White Americans Will Have to Pay

In the interest of full disclosure, I have to note that I am of Italian descent (on my father’s side), and therefore heir to that wave of immigrants which arrived in the U.S. in the 1880s through the early 20^th Century. As many now protest, they had nothing to do with slavery, massacring Native Americans, or the suppression of people of color—especially since they themselves were considered ‘people of color’ when they arrived. Therefore, many of them find it appalling that they should be asked to suffer the loss of their putative hero, Columbus, or worse, pay for the upraising or favored treatment of blacks that is now being demanded. Many ‘white’ Americans clearly feel the same way. We had nothing to do with slavery, is the cry; why should we have to pay for it in any way—either by losing out to less qualified Blacks in hiring, or lose out to them in college admissions (via affirmative action)? And one can certainly understand the logic in this. 

            Indeed, after watching Heather McGhee’s excellent TED talk, “Racism has a cost for everyone,” one at first wants to subscribe to her idea that getting rid of zero-sum thinking (if you win, I have to lose), and coming to realize that all of us are in this together might just be a solution. Yes, we want to say, if we lift up Blacks and other people of color economically, we will all be uplifted. Conversely, she argues, clinging to the idea that keeping them down is the only way to preserve white privilege and wealth is erroneous; it costs us all to keep a major part of the population hedged off in ghettos where they are underserved and underpaid and harboring resentments sure to explode, one way or the other. In sum, to raise up one of us economically is to raise up all of us, white or black. And we respond, thinking yes, this is a way to enact racial and economic justice, and can be a way for all of us to win. That is, we white folks will not really have to lose, to pay for justice.  

            However, after really thinking about this, I have become convinced that it’s a bit of sleight of hand to persuade white Americans that racial justice and equality can finally be achieved in our time, without much cost. Without significant loss. And, if true, would certainly make the acceptance of such justice a little easier to swallow for most. But I think we are kidding ourselves on several levels if we do. There will be a cost to full social and economic equality, and my contention here is that whites in America should be prepared to give up some of their privilege in exchange for finally, after two-hundred-seventy years of hypocrisy, making America live up to its creed. 

            But why, many of my fellow Italian Americans would ask, should we have to pay? Neither we nor our ancestors perpetrated any of the racial crimes of slavery or Jim Crow or the extermination of Native Americans, so  why should we pay? The answer is simple. You have benefitted from those crimes from the moment you set foot on this soil. You have benefitted because of the simple fact that you are now considered ‘white.’ Yes, even though when you arrived, you were considered racially inferior and virtually ‘black,’ you very quickly made the devil’s bargain to stake your claim to whiteness. You saw that in America, even those initially considered ‘marginal’ could claim that ‘at least I am not black.’ And you embraced that claim, often giving up your initial impulse to befriend African American neighbors and co-workers, in order to do it. To become white. And to become that, to become American, you had to become racist. You had to embrace the idea that the racial line, especially in the neighborhoods you inhabited, were clearly demarcated—separated off from those neighborhoods that were ‘black’—and could not be crossed. All Americans imbibe that knowledge with their mother’s milk. And that becomes racial privilege. White privilege. Knowing that the houses and apartments in those ‘other’ neighborhoods have always suffered from undervaluation and neglect, at the very least. Then, when you returned from serving in WWII, as a ‘white’ veteran you could benefit from the G.I. Bill, which allowed, even encouraged you to get a government-subsidized mortgage on a house in the suburbs. This, in turn, allowed those of you who chose to, to move out of the crowded city and into the whiter suburbs. Whiter, because black returning veterans were excluded from the right to get those G.I.-Bill mortgages (the federal government excluded them, at least partly to get the bill passed by Southern congressmen—see Katznelson, Ira, When affirmative action was white: an untold history of racial inequality in twentieth-century America, W.W. Norton 2006.) And because their neighborhoods were redlined (denial of financial services from banks and insurance companies), with the resulting values of the homes they might buy accordingly reduced. 

            The wealth white families in America were able to accrue from this one privilege amounted to the growing ability of succeeding generations of whites to send their children to college (the G.I. Bill also provided direct subsidies to vets to attend college), and in turn enter the ranks of the higher paid. That’s white privilege, or more specifically “affirmative action,” from just one government-sponsored favor. And there are countless others, both overt and covert. In sum, white Americans, though many protest that they are hardly privileged, are endowed with this one overriding privilege: they are white in a society that has always offered them the gold-plated ticket to every show, from police protection to the psychic protection of knowing that no matter how far they sink, they are still not at the bottom. 

