity of people who need those programs, whether it’s health care, unemployment insurance or food stamps. It’s people saying things like people should be ashamed to be on food stamps, we should drug test them, we should make them jump through all kinds of hoops, we should make it harder for them, we should make them feel pain. Literally people saying these things. Or saying the poor aren’t really poor after all because they have washing machines and color TVs and microwaves.

After hearing that for so long I just started to ask the question, why is it that the culture has come to this place when there was a period maybe 70 years ago, even 100 years ago at the turn of the 20th century, where it was understood that if there was any group that had bad values and pathological behavior, it wasn’t poor people and it wasn’t unemployed people, it was rich people. They were called robber barons for a reason. They were not venerated. They were not respected. They were despised.

In the 30s, although it was very racially unequal, there was a general sense that when people were unemployed it wasn’t their fault that they were poor. There were systemic problems that needed to be fixed in the economy, and the only people who rejected that idea were the rich. Yeah they wanted poor people to work for whatever crappy wages they were offering, but every other average everyday person looked at the unemployed – at least the unemployed white man – as salt of the earth: hard-working, struggling against all odds.

Seventy years later we’ve come to a place where those very same people – including ironically, unemployed white men – are now being looked as dysfunctional, pathological, having the wrong values, being ‘takers’ not ‘makers.’ So I wanted to look at why. Not only that it happened but why it happened.

FG: And what did you see as the reasons this shift has taken place?

TW: I’ve identified three things. One is the racialization of poverty, that is, once we came to view poverty and need as Black and Latino, the less concern that white America had. There’s study after study that demonstrate that the more we view those needing social programs as people of color, the more whites have hostility for them. Lots of scholars have written about this.

The second reason is the sexist impulse, the feminization of poverty, so that the image of the poor shifted not only from white to Black or white to Brown, but from male to female. Instead of the unemployed hobo riding the rails looking for work in the 30s or the dustbowl farmer trying to hold it together in Nebraska, it was the single mom who was called in the 70s, the “ghetto matriarch,” having children she couldn’t afford and not even needing a man anymore, letting the state replace a husband. So there’s that whole male resentment and backlash that’s part of why the safety net programs were attacked and why the rhetoric has gotten so harsh.

And the third reason that is more modern and hasn’t been talked about as much is that popular culture sends these messages every day that reinforce a notion that is long standing in America – the notion of meritocracy, that anybody can make it if they work hard. That’s always been the reigning ethos of the country. But 80 years ago most people knew it was crap. During the Depression most people were saying, “yeah whatever, we don’t really believe that and know it’s not true.” Now even though the evidence says upward mobility is less common than ever, the belief in upper mobility is greater.

And the only logical explanation that I can find evidence for is that you have a popular culture that everyday transmits signals through hundreds of television stations and dozens of reality shows that really anybody can make it because look, you’ve got people who are not particularly educated, not extraordinarily intelligent, don’t really work all that hard but they’ve got a reality show. You’ve got the guys with Storage Wars, Duck Dynasty, Hillbilly Handfishing, Honey Boo Boo. You’ve got people with a gimmick.

It’s not like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous – these are lifestyles of the working class and mediocre but by God, they got a show. So it’s those constant symbolic images of upward mobility, symbolic images of success that don’t really comport with reality but reinforce these notions that if I just work a little harder, then I can make it.

Think about it. During the Depression, if you were poor or working class, you didn’t see images of upward mobility everyday. The media wasn’t as big as it is now. You were surrounded by other poor and working-class people. And likewise, if you were rich, you were just surrounded by rich people. Today you can be pretty poor or struggling but you might still have a television that will allow you a glimpse into that world and make you perhaps hate yourself or seriously doubt yourself or certainly doubt others who are even worse off than you.

So I think when you take these factors – race, gender and popular culture – and mix them together, you have this perfect recipe for this culture of cruelty, this indifference to suffering that in the long run –as I talk about in the book – is going to vitiate what little safety nets we have left and really jeopardize the economic health of the nation in the next 20 years.

FG: We’ve seen, especially in the last two elections, white people go against their own self interests, who are so hysterical that there is a Black man in the White House, particularly poor and working class white people who have actually sided with those class interests, opposing tax cuts for the rich, opposing health care for themselves, and ultimately believing that one day they too might be rich.

TW: Part of that is an old tradition, particularly among white struggling people, that’s been going on for 400 years going back to the colonies; an attempt to convince them that their real interests were with other whites even if they were rich whites, rather than with their Black and Brown brothers and sisters. And it’s worked with every generation to different degrees.

What was interesting during the Depression, one of the reasons there were such high levels of support for social safety net programs was precisely because people of color were basically excluded from them. So whether it was the New Deal programs, the jobs program, the FHA Loan program or later on, the GI Bill program from which people of color were routinely blocked – as long as you thought the only beneficiaries of big government looked like you it was all good.

