Exposed: The Billionaire-Backed Group Strong-Arming Parents into Destroying Their Kids' Public Schools

Education  

Not Safe for Work Corporation / By Yasha Levine

Exposed: The Billionaire-Backed Group Strong-Arming Parents into Destroying Their Kids' Public Schools

 

You won't believe the predatory behavior of this education "reform" outfit, Parent Revolution.

 

 

 

Photo Credit: Brad Jonas -- NSFW

 

 

April 26, 2013  |  

 

This article first appeared at Not Safe for Work Corporation. 

When I traveled to the desert city of Victorville in Souther California this January, I little expected that the neighboring town of Adelanto would become ground zero for a fight between billionaires on one side, and poor, vulnerable minority parents and children on the other.

I first heard about the fight through the local right-wing paper, the Victorville Daily Press, which gleefully announced on its front page that a local school, Desert Trails Elementary, had just made history as the first school in the nation to be privatized under California's new "parent trigger" law. The paper described the takeover as “promising a fresh start to the failing elementary school,” and claimed it had received widespread support from parents.

The national press gushed in similarly glowing terms. The LA Weekly described the Adelanto privatization as an “historic moment for the education-reform movement picking up steam across the nation.” The New York Timesdutifully compared the takeover of Desert Trails to “Won’t Back Down.” An “issues” movie starring Face of Indie Maggie Gyllenhaal, “Won’t Back Down” promotes the parent-trigger law as a panacea for America’s public-education problems, one that “empowers” parents to fight back against self-interested public school teachers and their union.

All in all, everyone agreed that this takeover of Desert Trails Elementary represented a triumphant moment for parents and their children, a victory for the people over rapacious elementary school teachers and their unions.
But something didn’t seem right about this story — it was too pat, too much like a triumph-of-the-spirit Disney tale, too much like Maggie’s movie. So I made some calls and started spending some time in Adelanto, to find out what really went on there.

* *   Motorists entering the City of Adelanto are greeted with a big blue sign that reads: "The City With Unlimited Possibilities." It's not clear who came up with this slogan, or when. But, these days, the sign is a cruel joke.

Founded in 1915 by the guy who invented the modern electric iron, Adelanto never amounted to much. Mostly it served as pit stop and junkyard to a nearby George Air Force Base. The base closed more than a decade ago, and home values have collapsed since the last real-estate bubble popped. Entire neighborhoods emptied out, and building companies went belly up, leaving behind half-finished “master planned communities” that still stand there, desiccating in the dry heat. Signs advertise brand-new three-bedroom McTractHomes for zero down and $800 a month.

Today, Adelanto is the end of the line. A poor, desert town, the city serves as a dumping ground for low-income minority families who have been squeezed out of the Greater Los Angeles-Orange County region and pushed out over the San Bernardino Mountains into the bleak expanse of the Mojave Desert, where housing is dirt cheap and jobs almost non-existent.

The numbers tell the story: Of the 32,000 people who call Adelanto home, one out of three are below the poverty line. Per-capita income is just under $12,000 — nearly three times lower than the California average, and about as much as the average person earns in Mexico. There are almost no jobs here, and Starbucks ranks among the city’s top-ten employers.

Nearly two-thirds of the population are Latinos, many of them undocumented. Another one in five are African-American. Then there are the 5 percent of the population that the census bureau classifies as “institutionalized,” which is nothing but a wishy-washy bureaucratic way of saying that 1 out of 20 Adelanto residents is currently rotting in jail — a rate five times higher than the national average. Adelanto does not have its own high school, but dropout rates in the neighboring suburb of Victorville, also hard-hit by the subprime bubble, are among the worst in the state — hovering somewhere around 50%.

If you stand at the city’s welcome sign, you can just make out its three major prison facilities: a giant federal prison complex to the north, a brand-new state prison to the west, and just north of that, California’s largest private immigrant deportation facility. The last was built recently by Geo Group, the nation’s second-largest private prison contractor.

* *   I would spend several weeks talking to the parents of children enrolled in Desert Trails Elementary, meeting with them in local taco joints and strip mall diners and talking about what happened. As I had suspected, their version of events turned out not to match the Disney version in national papers.

The parents told me that a Los Angeles-based group calling itself Parent Revolution organized a local campaign to harass and trick them into signing petitions that they thought were meant for simple school improvements. In fact those petitions turned out to be part of a sophisticated campaign to convert their children’s public school into a privately-run charter — something a majority of parents opposed. At times, locals say, the Parent Revolution volunteers’ tactics were so heavy-handed in gathering signatures that they crossed the line into harassment and intimidation. Many parents were misled about what the petition they signed actually meant. Some told me that the intimidation with some of the undocumented Latino residents included bribery and extortion.

They first noticed something was up in the summer of 2011, when small groups of parents decked out in Parent Revolution T-shirts started appearing around town, going door to door to speak to parents of Desert Trails Elementary kids, spreading the word that they were organizing a "parent union" to try to improve the quality of their children's education.

At that, local parents who’d been involved in school affairs started to grow suspicious. According to several I spoke to, two of the leading members of this new “parent union” had previously served in the school’s Parent Teacher Association, and had resigned amid accusations of improprieties.
Why would they suddenly start a new parent organization? Spite? Revenge? And what exactly was Parent Revolution?

Parents didn’t get much of a chance to ponder these questions. As soon as summer vacation ended, the parent union began to reveal its true function. Adelanto was to become the first victim of a giant corporate push to privatize public schools.
* * Put simply, a parent trigger law allows a group of parents to hand over their kids’ public schools to private contractors, and then allows these new private contractors to tear up teacher union contracts and fire or hire as they see fit — all while receiving taxpayer money to fund their private-charter school business.
The law works like this: If enough parents sign a trigger petition (representing more than 50% of the number of students in the school), they can fire its principal, lay off unionized teachers or hand it over to a private charter school company.

According to a recent investigation by FryingPanNews, Parent Revolution has received $14.8 million since its founding in 2009. Almost half of that — $6.3 million — came from the Walton Family Foundation, which has long bankrolled the war on unions and public education. The rest of Parent Revolution’s cash came from more liberal sources, including The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Broad Foundation, each of which has given about $1.5 million to the group.
As reported in Dissent, these three foundations -- Gates, Walton and Broad -- spend roughly $4 billion a year to hand public K-12 education to the private sector, giving them increasing leverage over a sector that's worth $500 billion per year.

Parent Revolution is a direct outgrowth of the charter school industry. Ben Austin, the outfit's leader, previously headed a large charter-school firm called Green Dot Schools, whose backers overlap nicely with Parent Revolution's backers -- Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, Eli Broad, Phillip Anschutz, and others. Austin's replacement at Green Dot Schools is a former partner at Bain, Mitt Romney's old firm.

Parent Revolution's Ben Austin has described the law as "a groundbreaking and historic new policy" that will "transform public education," and has dressed it up in the language of parents' rights. ALEC, which adopted a version of the Parent Empowerment Act as a model for "parent trigger" legislation, described it in similar terms, saying that it "places democratic control into the hands of parents at school level."

And yet, for all this empowerment, parents have never tried to pull the trigger on their own, not without Parent Revolution coming into town and applying pressure, intimidation and bait-and-switch techniques on unsuspecting parents.
In recent years, Diane Ravitch, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education under George H. W. Bush, has turned into the most eloquent and forceful critic of charter schools and voucher programs. She tells me that California's parent trigger law was not designed for the parents' sake. Instead, Ravitch describes it as "a stealth tactic by charter advocates to gain a larger market share by duping parents."