            In exchange for that, white society is now being asked not only to allow African Americans entry into that privileged place, but to pay for the transition that will allow it. And though many are protesting—because they are convinced, zero-sum-game style, that any black gain means their loss, I contend that the just among them, among us, must be willing to pay. We must pay either with our perceived loss of favored status, or in what we will have to pay to compensate the descendants of slaves for what they have had to suffer (the idea that blacks all suffer from post-traumatic-slave syndrome, PTSS, gets to this idea, maintaining that even those who have never been enslaved or suffered from Jim Crow live with these horrible legacies in their psyches and their very genes*; see Dr. Joy De Gruy, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, and/or www.joydegruy.com ), and what it will cost to bring many of them up to a decent level of living. And that’s going to cost money. The money will have to come from government (its policies have fostered black suppression, after all), which means eventually from the taxes we all pay. The question is, will white Americans be willing to pay it? Should they?

            I believe that they should, for many of the reasons outlined above. But more than that, we should be willing to pay for the simple reason that no society can endure for long with such glaring injustice and inequality, such a bitter history left intact. Because sooner or later, the rot from that injustice seeps into every part of our society and culture. This is what the massive demonstrations following the death of George Floyd are saying. That Black Lives Matter. And what a failure of culture that slogan implies—that any group of people in the alleged ‘home of the free’ has to explicitly put their lives on the line to insist that their lives actually matter. What kind of society so mistreats a whole group of people that they must publicly resort to that claim? We know the answer, and it is the shame of nations. 

            It is also the shame of nations that so many white Americans want to claim victimization by answering ‘what about us?’ The shame of nations that so many Americans fail to see the justice of that plea. Fail to see that without that justice, American society is a sham. Its claims to be that land of the free, that land of equality, of equal justice for all, are shams, hypocritical pretense. And mostly, it is the shame of nations that so many people refuse to see that finally making all people equal will make this, at last, a nation to be proud of, a nation worth living in. A nation where those who have are willing to share with those who have long been deprived of having. That I am my brother’s keeper, and that the deprivation of one is ultimately the deprivation of all. That human society must be built on the idea of common wealth, the idea that we all must share the bounty of the earth that is given to us by Nature, rather than subscribe to the lifeboat theory operative now, that each individual must seize and fight for his little piece of the planet (in the American case stolen, every inch of it, from the indigenous inhabitants), and kill for it if necessary.

            Can this happen? I am given hope by one fact only—that so many white, young people seem willing to put their lives on the line in demonstrations to demand this change. They are willing, this generation, to sacrifice some of their inherited privilege to bring change about. And we should all be grateful, and willing to open our pockets and our minds to join them. Because that, that willingness to share the common wealth, that willingness to see that sharing wealth is deeply ingrained in the human psyche and is the source of the only true happiness for humans, the pre-eminent social animal—that is the only way out of our American dilemma. We Americans have been sold a pernicious bill of goods—the notion that we must only look out for ourselves because that is our nature. It is a misreading of both human nature and of the Declaration of Independence. That declaration called not for the permanent independence of each human, to be preserved at any cost. It called for the independence of the United Colonies from British rule. But the economists and libertarians of our time insist that it means freedom from every obligation to other humans, and that is not only wrong-headed but the source of endless suffering and discrimination. No, what is truly human—from our primate cousins through every development of homo sapiens—is concern for others. Cooperation with others. Empathy for others. Sharing, as hunter-gatherers knew, the good fortune of one with those others who were not so fortunate in the hunt on any given day; because what one shared one day was returned by others who shared their bounty another day. And more broadly, coming to the aid of one in need, as any child of today still does to another child who cries. As most of us still feel the impulse to do. It is in our genes, in our brain cells (see the voluminous research on the function of ‘mirror neurons’ in promoting empathy in humans). And not only helps others, but helps us in doing so, literally promotes our happiness and well-being. 

