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 20th 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment