A Detailed Analysis on White Privilege and America's Refusal to Acknowledge It- by Tim Wise

                                                                   

"To pay attention to the American political process, and what the candidates for this nation’s highest office have to say, and not say, about the issues that are of importance to them, and thus. we are to presume, importance to the nation, you would get the impression that the issue of race, that the issue of racism, that the issue of discrimination, and certainly that the issue of white racial privilege were non-existent issues; that they were of really no importance, or that of very little importance, because you will not hear any of the candidates for the presidency of the United States, in either party, of whatever political ideology, make this an issue.

Yes, they talk about poverty and occasionally they talk about schooling and education. They talk about healthcare. They talk about all of those things, but not once have any of those candidates tried to directly connect the role that racism, the role that racial discrimination, the role that institutional racial oppression and white privilege play in regard to health care, in regard to housing, in regard to schooling. It is as if those issues exist in a vacuum and have no relationship to color, have no relationship to race, have no relationship to a history of racial subordination.

What does it say, about our nation’s political process, and about our nation’s political and social culture, that none of these candidates for political office has seen fit to tell the American public the following things? All of which you would think would be campaign issues of some importance, at least to some people, and yet they won’t say them. Why is it that none of them mention, that it was 2006, not 1996, not 1986, not 1976 or 1966, but 2006 which witnessed the highest number of race based housing discrimination complaints in recorded history? The fair housing act was passed in 1968, and yet it was not 1968 that witnessed the highest level of discrimination complaints based on race. It was 38 years later, in 2006.

What does it say about our culture and the politicians, the choices we’ve been given for leader of the so-called free world, that none of these candidates sees fit to mention, as they talk about health care, which is a subject they do talk about with some regularity, what does it say that none of them mention the research that was published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2004, which had looked at ten years of excess mortality data for African Americans, from 1991-2000, looking at the number of black folks who had died, hundreds of thousands above and beyond the number that would have died, but for their blackness, in effect….and the social and economic conditions that ascribe and essentially adhere to blackness in this country? And what they found in this study, which received almost no media attention again, published in an academic journal, not read by the average American, not read by political candidates, read by doctors and people who research the health care industry, but that’s about it.

This study found that between 1991 and 2000, there were almost one million black people in this country who died who would not have died had they merely been white and had the average health care quality and access of the typical white person in this country, had they been living in
neighborhoods, like white neighborhoods, in which the levels of exposure to toxicity had been as low as it is in the typical white neighborhood, as opposed to excess exposure to toxics, pollutants, etc. in black and brown spaces. Almost one million excess dead African-Americans who wouldn’t have died had the system of health care access and exposure to toxins been equal between white folks and black folks. How is a million dead black people not news?

You see, if James Bird gets dragged to death behind a truck in Jasper, Texas, you will hear about that and well you should. If one individual is the victim of a vicious hate crime, you will hear about that and well you should. But if nearly one million people die, not because of bigotry, not because of
hatred, not because of some white supremacy organization, but because of systemic and institutionalized injustice, you will not hear anything. How is this not news….?" The next time a Caucasian-American groans and moans about how they wished America was 'back in the good old days' in the days of 'small government and low taxes', falsely reassuring me that it has nothing to do with race, I am going to firmly sit their nervous two-faced asses down and educate their racist mindsets, squarely quoting one of their own, acclaimed anti-racist activist, author, writer and speaker Tim Wise. What follows here is part of a transcript from his 'Roadmap to Racial Equity'.

"Hell we had Africans on the continent before most of us got off the boat. Because the Spanish brought and dumped a group of Africans off the coast of what is now South Carolina in the late 1500s—well before Jamestown, long before the Mayflower. So even African people were here before English folk and Scottish folk like my family were. And certainly long before that Russian Jewish side of my family got here in the early 1900s. But they've always had to fight and scrape and claw and lobby and demand inclusion in that definition of that thing called an American while other folk got to take it for granted.

And so now, when all of that is being challenged, that white normativity, that narrative of who we are as a country being challenged, folks are not always ready. And in response, they become anxious. Signs of that anxiety are all around us. We have a political movement that has decided to elevate nostalgia to the level of religious sacrament. That it elevated nostalgia as a political organizing tool to the sort of pinnacle of their own ideology, this tea party, which is funny, right, that they choose this imagery. Really it is hilarious because these are the very same folk that tell people of color to get over the past.