Charter school advocates like Parent Revolution and so-called "school reformers" like Michelle Rhee (recently discredited in a series of test-score cheating scandals and for trying to conceal the wealthy Wall Street funders of her "StudentsFirst" pro-privatization group) front for some of the world's biggest, most powerful corporate figures. Potentates from the extraction industry, Wall Street hedge fund tycoons and others have invested huge sums into privatizing America's public education system. For them, it is a public trough filled with up to $1 trillion just waiting to be converted into private profit, whatever the consequences for children.

Former "Junk Bond King" and convicted felon Michael Milken, Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, Netflix founder Reed Hastings and billionaire venture capitalist John Doerr are just some of the names betting heavily on privatized education. Black Rock, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and just about every other big name in Wall Street and private equity are in on the action, as well.

An investigation by the Huffington Post revealed that Michelle Rhee's secretive, well-funded pro-privatization group StudentsFirst is backed by hedge fund tycoon David Tepper, who pocketed $2.2 billion in 2012 alone. Another backer is billionaire John Arnold, a former Enron trader who reportedly gave Rhee's group "tens of millions" of dollars. Arnold, a self-described "libertarian" who profited heavily from Enron's manipulation of the California energy markets, is funding the drive to slash California teachers' pensions through his front-group, The California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility.

Just last month, Rhee joined the "Parent Revolution" group for ajoint march in support of parent trigger and charter schools in Los Angeles. It's a small world, school privatization, and its inhabitants have very deep pockets.

So these are some of the people behind the parent trigger law, which should indicate what it’s really about. The law will give these corporate interests a new weapon with which to privatize public education and access to a virgin vein of taxpayer dollars. Best of all, the trigger law makes it look as if parents are choosing to privatize public education out of their own free will. They were given a choice, and they put their trust in the private sector.

California is just the beginning. In the past few years, parent trigger laws have popped in seven states so far, and another dozen others are currently deliberating similar legislation.

But this kind of reform did not come easy. The parent trigger law was conceived as a con, but that didn’t mean that parents would fall for it automatically. That’s what Parent Revolution learned when it used the trigger law for the first time shortly after it passed in 2010.

Parent Revolution first tried using the law to take over a school in Compton in 2010, organizing a small clique of local Compton parents and waging a blitz fake-grassroots campaign to dupe parents into pulling the trigger on their kids’ school. But the campaign crashed and burned after parents and teachers pushed back hard. Compton parents accused Parent Revolution organizers of deception and harassment, and many of those who signed the petition eventually rescinded their signatures. “They told me the petition was to beautify the school," one parent told the Los Angeles Times. “They are misinforming the parents, so I revoked my signature."

To fight back, Parent Revolution called in a favor from Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a former Chicano community organizer turned charter school advocate. Villaraigosa, who has stacked the LA County Board of Education with former employees of the Eli Broad empire, counter-accused Compton parents of harassment, and equated them with union-busters:

“It's particularly alarming to see these parents resort to the kind of intimidation, the kind of smear campaigning, the kind of rumor-mongering that is all too reminiscent of the way bad employers try to intimidate working people.”

But it was no use. Even Compton — a city synonymous with gangs, poverty and violence — was neither poor enough, nor isolated enough to take Parent Revolution’s “power empowerment” program without a fight.

An isolated desert suburb about halfway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, home to some of the poorest families in Southern California, would prove to be much more vulnerable to the tactics used by Parent Revolution.

* * So they went to Adelanto. By enlisting local parents to canvass the neighborhood speaking out against the teacher’s union, Parent Revolution had already laid the groundwork. The “parent union” was a classic PR strategy, designed to create a rift between parents and the local teachers’ union. Parent Revolution’s aims were initially vague, except on one issue, which was demonizing the teachers union. Parent Revolution volunteers all told the same story: The school’s problems were the fault of bad, self-interested teachers, who cared more about their own pay benefits and job security than about educating the children. As the group's website explained, "Our schools are failing our children because they are not designed to succeed. They have been designed to serve adults, not children."

In September 2011, the local “parent union” was joined by the big guns: a troop of trained, experienced organizers sent in from Parent Revolution’s main office in Los Angeles.

Parent Revolution's "lead organizer," a former Green Beret by the name of Alfonso Flores, headed the campaign. Flores is not just any old organizer. He has worked as a public school teacher, run a Los Angeles charter school called Global Education Academy and is considered an expert in the field of applying free-market solutions to public education. In 2008, Flores led a panel at a seminar hosted by the Pacific Research Institute, a GOP think-tank linked to ALEC and the Cato Institute, and backed by major oil, tobacco, pharmaceutical and health insurance firms. (Pacific Research Institute flaks served on President George W. Bush’s environmental advisory panel in 2001.) The same year that it hired Flores to offer advice on how charter-school administrators could improve student behavior, Pacific Research Institute was lobbying hard against the healthcare reform and a government-run medical system, saying that it would inevitably result in Soviet-style shortages and the rationing of medical care.

Alfonso Flores set up a command bunker in a rented home just a block away from the school, on Delicious Street. Parent Revolution advisors and organizers sent in from LA continuously came to the house to hold strategy sessions, instruct trigger parents on everything from collecting signatures to handling the media. They used it as a forward operating base to launch tactical operations into the community. Hanging in the living room and overlooking all this activity was a black-and-white poster depicting Parent Revolution’s mission and raison d'etre. The top part of the poster showed a big black fish eating a group of disorganized little fish. This was the “system” eating the “parents.” Below it was another big black fish, but this time it was being chased by an even bigger fish made of organized smaller fish. This was the local “parent union” eating “Desert Trails Elementary School.”

Devouring a public school—nothing better describes what Parent Revolution was doing in Adelanto. Over the next three months, packs of trigger activists and organizers would spill out of the house and swarm the neighborhood, aggressively pushing parents to sign some sort of petition that they barely bothered to explain.

First, they started with the school. Parent Revolution’s lead organizer Alfonso Flores led the pack.

One mother described the group’s aggressive petition drive in a signed statement filed with the Adelanto School District. I was able to obtain this statement from anti-trigger parents:

“The man came to my car over several days and constantly begged me to sign the petition when I asked to get it & turn it in later he stated that he couldn’t do that so after several minutes of harassment I gave in and signed the petition unaware of the consequences. He was very pushy & persistent. I wish I that I wan’t intimated [sic] by him & that I didn’t sign the petition.”

It got so bad that parents had to ask the school to deploy more security to protect them from Parent Revolution’s pushy canvassers.

“They were there every day, every morning and every afternoon,” says Maggie Flamenco, a mother of two special-needs children enrolled in Desert Trails, and a member of the Adelanto’s Special Education Parent Advisory Committee. We met at a Denny’s just around the corner from Desert Trails Elementary. The way Flamenco describes it, the trigger campaign was much more like a low-intensity war designed to break the parents’ will using intimidation, harassment and deception, than anything like the “empowerment” that the Parent Trigger advocates claimed it was.

She described to me how Parent Revolution volunteers would block cars with their bodies to get the parent driver to sign their parent –trigger petition; how they’d knock on windows, hound and follow parents when they dropped their kids off and when they picked them up after school. They were so persistent about it that it got to the point where parents like Maggie dreaded going to collect their own children.

Maggie told me she had to file a police report against a Parent Revolution activist because the man kept harassing her every time she came to pick up and drop off her kids at school. “Because I was one of the parents who did not want to sign... he blocked the car with his body and prevented me from leaving, writing my writing my plates down, taking pictures of my plates, taking pictures of the kids...it was just harassment."

The harassment worked. Maggie didn’t sign the petition, but she did withdraw her kids from the school because of the stress and fear they were suffering from the repeated harassment.

"Their anxiety was high. Their teachers and aids were saying, 'The school is gonna be done.' They were scared," she explained. “The doctor put them on a home hospital due to their anxiety. All this stuff with their school they were just freaking out that it was going to get taken over, that they are not going to have their aides, their teachers anymore. They are autistic so they don't understand anything. They told me the other day, ‘I hope they don’t close the school when we’re in there.’”

