This week saw stories about campus uprisings (some successful) relating indirectly to the Black Lives Matter movement and yet another Republican debate about practically nothing. These seemingly distinct phenomena are not entirely unconnected, particularly when you consider the economic focus of the G.O.P. debate and the very racially exclusive history of the expansion of the middle class during the second half of the 20th Century.
Living in my hermetically sealed white man’s world, I am witness to a lot of head scratching about why students at, say, University of Missouri are so upset. Of course, all my white companions know of this is what they hear on the evening news or via online sources, which only brings them the events of the past few days. The long history of abuse, exclusion, marginalization, incarceration, injury, and in some cases killing is not encapsulated in these very brief reports. So naturally, it seems nonsensical.
My life isn’t exactly typical, but my family experience offers some insight into the depth of white privilege. My dad came back from World War II, got his high school equivalency diploma, and went to work. He was white, so it wasn’t that challenging to find a job in those days. He had V.A. and F.H.A. loans, barred to black families, with which to purchase his first, second, third house and so on. By the late sixties / early seventies, we were living in a new house in the richest town in our county, with one son on the way to Oberlin College, all on one salary. Dad’s financial profile more or less tracked the trajectory of the American white working class, declining somewhat through the seventies, eighties, and nineties, but he left enough to fund an IRA and, with Social Security, set my mom up for the rest of her life. Black families, by and large, didn’t have any of that – not the jobs, not the equity, not the access to credit, an not the freedom to live wherever they wanted.
What’s more, because my parents benefited from that brief period of somewhat broadly shared white prosperity in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, they were there to catch me and my siblings when we faltered. I had the luxury of being able to fail once, twice, many times, always having that safety net below me. Again, black people my age didn’t have that, because their parents hadn’t shared in the prosperity. So when people like Ben Carson, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, etc., tell this tale about pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, they’re talking out of their asses.
The truth is, the American economy is a game of chance, not of skill. Not everyone can grow up to be an entrepreneur or a famous neurosurgeon, and they shouldn’t have to in order to have a decent life. And though we live under these lofty-sounding delusions about self-reliance and persistence, people no longer have the luxury of failure. Black people never had it, and now white people are reaching that threshold as well.
We need to fundamentally change the way we do things if we’re ever going to achieve racial or economic justice. This is probably a good time to start.
God awful. So sorry to hear about the bloody attacks in Beirut and Paris. My condolences to the families of the fallen.
luv u,
jp