If you don't see the irony in that, look up the definition of the word irony, but trust me when I tell you, when you have people running around in Revolutionary War costumes, tri-corner hats, powdered wigs, carrying muskets, and telling black folk, you all need to get past the past. That's irony. That's like the walking, talking, working definition of the term, man. Get past the past. Meanwhile, I'm going to put in my wooden teeth and walk around with a Don't Tread On Me flag. And I'm not going to notice any of the inconsistency with that.

Not only do I not believe that the Right and everyone on the Right is racist. I don't give folk on the Left a pass for being racist. And I know better than to give folks on the Left, or the nominally liberal Left, a pass. Because I know that even right before the election of 2008 there was a survey that was done in October, the month before the election, that found that something like 60% of white Democrats acknowledged that they continued to hold racial biases about black folk as a group. But the vast majority of that 60% said they were still going to vote for this one black dude.

So they carved out an exception for him. He became the political equivalent of a Cliff Huxtable from The Cosby Show. That doesn't say anything about the larger issue of racism. If you're carving out an exception for one black man because you think he's different than the larger black community that you avoid on a good day, then that's not the end of racism. Man, that's just racism 2.0.

So let's be clear. We're not talking about the Right being inherently racist, or liberal Left folks being inherently somehow delivered from it. It's this thing that works through and in all of us. But I will say this about the Tea Party. I know that when they say—look, I've been white a long time, OK. Long time. And in 42 and 1/2 years of being white, I know that when white folks, particularly older than myself, say they want their country back, it makes me nervous. Because I know what their country was and more to the point so do they.

(Texas Governor) Rick Santorum a couple weeks ago stands up and he's criticizing the president for—the president had made some comment about the Voting Rights Act or something. Just about post-1965 sort of how the country, in wake of civil rights reforms, et cetera, had become a better place. Like a pretty non controversial statement among remotely rational people. But like I said, Rick Santorum stands up, not falling into the latter category of remotely rational people, and he says, you know the president said this thing and he sort of paraphrases what the president had said. And he says, but I think that America was pretty great before 1965. No, it wasn't, Rick. It wasn't even remotely decent before 1965.

Does that mean there weren't decent people? No, of course not. There were decent people. There've always been decent people. There have been moments of wonderful things that have happened before the Civil Rights revolution. But to say that this nation was great when we were still a formal system of white supremacy and apartheid, is inherently a white supremacist thing to say whether he realizes it or whether he doesn't.

We were not remotely great. We were not remotely decent. We were a work-in-progress. We had the potential to be great, but we were not there. And for him to say that, is again part of this white narrative, this notion of white normalcy, that people say when they want to go back. They're remembering this fictive moment, this totally fictitious moment that never existed, for the vast majority of people. And to be honest with you, didn't exist for most white people either. That's what's so crazy about this.

Most white folks didn't live like the white folks on television in 1957. June Cleaver on Leave It to Beaver. Barbara Billingsley doing housework in heels and pearls. Man. Not only did people of color not live like that, most white folks didn't live like that. Father Knows Best, Andy Griffith, all of this. This was not realistic. This wasn't reality TV. It was fiction. That's why people liked it.

They wouldn't have wanted to watch something that was just like their actual life. This wasn't real. But it allowed us to escape into this fantasy. Now you have a whole political movement that is based on escaping into that fantasy. We want our country back. And of course, they'll tell you it isn't about race. Oh,they'll tell you that. Here's why I know they're lying.

So I get in this argument. Imagine. I didn't pick the fight actually. But I'd written something about the Tea Party thing and about the, we want our country back, narrative. And then Rush Limbaugh decided to attack me, which was a wonderful moment in my life. It was great. I mean he didn't attack me physically. I'm not fast, but I can outrun him. It would be like the only one I probably could. I'm out of shape, but anyway. So he attacks me on air. Calls me a dunder head, which I don't know what that means actually. But I looked it up, and it's apparently a nonsense word that OxyContin addicts use to describe their political adversaries.