This was clearly no longer a grassroots campaign run by local parents, nor was its mission to empower the community. Its primary goal now was to force as many parents as possible to sign "parent trigger" petitions.

Parent Revolution operatives followed people into local businesses, harassed them with constant phone calls and staked out people's homes. One father got a panicked call from his child, who was scared because a man was lurking outside their home for a long time. Panicking, the dad rushed home, only to find a Parent Revolution organizer camped outside waiting for a signature.

Some Desert Trails parents noticed that Parent Revolution organizers had somehow obtained contact information that was not publicly listed, including cell phone numbers and addresses, and worried that the group had somehow illegally accessed their children’s confidential school records.

One mother outlined her suspicions in a signed statement later filed with the Adelanto School District:

“I received a call on my cell phone, and the parents came to my house twice. My cellphone is not public record and when I questioned the gentleman on the phone how he received my cell # the call disconnected. I then called back and did not receive and [sic] answer. I am also wondering how they knew my address. I feel there has been a breech in confidentiality of my 2 childrens [sic] record at the school … I am now afraid they have my childrens [sic] Social Security numbers.”

Parent Revolution used every debt-collector trick in the book, purposefully making life so miserable for parents that they would agree to sign just to get the canvassers off their backs. “Most of the reason the parents signed was because they were tired of not answering their door, of hiding from them,” said Maggie Flamenco.

Lori Yuan, a mother of two kids Desert Trails and a member of Adelanto’s planning commission, who would later lead the parent effort to resist Parent Revolution, agreed: “Most folks were duped and had no idea the consequences of this petition succeeding.”

Statements filed by parents with Adelanto’s school district all say pretty much the same thing: “We were duped and pushed.” Here are just a few examples:

“I was misled and told that we weren’t going to fight to be a charter school. They kept coming to my home and insisted I sign. I am upset thats not what I wanted for my students.”

“The petitioner kept coming to my doorstep, for many days, my wife told me not to sign it but I did because I felt harassed, and I wanted them to leave me alone. I don’t blame them I blame myself but I don’t agree with the petition now that I understand it.”

Just a few months before Parent Revolution showed up in town, there had been a huge scandal involving the Adelanto Charter Academy, a new publicly-funded charter school that embraced “conservative and Christian values” run by a couple of businessmen with deep connections to San Bernardino County’s GOP political machine. At the time, it was Adelanto’s only charter school. District officials started to notice something was up when they discovered administrators didn’t bother with even the most basic bookkeeping, and a deeper audit revealed that the school failed to meet basic education requirements, served tainted food and functioned as little more than a shell company that diverted public education funds into private bank accounts and political campaigns.

On top of all that, it turned out that the charter school was set up with the help of San Bernardino County Supervisor Bill Postmus, who crashed and burned in that special way only evangelical closet-cases manage to pull off: he was arrested for possession of meth while under investigation for a long list of corrupt dealings and kickbacks. Right before the Adelanto Charter School scandal broke, Postmus pleaded guilty to fourteen felonies, including bribery, conspiracy, extortion and the misappropriation of public funds.

It was big, ugly mess, and it did not make charter schools look very good. So Parent Revolution canvassers did what any honest community organizer would do: they pretended that their petition had nothing to do with charter schools.
"When Parent Revolution came to my door, they explained they wanted to make the school better, get water fountains, the playground set and making sound like they were gonna do a makeover, instead of a takeover,” said Eleanor Medina, who moved to Adelanto 10 years ago from Buena Park in small city in Orange County to retire, and has been helping raise her grandchildren. “They also said that everyone was going to get a computer.”

Other parents report they were told pretty much the same thing: Parent Revolution promised that they were not trying to convert Desert Trails into a charter school, and reassured parents current teachers would not be fired. Organizers also made the dubious claim that if the petition went through, each child was going to receive a laptop to own.

For parents who insisted on giving the petition a closer read, Parent Revolution used a crude bait-and-switch technique: canvassers asked the parents to sign two completely separate petitions, and invoked two different clauses of the parent trigger law. The first petition sought only to introduce reforms and give parents greater power over administering the school. The second petition invoked the full privatization package: firing all the teachers and handing the school over to a private charter- school company (the specific company would be chosen at a later time).

Two petitions? Well, Parent Revolution’s reps explained that the second petition would never be used officially, but only employed as a negotiating tool — a prop that could be used to threaten the school district if it attempted to stall implementing the demands of its first petition.

Chrissy Alvarado, a mother of two students at Desert Trails, says she always thought the two petitions were just a ruse, a way to sow confusion. “They never explained themselves enough for us to understand anything,” she said. “In reality, it was all about the charter.”

She was right.

In early January, Parent Revolution activists announced that they had collected signatures representing 70 percent of the students, and proceeded to submit the petition calling for full charter conversion.

The news outraged Desert Trails parents, but it finally spurred them into action, and the small group emerged to try and stop the petition.

Eleanor Medina couldn’t believe they had the gall to dupe parents like that: "You're talking about my kids' education. They need to go to college. Pretty soon they're gonna need to go to college just to get a Jack in the Box job."

“We didn't know what we could do, because no one had done this before,” Lori explained as she met me for coffee, before heading to an Adelanto planning commission meeting. “We were in overdrive, 24 hours a day, doing nothing but research, pounding the pavement, driving around, having meetings, going crazy. Literally nothing else in life existed how do we beat this, what do we do.”

Very quickly it became apparent a whole lot of parents had been duped, and would happily rescind their signatures if they got a chance.

“We called hundreds of lawyers, but no one would help us. They didn’t even refer us to the right lawyer who could help us,” Lori explained, shaking her head. “Meanwhile, Parent Revolution had a slick legal team working for them pro bono.”

Anti-trigger parents were grasping at straws, and felt totally alone. Local teachers couldn’t help them; they were afraid to even talk. The union told them to stay quiet because it was afraid of legal action from Parent Revolution. Anti-trigger parents say that, in the end, the only real help came from California’s teachers union, but even that was mostly restricted to legal advice on how to properly collect statements from parents so that Parent Revolution would not be able to challenge them in court.

“We got no real help from anyone,” said Lori. And that included the press, which tended to smear anti-trigger parents as union stooges and thugs out to intimidate low-income minorities into submission. LA Weekly ran a series of particularly nasty articles, specifically attacking Lori for doing the bidding of corrupt teachers who care more about “cushy union contracts” than their students’ education. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial features editor (and son of raging neocon Douglas Feith) David Feith published a string of pieces attacking the efforts of anti-trigger parents to push back against Parent Revolution’s astroturf campaign. Feith smeared their genuine grassroots organizing as a “systematic and legally questionable pressure campaign waged against parents” on behalf of the “hostile unions” and the “education establishment.”

Lori started to feel surrounded by intrigue. She says, “I would do these interviews with these people and reporters and journalists and bloggers. Anyone that would call I would talk to because I need to get this information out because people need to know this. And then I'd get the article and I'd be like this has nothing to fucking do with what I said. I got to the point when I started thinking, do they — and by they, I mean Parent Revolution — do they own everything? Do they own the fucking editors, do they own the newspapers?"

Lori’s paranoia-sense was not that far off the mark.

Parent Revolution might not own the press, but the people and companies who fund groups like Parent Revolution and stand to profit from school privatization, well . . . they quite literally do own the press. Sometimes they are the press.
Among the major investors in privatizing education is Rupert Murdoch.
It was Murdoch’s 20th Century Fox that put out “Won’t Back Down,” Maggie Gyllenhaal’s parent trigger film bankrolled by Phillip Anschutz, the right-wing oil billionaire who funds everything from anti-gay ballot initiatives and Christian Identity, to teaching creationism in schools. Anschutz is also a major backer of ALEC, the right-wing lobby group that pushed through the “Stand Your Ground” vigilante laws that resulted in Trayvon Martin’s murder. ALEC is also spearheading parent-trigger laws in states across the country.

