THE INCREDIBLE WHITENESS OF BEING

[AthenaAwakened]

My kid and I were having one of those rambling conversations people have when there is nothing on TV and raindrops do a soft shoe down window panes. We were speaking of many things and within those many things, the subject of race came up, but not the 'negro problem" but that Pearl of Great Price known as whiteness.

You know, whiteness is a powerful thing. So powerful in fact that it has managed to make slaves out of white people so desperate to hold onto a myth a supremacy that they would rather share whiteness with the white man kicking them in the ass day in and day out, than share better wages, better working conditions, and better benefits with someone who looks like me. Poor and working class white folk all over this country defend austere economic policies and vote for representatives who actively seek to remove any and all worker and wage protections on the books, all for a promise that people of color will get no "special treatment," nothing they have not earned and earned hard. They will depend on a contribution jar left on a convenience store counter and the change strangers get from a ten to pay for the healthcare of their children, rather than demand a broader and more comprehensive universal healthcare at a more affordable price because such a plan might be considered "reparations". They will lose their homes to sub prime mortgage scams rather than demand regulations that could save the limited assets of their families and their generations to come.

Damn strong drug, this whiteness. Blinds you, binds you, then it never minds you.

 

[Davka]

Somehow whiteness has been infused with True Religion^TM to create this weird justification for calling charity "evil," even though the Bible calls it good. This seems to make it easier for poor whites to accept that their position in life is God's Will, blessed be His lily-white and kissable sphincter.

Fear of Hell + Fear of Melanin = Poor White Republicans.

 

[Tigers!]

Such a shame I can't do anything about my whiteness. Pity that lack of melanin.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

Such a shame I can't do anything about my whiteness. Pity that lack of melanin.

Indeed. And Horray for another random hate white people thread from the lady that declares only white people can be racist. The irony in this one is so tasty.

So, does whiteness somehow magically make somebody a US conservative rather than liberal? Is it race that makes them oppose wage protections, universal health care, banking regulations, etc? They do it because they are racists who want to keep the black man down? Or perhaps they do it because they subscribe to US conservative ideology, side with the rich against the poor, and oppose socialism? Last I looked there were plenty of white liberals who take the exact opposite positions. Did the whiteness fail in their cases? And is it impossible to be a white racist who pushes for socialism, universal health care, banking regulations, wage protections, etc?

I don't think in all my time reading this forum that I have ever seen such a silly case of playing the race card.

 

[Random Person]

You can't control the color of the skin you were born in but you can control your attitude about it. Sending yourself hopeless messages isn't the same as sending realistic ones.

 

[Toni]

Such a shame I can't do anything about my whiteness. Pity that lack of melanin.

Indeed. And Horray for another random hate white people thread from the lady that declares only white people can be racist. The irony in this one is so tasty.

So, does whiteness somehow magically make somebody a US conservative rather than liberal? Is it race that makes them oppose wage protections, universal health care, banking regulations, etc? They do it because they are racists who want to keep the black man down? Or perhaps they do it because they subscribe to US conservative ideology, side with the rich against the poor, and oppose socialism? Last I looked there were plenty of white liberals who take the exact opposite positions. Did the whiteness fail in their cases? And is it impossible to be a white racist who pushes for socialism, universal health care, banking regulations, wage protections, etc?

I don't think in all my time reading this forum that I have ever seen such a silly case of playing the race card.

The circumstances of your birth do indeed inform your world view. How much depends upon many things, including choices you make in your education, your associations, your work, etc.

It is not surprising that people who never actually encounter someone who looks/thinks/has a different experience of the world than themselves and whose significant experience with 'other' is what they see on sensationalized news have a fairly narrow world view and don't really understand that the world looks different if you have a different accent, a different color of skin, a different hair texture and more importantly: the world treats you differently. For example, a lotta white people don't realize that black people need sunscreen, that black people can get skin cancer and die from it, too.

It's not always malevolently intended. A lot of medical standards were based on what is normal for medical students: i.e. white males because those were the study subjects most easily available. Women still struggle to get doctors to recognize that heart attacks present with different symptoms than for males. And so on. It just relies on a narrow point of view. In some cases, pin point narrow.

 

[lpetrich]

American deceptionalism - Opinion - Al Jazeera English
Paul Rosenberg started off by noting United States exceptionalism, and how American revolutionary ideals were (1) very imperfectly applied for a long time and (2) an inspiration for European reformers and revolutionaries. He also noted what seemed to him a condescending attitude toward Occupy Wall Street from some of the US's political class: "You've made your point. Now go to your room and shut up. We've got a lawn to keep up, and you've spoiled it."