So once I figured that out, it was all good. So I write this piece. And he goes off on me. And one of his listeners, one of the 20 million people who listen to him, or whatever, five billion people who listen to him, writes me the next day and she says, how dare you suggest that this mantra is about race. When we say, we want our country back, it has nothing to do with race. OK, I'm just going to indulge this. It's a weekend. I got nothing to do. We're just going play this out.

So I said, OK. So you tell me it's not about race. You tell me what it is then. I just want to know. I'm going to play your game. You tell me it's not about that. What is it about? And she said, well it's very simple. We just want to go back to a time when government was small and taxes were low.

All right. I said, cool. I'm going to play this game. Next step. Pick a date. She said, what do you mean? I said no, no, no, no. You don't give me this vague, bumper sticker, nonsense about I want small government and low taxes. That's just some kind of mantra. It means nothing. If you say you want to take your country back, that's a directional phrase. I want to know what date are you thinking of? Pick a year. I'm not asking for like a month, or a week. Just like pick a year that you think it was cool, that you want to go back to. Because you're making a directional argument.

And see, it was a total setup. I was totally setting her up, because I knew exactly what she was going to say. Not exactly. Let me take that back. It's sort of like, do you remember the game, The Price is Right, when they had that game with the yodeller and he's going up the mountain? And you didn't actually have to guess the exact price of the soap. You just had to be within like $0.23 in either direction and then you'd win the car. Or if you didn't, you'd fall off the edge of the cliff and die and be embarrassed in front of millions of people who were watching that show.

So if this had been a game of the Price is Right, oh hell, I would have won. Because I knew exactly what she was going to say within a range, in fact, I got it dead on the money. Now she could have said 1897. Could have. She wasn't going to. Come on everybody knows 1897, unless you were like one of six rich, white dudes where their kids pretty much sucked. So nobody was going to say—they're not going to say 1897 is where I want to go back to. Come on, she's not going to do that.

She could have said 1909. I mean I guess technically, government was sort of small. It was before the income tax was created and all that. She could have said that. But come on. She's not going to say 1909. Children were still working in factories and mines in 1909. Like nobody ever says, those were the good old days.

In fact, I knew she wasn't even going to say 1924. Come on, really? Yeah, let's go back to the early '20s. Those were great times. Come on. No, they weren't. They were horrible. Right? So I knew she wasn't going to say any of that. Even though technically, that's relatively small government, low taxes, all that.

I knew exactly what she was going to say. My guess is, so do you. She said 1957. Of course she did. That's when Leave It to Beaver debuted, man. 1957. And now I had her. She didn't know I had her, but I had her. Because I said to her, I said, you see it's fascinating. This is all by email by the way. This is fascinating to me that you say 1957 is a moment that you'd like to go back to because it was small government and low taxes.

I said, do you have any idea what the top marginal tax rate was in 1957? Just out of curiosity, have you brushed up against this minor statistical detail in the course of your intense political study of the country that you want to take back? Do you have any clue what the hell you are talking about? She did not. She said, no, I don't know.

I said, good I will tell you. The top marginal tax rate in 1957 was 91%. Which is more than double the top rate now even if the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire completely. More than double the current rate, meaning that every dollar you made above a certain amount, which in those days was $300,000 equal to a million today. Every dollar you made above $300,000 the government took $0.91 of it.

Interestingly, that was not a moment then of low taxation. In fact there were three or four different tax brackets all above anything that we have now. It was a much more steeply graduated system back then. Oddly enough though, she remembers it as a low tax era, and so do a lot of folks. I will leave it to your imagination as to why that is. Why do we remember the '50s or maybe, just to give you a little hint, the pre-'60s, maybe is a better way to put it.

Why do we remember the pre-1960s as a moment of low taxation when it was exactly the opposite? Oh I think there's a reason. And I think it's about color. But I'm going to leave that to you for a second. I'm going to come back to it. Then I asked her, I said, tell me about the size of government. Do you think government was small in 1957? You apparently do. You said that's why you want to go back to it.

But was government small in 1957? Well not if you were white, it wasn't. Government had never been small for white people. Ever. In this country's history going back to the colonies before we even were a country when my 17th degree great-grandfather first came here in the 1620s, he was able to take advantage of one of the first affirmative action programs on this continent. Though we didn't call it that it.