Murdoch recently announced his plans for aggressive expansion into the private primary education sector, saying, "When it comes to K through 12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed.”

Murdoch’s News Corp media empire is vast. The Washington Post Company — which owns The Washington Post, Slate.com, Foreign Policy magazine, among other news media holdings — relies heavily on its for-profit education subsidiary, Kaplan Inc, which generated 62% of the company’s revenue in 2012. Then there’s The Financial Times and The Economist, both of which are owned by Pearson, a multinational mega-media company that’s also heavily involved in private education.

Incidentally, all three companies have been members of ALEC’s pro-charter Education Task Force, which has been at the forefront of the effort to enact legislation to privatize public education in states all across America.

But for Adelanto residents, the centralization and corruption of news media was a bigger issue. The main concern for Lori and other anti-trigger parents was to collect as many rescissions as possible.

As they made their rounds, they found that the vast majority of parents they spoke to had had no idea that the petition would convert the school to a charter. The magnitude of Parent Revolution’s deception came as a shock. “In our canvassing to gain rescissions, there were maybe three people or households that I can recall that actually said, ‘Yep, we know exactly what this petition will do, we want the teachers fired’,” explained Lori.

Over the course of two months, anti-trigger parents managed to collect somewhere around 116 rescission statements.

As the group collected rescissions, talked to parents and educated as many as possible about what Parent Revolution’s intended to do with Desert Trails, tension in the community continued to mount. There was real anger and bitterness. Friends and neighbors suddenly became mortal enemies, and even kids started getting drawn into the conflict.

Desert Trails’ principal David Mobley told the Los Angeles Times that kids whose parents were on opposite sides of the trigger issue had started fighting at school. "It's sad because these kids used to be really good friends. Now these kids have become pawns in a political mess, and it just breaks my heart,” Mobley said.

Chrissy Alvarez’s best friend -- I’ll call her Mary (not her real name) -- was one of the leading members of the trigger group. Chrissy explained that their friendship turned into hostile after she realized that Mary had been an accomplice to Parent Revolution’s swindle and knowingly helped sell out her community — something Chrissy could not forgive.

Why would Mary do the bidding of a corporate front group, pouring her energy and time into privatizing her kid’s school?

Turns out that Mary, who had a second-grade daughter in Desert Trails, had good reason to join the campaign. Chrissy says she had serious problems with her immigration status and was facing deportation. Parent Revolution promised to make those problems disappear. It was an offer than must have been hard to resist: help a group pull off its trigger campaign or face deportation and the possibility that she’d never see your family again.

"No shit?!" I blurted out. We were sitting in a taco shop in a strip mall on the edge of town with a couple of other parents. We were in a family setting, and there were kids around. But I couldn’t restrain the profanity. I was too shocked. I just couldn’t believe it.

“Yes! She told me! She was my best friend,” Chrissy explained. "We were still best friends until the time she submitted the petition. And I told her to her face: 'You guys have been bs'ing. These were bought with citizenship.' She had already signed two documents that she was supposed to leave the country years ago. She was in a heap of trouble. She had gone to a lawyer, who told her that there was no way around this other than you going back to Mexico.”

I recognized the woman’s name. She had been interviewed by cable news networks, and appeared in dozens of news stories talking about parent empowerment and the need for parents to take an active role in their children’s education. She even squirted a couple of tears for reporters once.

Dangling citizenship in front of a desperate mother facing deportation—this is what parent empowerment looks like to the billionaires trying to privatize public education. And it appears she was not the only one...

Multiple sources told me that Parent Revolution had propositioned other undocumented Latino immigrants, promising to help resolve their immigration status in return for their support of the parent trigger petition. Help with immigration in exchange for a single signature? It’s an offer that many families must have found difficult to turn down.

I made multiple to attempts to verify these allegations. But no one would talk or even communicate with me — on or off the record. Through a third-party, I was told that they feared retribution from Parent Revolution and did not want to put their families in danger. “One, they are tired. Two, they are scared. Three, they are thinking: ‘What’s the point? The school is already gone’,” explained a parent who had tried to arrange a meeting.

They were scared. And who could blame them?

As undocumented immigrants, they had nothing to gain by talking to me. On the contrary, they had everything to lose. The sprawling private deportation facility located just a few miles north of the school, dedicated to corralling and booting out people just like them, served as a constant reminder of just how much they had to lose, and how easily deportation could happen to them. A speeding ticket is enough to initiate deportation these days, and it doesn’t matter if they have children or family: recent stats show that a quarter of people deported are parents with children who are U.S. citizens.

I could appreciate this kind of fear. My family fled the Soviet Union in 1989, and we spent seven nerve-racking months living in European refugee camps. We had no money, no citizenship and no idea about the future. I was just a kid, but I was deeply affected by the fear, anxiety and insecurity that dominated our lives. We certainly didn’t think we had any rights, or that we were entitled to anything. The most important thing was to keep your head down and not rock the boat.
No wonder Parent Revolution chose Adelanto. Out here it could act with near-impunity.

Even so, there was some pushback. Even the poor don’t like being ripped off.
Armed with the stack of rescissions collected by Lori and Chrissy, Adelanto’s school board invalidated 100 of the 466 original petition signatures submitted by trigger activists, bringing the number below the simple majority required by law. And so on March 2012, Adelanto’s school board unanimously voted to reject Parent Revolution’s petition on grounds it had failed to meet minimum signature requirements.

But it was a short-lived victory.

Parent Revolution lawyered up, and after a year of court battles, forced the Adelanto’s school district to accept the trigger petition. In the summer of 2012, San Bernardino County Superior Court Judge Steve Malone ruled that the school district had no right to reject the petition because California's parent trigger law did not give it authority to rescind signatures. It was a bizarre decision, and didn’t seem to accord with the spirit and letter of California’s Parent Empowerment Law.

But was it valid?

That’s not clear. Adelanto’s cash-strapped school district didn’t appeal the decision. It simply didn’t have the resources to continue a lengthy court fight. Not that it would have continued to fight for very long, even if tired. Shortly after the decision, two parents who had been involved in Parent Revolution won spots on Adelanto’s school board, finally and totally tipping the board’s ideological balance in favor of charter school.

"I thought the ruling was crazy,” said Diane Ravitch. “If anything, it seems totally not to have empowered the parents, but to say: you mistakenly signed a petition and you can't take your name off. That's not parent empowerment, that's parent deception.”

“It’s basically the taking of public property,” said Ravitch, unable to hide her annoyance with the claims made by trigger advocates. “In the nature of public education, people come and go. In the course of a few years, there is a lot of turnover in terms of who the parents are in a school. But they don’t own the school. The public owns the school. So you’re taking a public facility that was paid for by tax dollars and saying that they people who are using it right now this year have the right to turn it over a private operator.”

Imagine if we did the same thing with other public services like buses or libraries... "Take a vote of everyone who happens to be in a public library at any given moment and say we want to hand it over to the Library Corporation of America to run for a profit.”

But the reality was even worse than that.

On October 18, Desert Trails parents met in a park adjacent to the school to vote and pick the specific charter company that would take control of the school. California’s Parent Empowerment Act allows only the parents who signed a trigger petition to cast a ballot in this vote, which meant that hundreds of parents should have shown up to make the decision, and to exercise their newfound empowerment. But in the end, only 53 ballots were cast — with 50 of them voting to give the contract to LaVerne Elementary Preparatory Academy, a small charter operator that runs one other school in a nearby town.
A decision made by 53 people in a town of 32,000? That’s less than 0.2% of the population. Parent empowerment indeed.