But as people of color gained access through social movements, protests, and the civil rights struggle to some of those things that white people always had had, then the backlash happened and all of that confusing one’s interests and thinking of one’s interests in racial terms rather than economic terms became possible again.

Now, at the very moment when white folks find themselves, not in the state of the Great Depression, but in the worst economic situation since then, a lot of those programs are being cut to the bone and they still seem to gravitate toward cutting them even more. I think part of that is the longer trajectory of false consciousness that has been instilled by whiteness and by certain notions of masculinity.

Some of this is definitely connected to – and I write about this in Dear White America – the changing demographics and the changing culture of the country which leave white folks under the impression that just about everything that gets done is going to be about “taking from us” and “giving to them.” So that’s why they can say that health care reform, as mild and moderate as it is, is “reparations for slavery.” And even white folks who need better healthcare will fall for that and go, “oh my God, they’re going to give to those people who aren’t deserving.”

There’s a study that was done a few years back in ’08, that when white voters were shown the 10 basic key points of Obama’s healthcare plan and told it was Bill Clinton’s plan, 2 to 1 supported it. When they were told it was Obama’s, there was 2 to 1 opposition. So what is that? Same plan. But when they hear it’s Obama’s plan they either assume it really must not be about helping “us” or even a crazier thing which is, “I’d rather not be helped at all then have a Black man help me.” It just goes to show that that notion of confusing one’s interests can really be part of this racial conversation that we’ve been having for hundreds of years and haven’t resolved.

FG: With the emergence of Occupy movement, there were some powerful shifts that popularized the notion of a 99% and a 1%. Granted there were issues within that movement in terms of racism, but that frame became pretty widespread in the national dialogue and in popular culture. What are you thoughts on this?

TW: I think that the thing that Occupy accomplished for those of us who talk about inequality is that it put that on the map of our political consciousness as a society in a way that had not been done in awhile. Yes, there had always been some of us who talked about those inequities, but for the most part those were third rail politics. You didn’t talk about inequality, you talked about opportunity, you talked about how we need to have better jobs and better income, better schools but you didn’t by and large frame it in the mainstream imagination as not just a matter of some people having too little but also some people having too much. And that was new for a national political conversation.

It even became a little piece of the presidential campaign. Not only did it prompt President Obama to talk, however limited, in a way he hadn’t before but I also think it ultimately prompted Romney to say the things he said and Paul Ryan to say the things he said about the ‘takers’ not the ‘makers.’

Interestingly, Occupy forced the conversation about who’s on top and who’s on the bottom and that forced the Republicans to out themselves as the party of the top and how we’ve got to stop those people who are coming to take what we’ve earned. So in a way, Occupy influenced the outcome of the election indirectly. That certainly wasn’t their goal and President Obama may not be a progressive on economic issues, but it is the first step in saying this is a conversation we need to have. I hope that with my new book and works by others who are trying to deepen this discussion that Occupy started that we figure out how to take what was this very germ of an idea that was brought to the American public and turn it into a longer, more steady and fulfilling narrative.

FG: What is it going to take to shift things to an understanding of class solidarity?

TW: We’re going to have to invert the blame and get back to understanding who the people are with the truly bad values. It’s not the people who are poor. So we not only have to defend the poor and working class from those attacks by explaining the myths that are held about them and exposing them for the lies they are. But we also need to be aggressive in saying that the people whose values we need to worry about and whose behaviors are sociopathic and even psychopathic are the ultra rich, the super elite. They’re the ones with the bad values and here’s the evidence, the studies, the research that prove this. It’s about flipping the script on the demonization of poor people and holding the mirror up to those people who are the problem: the rich and the elite.

FG: How do you do that when the rich and elite own the media, Congress, prisons, the criminal justice system, etc.?

TW: They owned all those things 100 years ago too but there was still a counter narrative that existed among working people at the time. Working people didn’t have social media that they could try and counter it with. They didn’t have their own newspapers, radio and TV shows. They may have had little tabloids. The rich have always controlled politics and the media. If anything right now, despite the concentration of media power, there’s also a contravening trend which is that communities around the country – and granted there’s an economic division to this and a racial division to this and a cultural and language division – but there is more opportunity today I would say, for working class folks to counter those messages in ways that especially young people are hearing.

Young people are not getting their news from those media outlets that big corporations that have an interest in maintaining things own. Yes, internet companies and social media companies are owned by corporations. But young people don’t get their news from Fox or CNN or the New York Times; from any of these bought and paid for sources and they don’t trust any of the politicians. They know there is something wrong.

So the good news is that we have a whole generation now who are seeking out alternative forms of information. So if we’re thinking as organizers, we can stay one step ahead of those forces who are trying to limit and manipulate information, and counter it through music and through art and through alternative media and various sources of social media exchange on the internet. We can move the conversation in a positive direction and show that it is the culture of affluence and power that is to blame for America’s economic and social crises.