It was called The Headright System. It allowed male heads of household from England to take ownership of up to 50 acres of land for free. It's government intervention. And I do not recall white folks gathering en masse having discovered their inner libertarian and complaining about it.

And then in the 1860s when the government creates The Homestead Act, and gives out 245 million acres of basically free land to white families. Most though, not all of it, West of the Mississippi. 245 million acres of free land, man, redistributed to white people. The market can't do that. Only big government with guns can do that.

And nobody is giving that land back. There are 35 to 40 million white folks today living on that land still. Or who have benefited directly from the intergenerational transfer of that wealth via the sale of that property. Not one of them has shown up in Washington, DC, in this era of, I want to take my country back and get the government out of everything, and offered to give that land back because they feel bad. If I keep this property, that's like Socialism. You got to take this ranch back, man. All this acreage, this house, this farm, oh, hell. Get this. I'm feeling horrible about this.

Nobody's doing that. The 1950s, actually beginning in the '30s, when the FHA, and the VA loan program later in the '40s come on line, and allow $120 billion worth of housing equity to be loaned preferentially to white families from the late '30s to the early '60s. 40% of all white mortgages by 1960 written under this one government program, without which there would have been no middle class in this country. Nobody complained.

In fact, average everyday working white folks, loved government so much, that when Barry Goldwater came South to campaign for the presidency in 1964, and tried to tell my people—because I'm from Tennessee—tried to tell my folk in the South, that he wanted to privatize the utility companies because government is bad and the market can do it better.

My people now, conservative as the day is long, were like, what? You want to sell TVA to some rich fat cat from New York City? Have you lost your mind? We don't want you to take away our government programs. We just want you to talk about black people. Oh. Which is to say they love big government. As long as they were the only ones benefiting from it.

And as soon as people of color gained access to the stuff that white folks had already had access to, that is when we discovered our inner libertarian. That is when we decided we love the free market. That is when we decided government was the problem.

So much so that in the 1930s when cash welfare was created as part of the Social Security Act, the Congresspersons who defended that creation of that program, got up on the floor of the Senate and the House and actually admitted that the reason they wanted to be able to give single moms cash benefits, was so that these white widows and white women whose husbands have left them to look for work during the Depression, would be able to stay at home, raise their children, and not have to work in the paid labor force. Oh? Really?

Now putting aside the sexist and patriarchal undertones of that argument, which is that women should not be in the paid workforce and they should all be at home. Putting that to the side for a second, that's problematic enough. But beyond that, is that the rhetoric we hear today about folk on welfare? Oh, no. As soon as black and brown women gained access to the programs, that's when we decided this stuff will make you lazy. This stuff will make you pathological. Makes you dependent on the State.

Hell, that was the point of the program when it was white women. As soon as it was black and brown women, you all need to get a job. What, raise your children? That's the craziest damned thing I ever heard. Stay at home and raise your children? What kind of lazy pathological, social deviant are you, anyway? You see, so we decided to turn on these government (programs) that promote social uplift, and provide justice, and equity, only when people of color gained access.

That's why the Tea Party narrative is about race. See, but that takes longer than 14 seconds or 17 seconds on CNN. It's a lot more complicated, right? It's that when you talk about wanting to go back to an era of overt white supremacy even if that's not your motivation for doing it, you're willing to countenance that, right?

A couple of years ago, Glenn Beck actually made some comments—he always does this every couple of days—his waxing nostalgic about the '50s, or the 1811, or whatever the hell he thinks was a great period. And so it's interesting, right? You listen to him. And my guess is, if you were to say to Glenn Beck, do you not realize what it was like in this country for people of color in these eras that you seem to think were so great?

He would probably say, well I didn't mean that part of the past. And he probably would be honest in saying that he didn't mean that. I'm even willing to cut him enough slack to say, you know what, he's probably not consciously thinking, I wish we could go back to slavery, I wish we could go back to segregation, I wish we could go back and steal half of Mexico again, I wish we could go back in and kill millions of indigenous people. He may not mean any of that.

But that's the problem. He's not even thinking about that. That's even worse. When you don't even credit the social reality of what will soon be half of your country's population. That itself is a problem. And that's where we are today. Race is the backdrop for all of this. And there's an irony here if we're just willing to engage it."

- Tim Wise