He noted that the 19th century had some successful welfare statism, notably universal public education and making large amounts of land available and accessible for at low or zero cost. Admittedly it was all stolen from its previous inhabitants, but that's another story. But industrial-era welfare statism was a different story. Much of the industrial workforce was first Irish, then Central and Southern European, mostly Catholic or Jewish, and these immigrants were perceived as hostile others. Americans have been curiously reluctant to learn from Europeans' experience, despite being willing to do so with many other things.

PR then notes this interesting bit of research: Why Doesn't the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State? | The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs After analyzing a variety of factors, the authors conclude that it's inversely correlated with the amount of racial minorities -- higher fractions of minorities means less social and welfare spending. This correlation holds true across nations and across US states:

Nations: Social Spending (% GDP) vs. Racial Fractionalization
US States: Welfare Benefits vs. Black Proportion

Americans have been more likely to consider poor people undeserving lazy bums than Europeans were, and that's because to many Americans, poor people are a hostile other, rather than fellow Americans who have had some misfortune or whatever. Think of all the stereotypes of black people as lazy and criminal and living off of welfare. But where there aren't many black people, US politicians have been willing to enact at least moderately generous welfare states. This is most likely because the beneficiaries are very likely to be fellow honkies.

Americans don't have much aversion to welfare statism that benefits them, however. This includes the right wing, where the Tea Party is known for an attitude of "keep your government hands off my Medicare!" Members of this movement do not object to fellow members sticking their snouts in government troughs -- just to people other than them doing so.

That study also notes various historic and institutional factors that got in the way of US welfare statism, like its being more rural than Europe, being more decentralized, and having political institutions with rather fossilized features, like lack of proportional representation.


Paul Rosenberg then discusses President Obama's rather desperate attempts at constructing a health-care reform package that Republicans might like, only to be rebuffed by them. He concludes with

I've concentrated here on healthcare as a key welfare state component. But the same pattern of delusionary grand bargaining can be seen wherever you care to look. Consider "education reform". "America's schools are failing!" we're told. We have to privatise, voucherise, give parents more choice - that alone can save us.

But none of this is supported by evidence, certainly not the evidence of other countries, whose systems are more centralised and less privatised than those of the United States. The US accounts of nearly half of military spending worldwide. The only folks whose overspending ever came close to us was the Soviet Union, and we sure didn't learn anything from them. On the drug war? Don't even think of thinking about it!

The list could be extended indefinitely. There is not a single area in which Republicans won't condemn anything foreign just for being foreign (unless, for some reason they like it, the way Michele Bachmann likes Chinese slave labour). And there's not a single area where Democrats won't be defensive about thinking outside the box that Republicans have put them in.

As to what the future might hold, it's clear that the United States has been becoming more Europe-like in some ways, like becoming more and more urban. That urbanization had a strange twist in the mid 20th cy., when lots of blacks moved to cities and many whites fled them for the suburbs. Instead of the recent European pattern of rich center and poor periphery, what resulted was poor center and rich periphery. But over the last few decades, gentrifiers have been at work on many urban neighborhoods, and some suburbs have become slums, thus moving toward the European pattern.

Also, racial divisions have been weakening, with Americans becoming more racially tolerant. We still have a way to go, but we've come a remarkable way from the days when Southern politicians would defend lynchings of black people as justified for their heinous crimes.

So I think that the US will become more and more Europe-like as time goes on, and that will likely move its politics in a more social-democratic direction.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

In ways so embedded that it is rarely apparent, the set of assumptions, privileges, and benefits that accompany the status of being white become a valuable asset—one that whites sought to protect and those who passed sought to attain, by fraud if necessary. Whites have come to expect and rely on these benefits, and over time these expectations have been affirmed, legitimized, and protected by the law. Even though the law is neither uniform nor explicit in all instances in protecting settled expectations of white privilege, American law has recognized a property interest in whiteness that, although unacknowledged, now forms the background against which legal disputes are framed argued and adjudicated.

http://bama.ua.edu/~jpetrovi/bef510/readings/Harris.pdf

It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule.

W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Free Press, 1995 reissue of 1935 original), pp. 700–701. ISBN 0-684-85657-3.

Aren’t We Special?