            So yes, it can be done. But the question still is, will it be done? Especially by those who are committed, because they have been taught, to the perversion of the independence doctrine? Those who still choose to see through the lens of zero-sum-game thinking? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But in the end, it will not matter for long. The dinosaurs will eventually die out, and a new species, represented by those now demonstrating and those who follow them, will rule the day. And what they are saying, now, is that enough is enough. Four hundred years of cruelty and deprivation are enough. Four hundred years of white privilege and black poverty of opportunity are enough. And, finally, we are willing to share our privilege and pay to compensate for what has been stolen. And those of us who are no longer young, no longer able to march alongside them, but see the rightness of what they are doing, can applaud and cheer them on, both with our voices and with whatever support we can offer. And rejoice that at long last, the America that we have hoped for, the America that is truly a commonwealth, can come to be.

Lawrence DiStasi

*Dr. Rachel Yehuda, professor of psychiatry at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, has conducted a depth of research into epigenetics and the intergenerational transmission of trauma. In layman's terms, she is researching how serious incidents of trauma (i.e. slavery, holocaust, etc.) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can be passed down through generations in shared family genes. Her research has revealed that when people experience trauma, it changes their genes in a very specific and noticeable way, so when those people have children and their genes are passed down to their children, the children also inherit the genes affected by trauma.

Fear

I have to admit it: it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to try to objectively assess the current president of the United States, or those Republican politicians like Mitch McConnell, who support his every inanity, or his base of supporters who dismiss every accusation of lying or chicanery against him as irrelevant and/or “fake news.” One really wants to condemn them all as idiots or traitors or worse. Ditto with the nation’s cops who are, many of them, clearly racist and militaristic and punitive in their alleged protection of the public. But this position, to a reasonable person seeking real change, is really not tenable. Nor does it reveal very much. Though we may be edging towards fascism in the United States, the way to combat its development (if it is not already too late for that) does not lie with name calling or insult or hyperbole. Nor does it lie in comforting oneself with perceiving and calling out those with whom one disagrees, in the hopes of somehow eliminating them. Gandhi and Martin Luther King were the latest true leaders to demonstrate that. Both name calling and insult only harden positions and lead to open and often violent conflict and the resulting repression. 

            Rather, it behooves us to see that people are motivated, when they are making the loudest noises and the most foolish decisions, by fear. For the most part, they think they are acting in their own ‘sacred’ self-interest. I put the word ‘sacred’ in quotes here to denote its unfitness as an adjective in this context, to indicate that though it may be a common conception in our time, it is not really apt because bloated self-interest is anything but sacred. May be, in truth, the opposite of sacred. But I digress. Most people, from what I have observed, do not or cannot see themselves as cruel or ignorant or racist. They do not see themselves as afraid, either. Or if they do, do not want to admit it, are afraid to admit they are afraid. And that is precisely why they rationalize their behavior with more acceptable notions like self-interest, or racist generalizations, or the ‘nature of things.’ Or perhaps the meanness and contempt of ‘others’: ‘They’ always get the best deal, and don’t care about us.’ Or, ‘they think they’re better than we are.’ Or, ‘they just don’t have the brains or the drive that we do.’ Or, ‘someone always has to do the dirty work; it’s what they’re suited for.’ Or, ‘I don’t have to apologize for looking out for my family.’ Or, ‘we work hard for our money and deserve all the rewards we can get.’ There are hundreds of such rationalizations, suitable for every occasion. And they all have the same basis in fear. Fear of losing what you have—or think you have. 

            This notion has been demonstrated in many psychological and economic experiments in recent years (first theorized by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in their 1984 paper, “Choices, Values and Frames”). It has also been confirmed in one of the great comedic sketches of all time, Mel Brooks’ classic The 2,0000 Year Old Man. The conclusion of this hilarious alleged interview (Carl Reiner plays the interviewer) with a man who has lived through most of civilized history comes when Brooks answers the key question: What has driven all of this human history and misery? “Fear,” says Brooks. Simple fear. And though we laugh at the simplemindedness of the answer, we also laugh because we know it is so fundamentally true. What psychologists have added is that it is mainly the fear of loss—loss of what you have or think you have—that dominates most people’s decisions. That is, in economic situations especially, people’s fear of losing what they have far outweighs their belief or confidence in hoped-for gains. So they will refrain from betting (or investing or otherwise engaging in risk), even though the rewards might be very great and their chances reasonable. They are overwhelmingly driven to preserve what they have—which means that most people fear losing what they have too much to take risks for large, and in some cases, almost certain winnings. 