As this article goes to press, LaVerne Academy has posted a job ad looking to hire teachers for the newly rebranded Desert Trails Preparatory Academy. According to the ad, job seekers only need a substitute teachers permit to apply. Apparently that’s all that’s required to help improve education at a chronically struggling school.

Yasha Levine is an editor for eXiledonline.com. He is the author of the book, The Corruption of Malcolm Gladwell (2012).

Why Didn't Regulators Prevent the Texas Fertilizer Explosion?

Why Didn't Regulators Prevent the Texas Fertilizer Explosion?

Seven different agencies regulate fertilizer plants in Texas, but none has authority over how close they are to homes and schools

By Theodoric Meyer and ProPublica

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PREVENTABLE?: A member of the Valley Mills Fire Department walks among the remains of an apartment complex next to the fertilizer plant that exploded on April 17, 2013 in West, Texas. Seven different agencies regulate fertilizer plants in Texas, but none of them have authority over how close they are to homes and schools. Image: Erich Schlegel/Getty Images

 

A week after a blast at a Texas fertilizer plant killed at least 15 people and hurt more than 200, authorities still don't know exactly why the West Chemical and Fertilizer Company plant exploded.

Here's what we do know: The fertilizer plant hadn't been inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration since 1985. Its owners do not seem to have told the Department of Homeland Security that they were storing large quantities of potentially explosive fertilizer, as regulations require. And the most recent partial safety inspection of the facility in 2011 led to $5,250 in fines.
We've laid out which agencies were in charge of regulating the plant and who's investigating the explosion now.

What happened, exactly?

Around 7:30 p.m. on April 17, a fire broke out at the West Chemical and Fertilizer Company plant in West, Texas, a small town of about 2,800 people 75 miles south of Dallas. Twenty minutes later, it blew up. The explosion shook houses 50 miles away and was so powerful that the United States Geological Survey registered it as a 2.1-magnitude earthquake. It flattened homes within a five-block radius and destroyed a nursing home, an apartment complex, and a nearby middle school.  According to the New York Times, the blast left a crater 93 feet wide and 10 feet deep, and the fire "burned with such intensity that railroad tracks were fused."

The blast killed at least 15 people, most of them firefighters and other first responders.

Have fertilizer plants ever exploded before?

Yes. A plant in Sergeant Bluff, Iowa, that manufactured ammonium nitrate fertilizer 2014 the same explosive chemical stored in West 2014 exploded on Dec. 13, 1994, killing four people and injuring 18.

But fertilizer plants are safer now, said Stephen Slater, the Iowa administrator of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. "All kinds of technologies have had huge improvements," he told the Des Moines Register. "And we haven't had any bad experiences at the plants in the 20 years since [the accident]. I'm knocking on wood." (Slater didn't respond to our requests for comment.)

Who regulates these fertilizer plants?

At least seven different state and federal agencies can regulate Texas fertilizer plants like the one in West: OSHA, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, the Texas Department of State Health Services, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the Texas Feed and Fertilizer Control Service.

Some of the agencies don't appear to have shared information before the blast.
Fertilizer plants that hold more than 400 pounds of ammonium nitrate, for instance, are required to notify the Department of Homeland Security.
(Ammonium nitrate can be used to make bombs. It's what Timothy McVeigh used to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.) The West plant held 270 tons 2014 yes, tons 2014 of the chemical last year, according to a report it filed with the Texas Department of State Health Services, but the plant didn't tell Homeland Security.

Carrie Williams, a Department of State Health Services spokeswoman, told ProPublica that the agency isn't required to pass that information 2014 which is also sent to local authorities 2014 on to Homeland Security.

While the exact cause of the explosion is unknown, a federal official told the New York Times that investigators believed it was caused by the ammonium nitrate. The blast crater is in the area of the plant where the chemical was stored.

The plant also filed a "worst-case release scenario" report with the EPA and local officials stating there was no risk of a fire or an explosion. The scenario described an anhydrous ammonia leak that wouldn't hurt anyone.

Did any of these agencies fail to inspect the plant when they should have?

It's unclear. OSHA conducted the last full safety inspection of the plant in 1985. "Since then," the Huffington Post reported, "regulators from other agencies have been inside the plant, but they looked only at certain aspects of plant operations, such as whether the facility was abiding by labeling rules when packaging its fertilizer for sale."

You can view the full OSHA report here. Since 2011, OSHA has carried out inspections based in part on the level of risk that plants like the one in West reported to the EPA. Since the West plant had told the EPA there was no risk of a fire or an explosion, it wasn't a priority. The plant also may have been exempt from some inspections as a small employer. An OSHA spokesman told ProPublica that the agency would be investigating whether the plant had such an exemption.

As the Huffington Post also noted, the most recent federal safety inspection of the plant, in 2011, resulted in a $5,250 fine for failing to draft a safety plan for pressured canisters of anhydrous ammonia, among other infractions. (There's no evidence that anhydrous ammonia played any role in the explosion.)
Why was a plant that stored explosive chemicals allowed to be located so close to a school?

The EPA and other federal agencies actually don't regulate how close such plants can be to schools, nursing homes and population centers. In Texas, the decision is left up to the local zoning authorities.

A Dallas Morning News investigation in 2008 found that Dallas County residents were "at risk of a toxic disaster because outdated and haphazard zoning has allowed homes, apartments and schools to be built within blocks 2014 in some cases even across the street 2014 from sites that use dangerous chemicals."

Ed Sykora, who owns a Ford dealership in West and spent a dozen years on the school board and the city council, told the Huffington Post he couldn't recall the town discussing whether it was a good idea to build houses and the school so close to the plant, which has been there since 1962. "The land was available out there that way; they could get sewer and other stuff that way without building a bunch of new lines," Sykora said. "There never was any thought about it. Maybe that was wrong."

Who's investigating what happened?

OSHA, the EPA and the U.S. Chemical Safety Board are all investigating. But don't hold your breath waiting for the Chemical Safety Board's conclusions. The agency is still investigating a blast that killed seven workers at an oil refinery in Washington State three years ago, as well as the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion that killed 11 workers in 2010 and sent oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico for months.

A Center for Public Integrity investigation found that the number of accident reports completed by the Chemical Safety Board had declined dramatically since 2006. Daniel Horowitz, the agency's managing director, said that the agency was stretched thin and had been asking for more investigators for years.

"Going forward, the owners and employees of Adair Grain and West Fertilizer Co. are working closely with investigating agencies,"Donald Adair, the plant's owner and a West resident,said in a statement last Friday. "We are presenting all employees for interviews and will assist in the fact finding to whatever degree possible."

Has Congress introduced any new regulation legislation?

Yes, but it would roll back regulations rather than strengthen them. Eleven representatives 2014 one Democrat and 10 Republicans 2014 sponsored a bill in February that would limit the EPA's regulatory authority over fertilizer plants. It has been endorsed by industry groups such as the Fertilizer Institute. Kathy Mathers, a spokeswoman for the Fertilizer Institute, told ProPublica that the group supports the bill because it would more clearly spell out how the EPA can regulate the industry.

From ProPublica.org (find the original story here); reprinted with permission.

Are Genes Patentable?

American Civil Liberties Union

Blog of Rights

 

 

04/25/2013

Are Genes Patentable? An Insider's Review of the ACLU's Supreme Court Argument on Gene Patenting

By Lenora M. Lapidus, Women's Rights Project at 2:01pm

In honor of DNA Day, celebrated on April 25, the ACLU gives you an insider's take on our Supreme Court Argument on gene patenting.


Are human genes patentable? That is the question at issue in AMP v. Myriad Genetics, which the ACLU argued before the Supreme Court on Monday, April 15.

"One way to address the question presented by this case is what exactly did Myriad invent? And the answer is nothing."

