Outlaw: If I understand you correctly, you believe that individual decisions contribute strongly to people's economic situations. Some people make "good" decisions--especially the decision to "work hard"--while others make "bad" decisions. These people decide to give up and be lazy and blame other people, especially white people, for their problems. They, you feel, are trying to make you feel guilty so you will give them a handout, rather than just knuckling down and working for a living. This strikes you as useless, at best, and unfair to people like you and me. Lots of black people, looking for an easy way out, to your way of thinking, would rather talk about racism rather than getting up and working on their problems. The ones who get out of poverty are those who avoid worrying about racism and just get on with life. This is why lots of black people are poor--they spend too much time whining and not enough time working.
I hope that that is a fair summary of your point. Now, I would like to make a request: the phrase "crying racism" is annoying. I will avoid saying you are "crying about other people's laziness." Will you please avoid the phrase "crying racism"? Thanks.
Now, I want to deal with one specific point you made. You say: The opportunity may have been there because farmland was easier to get and neighbors were nicer if you were white. But had they sat on thier asses and waited for a handout the success would not have come.
You could not get the farmland in Iowa if you were black. The farmland itself was a handout in many ways, under the Homestead Act, as were the farm subsidies that came after, and these were available for European immigrants exclusively, and their heirs. Through 1997. Yes, those white folks still had to work hard. But there were invisible props available to them. Props conveniently pulled out at just about the same time that the the USDA admitted to practicing overt racism. There are fewer and fewer farmers generally, because the whole agribusiness sector is being bought out by massive multinational corporations (Archer Daniels Midland, Monsanto, IBP, Cargill, and a few others), so there's no need to worry about dividing poor white farmers from poor black farmers any more. You can work hard from sunup to sundown on a farm and not make enough money to pay back your expenses. Whose interests are being served? (Not consumers, by the way--the profits are being swallowed by CEOs and the big investors, not by the people buying Wheaties.)
Fact: White people have been receiving handouts from our government for a long time. We just didn't call them "handouts" when they were available almost exclusively for white people. When people of color start receiving them, and this includes welfare, which also was initially available only to white women who stayed at home with their children, then legitimate sources of governmental assistance have become tainted by the label of "handout." This has happened over and over again, in a variety of governement programs. I would argue that it's why we, unlike the European countries from which many of our forebearers came from, do not have universal medical coverage. Maybe now that most of the wealth is being concentrated into a few hands, we'll start to see the way racism has damaged all of us, kept us fighting against our natural allies.
So let's move out of race, then, for a moment, and think about the way larger social and economic structures work. I'm interested in the notion of 'work ethic.' The hardest working people I know are poor people. Rich people generally don't have to work very hard--and more than 5/6ths of them never did. (I believe that's the correct stat, but you might want to check me on it.) Most of them, like some of the great writers of the 20th century--William S. Borroughs, Gertrude Stein, etc., were trust fund kids. The Kennedys. George W. Bush is a prime example of someone who has never really had to work, and he has lost billions of dollars in bad investments, most of it not his. And then wealthy friends came along with more handouts the next time he'd get a hare-brained scheme. This is all public record, but there's an excellent article from Harper's I could recommend to you, if you're interested.
Particularly today, hard work is mainly for those who will almost certainly remain poor most of their lives. Yet 40% of Americans believe they are or soon will be in the top 5% of the income bracket. Only 1 in 5 people making in the six figures or above is exceeding their parents' incomes in real dollars. Whose interests are served by this idea?
There are strong economic and class structures in place that maintain the status quo. Yes there are exceptions--a few poor people "done good." And, yes, if we turn back to race more overtly again, Asian Americans would seem to be "exceptions," on the face of it, and they certainly carry with them a cultural mythology of being smarter, more dedicated than white folks. If you look at the stats about Asian Americans more closely, however, you will find that their income is lower than white Americans. The sweatshops in Los Angeles and New York are still filled with Asian women, and their incomes must be included in statistical analyses. Many Asian families live with more than 2 bread winners under their roof, even in the U.S. I know you are not going to believe this, but they still often face a glass ceiling, particularly in jobs that require "people skills"--i.e., management--because they're assumed to be silent, hardworking, tech-heads. What it boils down to, is that the notion of them as a "model minority" is a double-edged sword, that's used to shame poor whites and other poorer ethnic groups in the U.S., into being reconvinced that their poverty stems from "laziness." Whose interests, again, are being served?
But by asking about whose interests are served, I'm not saying there's a conscious conspiracy at work. As Nietzsche, one of my favorited dead white guys says, there is no great big spider of causation, some God-like power behind the scenes. When he said God is dead, he meant simple causation--simple Big Man Behind The Curtain Controlling It All was not a useful or accurate way of seeing things. I don't think that this structure is the product of some smoke-filled room somewhere with evil white men plotting to keep the dark people down.
It is a product of they way power works when you have small groups of people who have, by hook or by crook, gained control over vast amounts of wealth in a society that is ideologically based on notions of equality and freedom, ideals that make us all feel really good about ourselves if we can conceive ourselves readily has having had equal treatment before the law and relative freedom. But when, despite democratic pretensions, a small group has access to creating and changing the rules by which the game of distributing wealth is played, AND access to determining how those are enforced by governmental and nongovernmental agencies, the people will by and large either get angry and want a revolution, or they'll develop a false consciousness.
Most normative U.S. citizens, regardless of race, don't really want a revolution, and for good reason. We see the crumbs we're getting off the table as pretty good. And they're bigger than the ones those folks in the ghetto are getting. And we are raised in the need to believe that hard work will get us ahead, and we need to interpret our own social standing as being "above average" or potentially above average. And so we do. Meanwhile, the top 225 wealthiest people in the world now control more than the wealth controlled by the bottom 50% of the world's population--3 billion people. That's not an accident. We'd like to believe we're closer to those top 225 people. That would be a product of false consciousness. Because we're not.
Think about it, if we really believed that hard work was the way out, rich kids would be going to ghetto schools and learning to survive on their own. They'd not have health-care coverage, because they'd learn more self-reliance.
In the big picture, struggle is not what gets large numbers of people ahead in life. Having structures in place that are designed to be readily available to you and which you are being trained to take advantage of is what makes most people succeed. Those structures are invisible, generally, to the recipients.
It's a cop out to see everyone who doesn't succeed as lazy. And ultimately it doesn't serve your interests, unless you happen to be one of those 225 people in the world who control over half of the world's wealth. I think you know that, at some level.
alas. |