            This is relevant in a wide array of human situations. It is no secret by now that Trump supporters do not think of themselves as racist. Rather, they are largely white, working-class men and women who have lost a great deal in recent years, as factories have closed, or moved their operations to China or Mexico or Bangladesh, and American manufacturing has been hollowed out. Prior to these international moves, these were people, many of them, who had entered the middle class, and whose good jobs meant they could afford homes and even send their children to college. No more. Now many live in communities riven by addiction and closing shops and factories and the encroachment of people of color into their communities, their prospects very dim indeed. They blame it all not on their own fear, but rather on those perceived to be taking it away from them: coastal elites who ran the corporations moving into foreign countries, people of color getting ‘undeserved’ advantages, and foreigners, immigrants or interlopers who appeared to be taking the only jobs left. Anyone who could be blamed, aside from themselves, was  blamed, and when Donald Trump came along and blamed those same groups, they saw him as their savior. But at its root was fear, fear of losing advantages given them by their whiteness, and Donald Trump was savvy enough or paranoid enough himself to heighten that fear and provide the rationale and excuse for it. ‘They’ are coming to take your jobs, and they don’t deserve them, they’re drug addicts they’re rapists, and I’m going to build a wall to keep them out.’ And in that scorn and contempt coming from the top, we can probably see the same fear at its root. For Donald Trump, despite his constant self-aggrandizement of himself as an innate genius, betrays the fear of the man who knows quite well that he isn’t, not even close. On the contrary, he has always been terrified that he will be found out—first by his wealthy, adored father—and exposed for the fraud he is. A bankrupt several times over. A failure at college. A man who can hardly spell at the level of a grammar schooler, who spends hours preparing his “fake” hair, who has trouble reading anything more complex than a line at the bottom of TV screens that summarizes the news. Hence his scorn for those coastal elites, who read books and write books and hence know far more about any subject than the man who gets his information exclusively from watching TV. And heaps ridicule on the literate purveyors of real news which he calls “fake,” to protect himself from being found out for the actual fake he himself is. 

            But it is not just fake politicians who are driven by fear. It is also the powerful heads of corporations and the titans of Wall Street who are driven by a similar fear—the fear of losing what they have gained, no matter if it was gained by diligence, or by trickery or fraud or inheritance. Or by sheer luck. Fear of loss is what drives them all. Fear of missing out on a windfall. This is why they were so eager to transfer to foreign countries what used to be the glory of America, her manufacturing. They saw the writing on the wall: that foreign labor was so much cheaper (and workers there so much more malleable and desperate to work) than Americans, secure with their unions. So the fear-driven solution was obvious: either get undercut by foreign corporations and lose it all, or move the whole operation to the foreign country, with cheap labor and fewer regulations. And justify it as simply acknowledging the new reality of inter-global networks making everything more efficient. And top it off with foreign safe havens for your profits, which is really stoked by fear of losing one’s income to taxes, but can be justified as a more efficient way to maintain stock prices at their maximum. The massive buy back of stock options with savings from government tax breaks runs on the same logic. 

            Add to all this the toxicity of white fear—that is, the fear of white supremacists that their perceived reign at the top of American society is coming to an end, proved by the demographics showing that people of color will soon outnumber them—and you have a formula for what we are seeing in the United States today. A president who openly calls nazified and armed white terrorists “some very good people,” and ditto for groups like the Base and others who openly advertise their hateful programs and calls for the “boogaloo,” a plan for what they see as the longed-for and fast-approaching race war; to settle things with the all-out violence of civil war once and for all (or should we say twice and for all, since we’ve already had one Civil War). And it takes no very great perception to see that these crazies are in large part motivated, too, by fear: fear of losing what they have always had in American society: white privilege. If things proceed as they are, and whites are to compete on an even field with those people of color who will soon outnumber them (and who probably can outwork them as well), whites will no longer be able to count on their privilege to help them stay at the top. They fear they will be outnumbered at the workplace, in the marketplace, and at the ballot box. And they are right. Which is why the Republican Party also knows that its prime supporters, if voting rights remain in effect, will be outnumbered, and so must somehow be helped by disenfranchising or gerrymandering those “others” out of contention. In short, the Republican Party knows that it can no longer win elections fairly, and must cheat, using every trick in the cheaters’ playbook. As well as stoke the flames of discontent and outrage among its white, mostly male followers.