That is how my colleague, Chris Hansen, began his argument. For the next 20 minutes, Chris engaged in a spirited discourse with the Justices about genes and patents. He argued that the patents issued to Myriad on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, which are associated with breast and ovarian cancer, must be held invalid because genes – as parts of our body and codes for our genetic makeup – are products and laws of nature. Because of its patents, Myriad has the authority to stop all research on the genes and is the only company in the United States that can provide diagnostic testing for mutations on the genes, and thus can charge exorbitant amounts for these tests (currently over $4000 per patient).

The Justices responded favorably. They discussed the science of genetics and appeared to understand what is at stake in allowing a company to own a patent on these basic components of human life – namely that scientific research is stifled and patients are limited in the diagnostic information they can obtain and use to make critical decisions about their medical treatment. Our clients in the case are women who have or are at risk of hereditary breast or ovarian cancer, breast cancer and women's health groups, geneticists, genetic counselors, and scientific associations representing approximately 150,000 pathologists, researchers, and laboratory professionals. These clients are harmed by the patents because they are unable to afford Myriad's test or to get a second opinion necessary to make decisions such as whether to have prophylactic surgery, or are unable to conduct research on the genes or provide diagnostic testing to patients.

After Chris argued, the Solicitor General, Donald Verrilli, argued for 10 minutes on behalf of the government. Although the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office – a part of the federal government - issued the patents to Myriad in the 1990s, the Obama Administration filed a friend-of-the-court brief agreeing with the ACLU on the basic point that patents on the BRCA genes are invalid. Verrilli opened his argument by saying, "Enforcing the distinction between human invention and a product of nature preserves a necessary balance in the patent system between encouraging individual inventors and keeping the basic building blocks of innovation free for all to use. Isolated DNA falls on the ineligible side of that divide because it is simply native DNA extracted from the body."

It is this point – how different is "isolated DNA" from the DNA in our body – that is at the crux of the argument. Under patent law, a patent cannot issue on something unless it is "markedly different" from a product of nature. Myriad's attorney, Gregory Castanias, argued that once the gene was removed from the body it became a "new molecule" that Myriad "invented." Justice Sotomayor challenged Castanias on this claim using a chocolate chip cookie analogy:

I can bake a chocolate chip cookie using natural ingredients – salt, flour, eggs, butter – and I create my chocolate chip cookie. And if I combust those in some new way, I can get a patent on that. But I can't imagine getting a patent simply on the basic items of salt, flour and eggs, simply because I've created a new use or a new product from those ingredients.

The best Castanias could do in answering Justice Sotomayor was to argue that the chemical composition of the isolated DNA is different from that of the DNA in our bodies because the gene is connected to other chemicals when it is in the body. Accordingly, Castanias argued, Myriad created an invention by determining where the gene began and ended. He tried his own analogy; he said, "A baseball bat doesn't exist until it's isolated from a tree. But that's still the product of human invention to decide where to begin the bat and where to end the bat."

However, Chief Justice Roberts took issue with the baseball bat metaphor saying, "The baseball bat is quite different. You don't look at a tree and say, well, I've cut the branch here and cut it here and all of a sudden I've got a baseball bat. You have to invent it, if you will."

Through all these analogies, the Justices grappled with the complex field of genetics and the process of sequencing genes, which is what Myriad and other scientists do when they identify the nucleotide pairs on the gene in a patient's blood sample and compare that sequence to a "normal" BRCA gene to determine whether she has a mutation that is correlated with an increased risk of breast or ovarian cancer. The analogies and the reasoning from those analogies indicated that several of the Justices viewed the BRCA genes, on which Myriad has obtained patents, as products of nature. If the isolated genes are products or laws of nature, then the Court should hold that the patents are invalid.

Notwithstanding the fact that Myriad may have invested time and money into discovering the location of the BRCA genes (much of which money came from public funding and at the time many other scientists were racing to map the location of these genes), because all the company did was discover something that nature created, it is not entitled to a patent on the genes. As my colleague Chris argued:

Myriad unlocked the secrets of two human genes. These are genes that correlate with an increased risk of breast or ovarian cancer. But the genes themselves, their – where they start and stop, what they do, what they are made of, and what happens when they go wrong are all decisions that were made by nature, not by Myriad. Now, Myriad deserves credit for having unlocked these secrets. Myriad does not deserve a patent for it.

We are hopeful that the Court will agree. We expect the Court to issue its decision in this case by June.

Learn more about gene patenting and other civil liberty issues: Sign up for breaking news alerts, follow us on Twitter, and like us on Facebook.

04/25/2013

 

BRCA

Uprooting Racism

Uprooting Racism

Paul Kivel offers a framework for understanding institutional racism. It provides practical suggestions, tools, examples and advice on how white people can intervene in interpersonal and organizational situations to promote social justice.

By Paul Kivel

April 2013

Uprooting Racism (New Society Publishers, 2011) offers a framework for understanding institutional racism. It provides practical suggestions, tools, examples and advice on how white people can intervene in interpersonal and organizational situations to work as allies for racial justice. Author, Paul Kivel, also includes a wealth of information about specific cultural groups such as Muslims, people with mixed-heritage, Native Americans, Jews, recent immigrants, Asian Americans, and Latino/as. 

What Is Whiteness? 

Racism is based on the concept of whiteness — a powerful fiction enforced by power and violence. Whiteness is a constantly shifting boundary separating those who are entitled to certain benefits from those whose exploitation and vulnerability to violence is justified by their not being white.

Racism itself is a long-standing characteristic of many human societies. For example, justifying exploitation and violence against other peoples because they are inferior or different has a long history within Greek, Roman and European Christian traditions. The beginnings of biological racism go back to the Spanish Inquisition. Trying to root out false Muslim and Jewish converts to Christianity but unable to reliably do so, the courts ruled that anyone with a Jewish or Muslim parent or grandparent was not a Christian. Soon, the courts were ruling that any person with any Muslim or Jewish blood was incapable of being a righteous Christian because they did not have clean blood (limpieza de sangre).1

In more recent historical times in Western Europe, those with English heritage were perceived to be pure white. The Irish, Russians and Spanish were considered darker races, sometimes black and certainly non-white. The white category was slowly extended to include northern and middle European people, but still, less than a century ago, it definitely excluded eastern or southern European peoples such as Italians, Poles, Russians and Greeks. In the last few decades, although there is still prejudice against people from these geographical backgrounds, they have become generally accepted as white in the United States.2

The important distinction in the United States has always been binary — first between those who counted as Christians and those who were pagans. As historian Winthrop Jordan has written:

Protestant Christianity was an important element in English patriotism …. Christianity was interwoven into [an Englishman’s] conception of his own nationality, and he was therefore inclined to regard the Negroes’ lack of true religion as part of theirs. Being a Christian was not merely a matter of subscribing to certain doctrines; it was a quality inherent in oneself and in one’s society. It was interconnected with all the other attributes of normal and proper men.3 

As Africans and Native Americans began to be converted to Christianity, such a simple distinction was no longer useful, at least as a legal and political difference. In addition, because Europeans, Native Americans and Africans often worked and lived together in similar circumstances of servitude, and resisted and rebelled together against the way they were treated, the landowning class began to implement policies to separate European workers from African and Native American workers. Even in this early colonial period, racism was used to divide workers and make it easier for those in power to control working conditions. Drawing on already established popular classifications, whiteness, now somewhat separate from Christianity, was delineated more clearly as a legal category in the United States in the 17th century, and the concept of lifelong servitude (slavery) was introduced from the West Indies and distinguished from various forms of shorter-term servitude (indenture). In response to Bacon’s Rebellion and other uprisings, the ruling class, especially in the populous and dominant territory of Virginia, began to establish a clear racial hierarchy in the1660s and 70s.4 By the 1730s racial divisions were firmly in place legally and socially. Most blacks were enslaved, and even free blacks had lost the right to vote, the right to bear arms and the right to bear witness. Blacks were also barred from participating in many trades during this period.