For conservative white people, the dominant fear is of someday living without the privilege that comes with whiteness. Polite conservatives defend the primacy of “Western civilization.” More reactionary whites are openly racist about the threat that non-white peoples pose to “our way of life.” Both versions defend the existing distribution of wealth and power, even though many of the working-class and poor whites who endorse such views have access to precious little wealth or power. Race is used by white elites today, just as it was in the nation’s formative years, to drive a wedge between people who would otherwise come together to challenge those elites. Divide-and-conquer strategies, it seems, never go out of style.

Liberals are quick to denounce both the thinly veiled and the openly reactionary conservative racism. But what of the fears of liberals? White liberals might reject the very idea that they are afraid, citing their support for diversity and multiculturalism. But my experience suggests that while white liberals reject assertions of white supremacy, many fear the loss of white centrality. They are willing to renounce the idea that white people are superior, as long as they are allowed to live comfortably in a world where white is the norm.

What White People Fear

 

[AthenaAwakened]

A Word on "Playing the Race Card"

Anything but Racism: White Reluctance to Accept the Evidence

Since the O.J. trial, it seems as though almost any allegation of racism has been met with the same dismissive reply from the bulk of whites in the U.S. According to national surveys, more than three out of four whites refuse to believe that discrimination is any real problem in America (2). That most whites remain unconvinced of racism’s salience–with as few as six percent believing it to be a "very serious problem," according to one poll in the mid 90s (3)–suggests that racism-as-card makes up an awfully weak hand. While folks of color consistently articulate their belief that racism is a real and persistent presence in their own lives, these claims have had very little effect on white attitudes. As such, how could anyone believe that people of color would somehow pull the claim out of their hat, as if it were guaranteed to make white America sit up and take notice? If anything, it is likely to be ignored, or even attacked, and in a particularly vicious manner.

That bringing up racism (even with copious documentation) is far from an effective "card" to play in order to garner sympathy, is evidenced by the way in which few people even become aware of the studies confirming its existence.

• How many Americans do you figure have even heard, for example, that black youth arrested for drug possession for the first time are incarcerated at a rate that is forty-eight times greater than the rate for white youth, even when all other factors surrounding the crime are identical (4)?
• How many have heard that persons with "white sounding names," according to a massive national study, are fifty percent more likely to be called back for a job interview than those with "black sounding" names, even when all other credentials are the same (5)?
• How many know that white men with a criminal record are slightly more likely to be called back for a job interview than black men without one, even when the men are equally qualified, and present themselves to potential employers in an identical fashion (6)?
• How many have heard that according to the Justice Department, Black and Latino males are three times more likely than white males to have their vehicles stopped and searched by police, even though white males are over four times more likely to have illegal contraband in our cars on the occasions when we are searched (7)?
• How many are aware that black and Latino students are about half as likely as whites to be placed in advanced or honors classes in school, and twice as likely to be placed in remedial classes? Or that even when test scores and prior performance would justify higher placement, students of color are far less likely to be placed in honors classes (8)? Or that students of color are 2-3 times more likely than whites to be suspended or expelled from school, even though rates of serious school rule infractions do not differ to any significant degree between racial groups (9)?

Fact is, few folks have heard any of these things before, suggesting how little impact scholarly research on the subject of racism has had on the general public, and how difficult it is to make whites, in particular, give the subject a second thought.

Perhaps this is why, contrary to popular belief, research indicates that people of color are actually reluctant to allege racism, be it on the job, or in schools, or anywhere else. Far from "playing the race card" at the drop of a hat, it is actually the case (again, according to scholarly investigation, as opposed to the conventional wisdom of the white public), that black and brown folks typically "stuff" their experiences with discrimination and racism, only making an allegation of such treatment after many, many incidents have transpired, about which they said nothing for fear of being ignored or attacked (10). Precisely because white denial has long trumped claims of racism, people of color tend to underreport their experiences with racial bias, rather than exaggerate them. Again, when it comes to playing a race card, it is more accurate to say that whites are the dealers with the loaded decks, shooting down any evidence of racism as little more than the fantasies of unhinged blacks, unwilling to take personal responsibility for their own problems in life.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/04/24/what-kind-of-card-is-race/

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

This has nothing to do with race. It has everything to do with AM Radio waves. People exposed to AM Radio have a higher tendency to be counterproductive with their political choices. Blacks don't listen to virtually any AM radio. Lots of whites do. Hence the confusion.