            Finally, though much has been said about them in recent weeks, it is important to note that the police comprise a similar case. For they too are motivated by fear. They are mostly white and therefore susceptible to the same alleged grievances and prejudices as others. But they occupy a unique position in our society, being in closer touch with the minority neighborhoods where much of the overt crime takes place (corporate crime is another matter), and have to contend with the prevalence of weapons that find their way into many of those neighborhoods. It is this prevalence of weapons that needs most to change. When policemen and women know that any person being stopped or chased could be carrying a weapon (and their experience and that of fellow officers tell them that too often they are), then no matter how well-trained or enlightened they are, that fear dominates their posture and procedure. That is to say, so long as American society is dominated by an insane gun culture that encourages citizens to arm themselves to ‘protect’ themselves, then policing will necessarily be dominated by the concomitant fear. How could it not be? There exist some 393 million firearms (at last count) in the hands of American citizens. That comes to far more than one weapon for every adult; and while some have dozens of weapons and many have none, their ubiquity certainly constitutes a danger for any person trying to enforce the law. And many others besides. This certainly does not excuse law enforcement personnel in general from their widespread tactic of punishing protestors and others rather than simply apprehending them as they are legally mandated to do, nor of their overtly militarized approach to law enforcement; but the prevalence of guns and the fear that stems from them makes the general attitude of cops somewhat more understandable.  

            Enough said. Many, if not most people whom we see as out of control in this nation, are driven by motivations that ultimately come down to fear. There may not be anything we can do about this, except to point out obvious things such as how much more dangerous driving a car is than flying, or being mugged, or robbed, or assaulted, or even losing your position in society to an outsider. But what we can do is understand and realize that we are all motivated, in part, by fear, and probably always will be, because from the point of view of this frail body with which we have been endowed, there is much to fear. That means, then, that we humans are more alike than we are different. That we are all struggling with what it means to be human in a world whose every passing year beings us closer to death—the ultimate fear. And that we can demonstrate a little more empathy towards our fellow humans than we have been used to. For in the end, it is not other humans so much that we have to fear, but dying before our time (which for most people is any time). And more than that, dying before we have come to realize how much we depend on each other, on all other beings, on life itself. That should be the real fear. Not “fear itself” as Franklin Roosevelt so memorably said, but the fear of never realizing who we are. And in this, we could do worse than empathizing and sympathizing with all those whom we want to exclude from our circles of empathy. The ones we see as depriving us or threatening us. If we could only do that—and I have had the sense lately, seeing these beautiful young people marching together in spite of all the risks, that they are seeing it and acting on it—then we might come to a greater realization, ourselves and perhaps those ‘others’ too, of what we all share. Both those who agree with us and think like us, and those who seem to have no understanding at all, and want to harm or eliminate us. Because all of us are alike in what really matters, our humanness, our basic nature, which is, yes, this flesh and bone we are so zealous to protect, but more than that too. And it is that “more” that we should really fear not recognizing and coming into some accord with. That “more” that can finally allow us to go beyond fear a little, or at least see through it sufficiently to smile at it and all it has driven us to do for so long and at such cost.

            And here I will end with a quote from a favorite poem of mine by Native American poet laureate, Joy Harjo. It is called “I Give you Back.” It’s well worth googling and reading the entire poem.

I 
release
 you,
 my
 beautiful and
 terrible
 fear.

I
 release
 you….

Oh,
you
 have
 choked
 me,
 but
 I 
gave
 you
 the
 leash.


You 
have
 gutted 
me
 but
 I gave 
you the knife.


You
 have
 devoured
 me, 
but 
I
 laid
 myself across
 the
 fire.

I
 take myself back,
 fear.

You
 are
 not
 my
 shadow 
any 
longer.

I 
won’t hold
 you 
in my hands.


You
 can’t
 live
 in
 my
 eyes,
 my
 ears,
 my
 voice, 
my
 belly,
 or 
in
 my
 heart my
 heart
 my
 heart
 my
  heart.

But
  come 
here,
 fear.

I
 am
 alive
 and
 you
 are 
so
 afraid
 of
 dying.


Lawrence DiStasi