Meanwhile, whites had gained the right to corn, money, a gun, clothing and 50 acres of land at the end of indentureship; they could no longer be beaten naked and had the poll tax reduced. In other words, poor whites “gained legal, political, emotional, social, and financial status that was directly related to the concomitant degradation of Indians and Negroes.”5 Typically, although poor whites gained some benefits vis-・vis blacks and Indians, because of the increased productivity from slavery, the gap between wealthy whites and those who were poor widened considerably.

Although racism was legally, socially and economically long established in US society, it was only defined “scientifically” as a biological/genetic characteristic about 150 years ago with the publication of Darwin’s theory of species modification. People combined Darwin’s ideas with systems of human classification developed by Linnaeus, Blumenbach and others into a pseudoscientific theory, eventually called Social Darwinism, which attempted to classify the human population into distinct categories or races and put them on an evolutionary scale with whites on top.

The original classifications consisted of 3, 5, up to as many as 63 categories, but a standard became one based on Caucasoid, Negroid and Mongoloid races.

These were not based on genetic differences, but on differences that Europeans and European Americans perceived to be important. They were in fact based on stereotypes of cultural differences and (mis)measures of physiological characteristics such as brain size.6

From the beginning, the attempt to classify people by race was fraught with contradictions. Latin Americans, Native Americans and Jewish people did not fit easily into these categories so the categories were variously stretched, redefined or adapted to meet the agenda of the people in Europe and the US who were promoting them.

For example, in the 19th century Finns were doing most of the lowest-paid, unsafe mining and lumbering work in the upper Midwestern US. Although logically, having light skin, they were white, in terms of political, cultural and economic “common sense” they were considered black because they were the poorest and least respected group in the area besides Native Americans. The courts consistently ruled that they were not white, despite their skin color, because of their cultural and economic standing.7 In another case, the courts ruled that a Syrian was not white, even though he looked white and had the same skin color as Caucasians, because “common sense” dictated that a Syrian was not white.

On the West Coast during the constitutional debates in California in 1848–49, there was discussion about the status of Mexicans and Chinese. There were still Mexicans who were wealthy landowners and business partners with whites, while the Chinese were almost exclusively heavily exploited railroad and agricultural workers. It was eventually decided that Mexicans would be considered white and Chinese would be considered the same as blacks and Indians. This decision established which group could become citizens, own land, marry whites and have other basic rights.8

There was a complex and dynamic interplay between the popular conception of race and the scientific categories, neither of which was grounded in physiological or biological reality, but both of which carried great emotional import to white people and devastating consequences to people of color, regardless of how they were being defined.

Although a few scientists still try to prove the existence of races, most scientists have long ago abandoned the use of race as a valid category to distinguish between humans. There is such tremendous genetic difference between these arbitrary groupings and such huge overlap between them that no particular racial groupings or distinctions based on skin color or other physical characteristics are useful or justified.9 The Human Genome Project has found that all humans share 99.9% of the same genes and has confirmed there are no human “races.” Of the .1% of the human genome that varies from person to person, only 3 to 10% is associated with geographic ancestry or “race” as classically defined.10

Yet despite the conclusions of the Human Genome Project, some are reasserting that there are important racial differences. These assertions are driven by political and economic motivations, not scientific research. For example, the first racially marketed drug, BiDil, was about to lose its patent protection as a drug for the treatment of heart disease. Even though the drug had failed to perform better than other products in tests and works with patients of all ethnic backgrounds, the company claimed that the drug was effective for African Americans and was able to extend its lucrative patent monopoly on the basis of the claim. It is now marketed extensively on that basis, which reinforces the common misperception that there are significant biological differences based on race.11

Genomic research has demonstrated that people have what has been labeled “ancestry groups.” These are the genetic markers indicating geographic root areas or origin areas. Most individuals have mixed ancestry groups, and certainly, “knowing a person’s geographical origin[s] does not give us enough information to predict his or her genotype” because the majority of genomic variation occurs within, not across, ancestry groups.12 For example, a person perceived as, or self-identified as, African American in the United States would have anywhere between 1 and 90% ancestry in either Europe or Africa.13

There is likewise no scientific (i.e., biological or genetic) basis to the concept of whiteness. There is nothing scientifically distinctive about it except  skin color, and that is highly variable. All common wisdom notwithstanding, the skin color of a person tells you nothing about that person’s culture, country of origin, character or personal habits. Because there is nothing biological about whiteness, it ends up being defined in contrast to other labels, becoming confused with ideas of nationality, religion and ethnicity.

For example, Jews are not a racial group. People who are Jewish share some cultural and religious beliefs and practices but come from every continent and many different cultural backgrounds. Jews range in skin color from white to dark brown. Because race was falsely assumed to be a scientific category, being Jewish has often been falsely assumed to mean that a Jew is genetically different from non-Jewish people.14

I grew up learning that racial categories were scientifically valid and gave us useful information about ourselves and other people. In other words, racism had a scientific stamp of approval. It is difficult for me to let go of the certainty I thought I had gained about what racial difference meant. And, of course, there are always new attempts to prove to us that race means something.15

• What residual doubts do you have that there may be something genetic or biological about racial differences? (“But, what about ...?”)

• How can you respond to people who say that there are specific differences between races?

I began to understand the artificial nature of racial categories more clearly when I examined how moral qualities were attached to racial differences. This confirmed my suspicion that there was a political, not a scientific agenda at work in these distinctions.

These moral qualities have, in turn, been used to justify various forms of exploitation.

From the old phrases referring to a good deed — “That’s white of you” or “That’s the Christian thing to do” to the new-age practice of visualizing oneself surrounded by white light — white has signified honor, purity, cleanliness and godliness in white western European, mainstream US and Canadian culture. Because concepts of whiteness and race were developed in Christian Europe, references to whiteness are imbued with Christian values. We have ended up with a set of opposing qualities or attributes that are said to define people either as white or as not white.

Qualities not associated with whiteness have been given negative meanings. They have become associated not only with people of color, but also with children, workers, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, Jews and heterosexual white women — just those groups excluded from the political and scientific institutions that define what normal should be.

Not all white people had an equal voice in defining racial differences. Those with most power — who had the most to gain or preserve — set the terms. White landowners, church leaders — the educated and successful — systematically defined whiteness in ways that extolled and legitimized their own actions and sanctioned the actions of others.

It is difficult for any of us to dissociate positive qualities from white people and negative ones from people of color, no matter how colorblind we would like to be because the emotional resonances of these dichotomies are passed on to us by parents, schools and the media. As sociologists Picca and Feagin observe, “when given a test of unconscious stereotyping, nearly 90 percent of whites quickly and implicitly associate black faces with negative words and traits (for example, evil character or failure). They have more difficulty linking black faces to pleasant words and positive traits than they do white faces.”16

White people who have challenged racism and the false dichotomies upon which it is based have been labeled to show that they don’t really belong to the white group. Labels such as “nigger lover,” “race traitor,” “un-American,” “feminist,” “liberal,” “Communist,” “unchristian,” “Jew,” “fag,” “lesbian,” “crazy,” “illegal alien,” “terrorist” and “thought police” have all been used to isolate and discredit people, to imply that they are somehow outside the territory of whiteness and therefore justifiably attacked. We can see from the moral virtues attached to whiteness that only those who are white are able to speak with authority. A powerful way to discredit any critique of whiteness or racism is to discredit the speaker by showing that they are not really white. This is a neat, circular convention that stifles any serious discussion of what whiteness means and what effect it has on people.