 

[Derec]

You may have outdone yourself this time Athena. Let me just deal with your OP (and briefly at that) rather than wade through the morass of overtly racist screeds like "What White People Fear" or quoting such illustrious publications as "Counterunch".

Poor and working class white folk all over this country defend austere economic policies and vote for representatives who actively seek to remove any and all worker and wage protections on the books, all for a promise that people of color will get no "special treatment," nothing they have not earned and earned hard.

There is no logical connection between "worker and wage protections" and "special treatment" for certain favored races or ethnicities. Likewise there is no logical connection between universal health care and reparations. If the Democratic Party insists on playing racial politics to the detriment of working class whites (such as support for affirmative action and other policies that treat people differently because of their race) you can't be surprised when they abandoned said party. That has nothing to do with racism. Instead, Democrats should abandon their attempts to play racial identity politics.

 

[laughing dog]

Such a shame I can't do anything about my whiteness. Pity that lack of melanin.

Indeed. And Horray for another random hate white people thread from the lady that declares only white people can be racist. The irony in this one is so tasty.

So, does whiteness somehow magically make somebody a US conservative rather than liberal? Is it race that makes them oppose wage protections, universal health care, banking regulations, etc? They do it because they are racists who want to keep the black man down? Or perhaps they do it because they subscribe to US conservative ideology, side with the rich against the poor, and oppose socialism? Last I looked there were plenty of white liberals who take the exact opposite positions. Did the whiteness fail in their cases? And is it impossible to be a white racist who pushes for socialism, universal health care, banking regulations, wage protections, etc?

I don't think in all my time reading this forum that I have ever seen such a silly case of playing the race card.

Then you are either not reading with comprehension or skipping many threads and posts.

 

[Davka]

Well, that didn't take long.

OP: "There is a disturbing tendency among poor whites to vote white rather than poor, thus shooting themselves in the foot."
The Kneejerk Dogpile:

 

[Derec]

OP: "There is a disturbing tendency among poor whites to vote white rather than poor, thus shooting themselves in the foot."

There are many people who vote against their economic interests, for a variety of reasons such as social issues. But as it regards racial identity politics, I think the Democratic Party is the guilty party in driving so many working class whites away, not the working class whites who pick up on it and don't appreciate it.

The Kneejerk Dogpile:

I think Athena is the only one here who has admitted to that particular form of protest.

 

[dismal]

Somehow whiteness has been infused with True Religion^TM to create this weird justification for calling charity "evil," even though the Bible calls it good. This seems to make it easier for poor whites to accept that their position in life is God's Will, blessed be His lily-white and kissable sphincter.

Fear of Hell + Fear of Melanin = Poor White Republicans.

Dude, I hate to be the one to tell you this but in all these threads about whiteness you count as one of the white people.

Or so I understand.

 

[Davka]

Somehow whiteness has been infused with True Religion^TM to create this weird justification for calling charity "evil," even though the Bible calls it good. This seems to make it easier for poor whites to accept that their position in life is God's Will, blessed be His lily-white and kissable sphincter.

Fear of Hell + Fear of Melanin = Poor White Republicans.

Dude, I hate to be the one to tell you this but in all these threads about whiteness you count as one of the white people.

Or so I understand.

Dude, I hate to tell you this, but I know that. And yet I am completely unrepresented in the OP of this thread. How do you suppose that happened?

 

[Bronzeage]

The white man's burden is a real thing, but not all white men can hack it. You can tell the ones who can't get a shoulder under it because they whine so much.

 

[Davka]

The white man's burden is a real thing, but not all white men can hack it. You can tell the ones who can't get a shoulder under it because they whine so much.

. . . and the winner of the Hilariously Inappropriate Post contest is . . .

 

[dismal]

Dude, I hate to be the one to tell you this but in all these threads about whiteness you count as one of the white people.

Or so I understand.

Dude, I hate to tell you this, but I know that. And yet I am completely unrepresented in the OP of this thread. How do you suppose that happened?

You think you're not represented. But you are one of the white people.

The "blinds you" thing at work, I guess.

 

[Davka]

Dude, I hate to tell you this, but I know that. And yet I am completely unrepresented in the OP of this thread. How do you suppose that happened?

You think you're not represented. But you are one of the white people.

The "blinds you" thing at work, I guess.

Nope. The OP may refer to you, but it doesn't refer to me, other than perhaps obliquely. Reading for Comprehension is clearly not your strong suit. Try again.