This leaves most of us who are white on pretty shaky ground. If we bring attention to whiteness and racism, we risk being labeled not really white or a “traitor to our race.” These accusations discredit our testimony and potentially lose us some of the benefits of being white such as better jobs and police protection from violence. Behind the names lies the threat of physical and sexual violence such as ostracism, firing, silencing, condemnation to hell, institutionalization, incarceration, deportation, rape, lynching and other forms of mob violence that have been used to protect white power and privilege.

We could usefully spend some time exploring the history and meaning of any particular pair of words on the list above. I encourage you to do so. Each one reveals some vital aspect of whiteness and racism. Here I want to point out three concepts that many of these words cluster around: Christian, American and male.

One cluster of concepts and practices of whiteness grows out of dominant Western Christianity. Whiteness has often been equated with being a Christian in opposition to being a pagan, infidel, witch, heathen, Jew, Muslim, Native American, Buddhist or atheist. Racial violence has been justified by a stated need to protect Christian families and homes. Pogroms, crusades, holy wars and colonial conquests have been justified by the need to save the souls of uncivilized and godless peoples (often at the cost of their lives).

Jewish people have lived within Christian-dominated societies (when permitted to) for nearly 1,700 years since Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. There is substantial history of Christian teaching and belief that Jewish people are dangerous and evil. These beliefs have been sustained even during periods of hundreds of years when Jews were not living near Christians.17 Jews, along with Muslims, have become symbols to many Christians of the infidel. This anti-Jewish oppression, originally based on religious and cultural differences, has become racialized as Christian values were combined with racial exploitation and an ideology of white superiority. It has exposed Jews to the same harsh reality of violence that pagans, Roma,18 witches and Muslims have experienced.

In addition, anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim hatred has been passed on to Christians of color. Religious leaders of both Eastern Orthodox and Catholic branches of Christianity, as well as most Protestant denominations, have accused the Jews of killing Jesus, using the blood of Christian children for Passover ritual, refusing to recognize the divinity of Jesus and consorting with the devil. Muslims were accused of colonizing the Holy Land, attacking Europe and being mortal foes of Christendom. As Christianity was spread by Western colonialism and missionary practice, these teachings were incorporated into the beliefs of many Christians of color.

At the same time, there are core Christian values of love, caring, justice and fellowship that have inspired some Christians to work against racism. For example, many white abolitionists were Christians inspired by religious teachings and values.

Yet another cluster of meanings centers on the concept of American.19 In the United States the idea of who is an American is often conflated with who is white. In fact, all-American is often used as a thinly disguised code word for white. A third-generation Swedish or German American child is considered an all-American kid in a way that a third-generation Japanese or Chinese American child is not.

In the same way, the patriotism of anyone with darker skin color is routinely questioned. During World War II, US citizens of Japanese heritage were interned in concentration camps and US citizens of Italian or German heritage were not.20 Even when they fought in the armed services in wartime, the loyalty of Asian American, Latino/a, Native American, Arab American and African American soldiers was challenged.

As the definition of who was white was broadened over time to include virtually all people of European descent, the boundaries keeping people of color out were firmly maintained. Immigration policies and quotas consistently favored Europeans and much of the time completely excluded people who were not considered white. Today, even when they have legally arrived here, non-Native American people of color are routinely asked where they came from and told to go back home. For example, even though many Spanish-speaking citizens have roots in the Southeast, Southwest and California going back more than three centuries, native-born Latino/as in these areas are often stopped by police and immigration officials and asked to show proof of citizenship. The passage of an Arizona law in April, 2010 that mandates police to stop anyone who looks like they could be in the country illegally — in other words racial profiling anyone who looks Latino/a — is just the most recent manifestation of racist targeting of the entire Latino/a community.21 The reluctance of many white people to fully accept people of color as patriotic Americans has meant that many feel forever foreign and wonder what it would take for them to be accepted as “all-American.”

Finally, whiteness strongly leans toward male virtues and male values. While terms of whiteness apply to men and women, there are also significant differences in which qualities are associated with each.

White women are held to higher standards of chasteness, cleanliness and restraint than white men. The basis of their rationality, righteousness and authority is supposed to lie with the white men they are related to. For example, white women are presumed to carry white authority over women and men of color. White women hold onto whiteness by the authority and protection of white men or by their willingness to adapt to male roles and exert authority in traditionally male spheres to protect their white privilege as employers, supervisors or teachers. They can also be cast out of the circle of white male protection by being rebellious or by violating racial or gender norms. White women have both colluded with and resisted their role and the violence it has justified.22

In most discussions of masculinity, we underestimate the role that racism plays. Training in white male violence against people of color starts early. White male bonding at work, at school or in the extended family includes significant levels of racism toward men of color ranging from sitting around joking about men of color (or lesbians or gays of all colors), to bonding as a team against an opposing team of color, to participating in an attack upon a specific person of color, to joining an explicit white supremacist group. Not participating in such “rites of passage” makes white men vulnerable to physical and sexual aggression from their white peers.

White men also bond with others and “prove” their heterosexuality by verbally and sexually assaulting women of color, Muslim and Jewish women. The ability to have sex with, but not to be undermined or entrapped by, exotic and dangerous women is a sign of sexual prowess and reaffirms that a man is in control, is one of the (white Christian) boys and that he knows the sexual and racial order.

When a young man is pushed by white male peers to assault or harass women or men of color, a lot is riding on the line — and he knows it. It is hard for most young men to avoid responding to such pressure because the threat of violence from other white men is real and immediate. We can help young men refuse to participate in white male violence by giving them tools for resisting white male socialization and that would make the entire community safer.23

Racism is a many-faceted phenomenon, slowly and constantly shifting its structures, dynamics and justifications. But at its core, it is a system that maintains a racial hierarchy and protects white power and wealth. It is a powerful construct with wide-ranging effects on our lives and on the lives of people of color. It is our challenge to let go of the construct and work to end such a destructive system.

 Words and Pictures 

Since whiteness has been a defining part of our culture for hundreds of years, we have embedded the ideas that white people are good and people of color are bad and dangerous into our everyday language. Most phrases containing black have negative meanings, while those containing white have positive meanings. Looking more deeply at our words and their current meanings, we can find hundreds that imply people of color and people of different cultures and ethnicities are dangerous, threatening, manipulative, dishonest or immoral. In fact, anything foreign or alien has connotations of being not white, not pure, not American and not Christian. We reinforce racism every time we use such language.

My goal in the following exercise is not to enforce some kind of political correctness. We are trying to understand how racism becomes embedded in our culture, our language, the way we see the world. And we are trying to develop ways of talking with each other that are respectful and counter historical patterns of exploitation and domination.

We also need to challenge racially demeaning usage in visual images. Advertisements, movies and TV images develop images of darkness to convey danger and to provoke white fear. Disney movies provide many examples of color-coding in popular culture. Throughout The Lion King, lightness is associated with good, darkness with evil. Everything from the coloring of the manes of the lions, the color of different animals to the sunshine in the lions’ kingdom versus the murky land of the hyenas reflects the racial and moral hierarchy of the film. This is reinforced by the language of the characters: the lions talk in middle-class “white” English and the hyenas in a more colloquial street dialect. Aladdin is also racially coded: Jafar, Kazim and the bazaar merchants each have exaggerated stereotypical “Arab” features and speak in heavy accents while Aladdin, Jasmine and the Sultan have “European” features and no trace of an accent.1 These racial, color-coded values can be found consistently in Disney movies going back to Sleeping Beauty and Dumbo (remember the crows).

Pictures, movies and video games also convey images of the ideal white body against which everyone in our society is judged. The white male body, whether upper-class or working-class, is handsome — fit, tall, with hair, blue eyes, fair skin and strong features. It speaks with authority, dominates others and is muscular/athletic and competitive. It stands or sits in postures of strength that command respect and attention. It is a body that is under control and controls others. It is also a body that can be roused to anger and violence to protect the innocent (usually white women) and pursue the guilty. The ideal white female body is portrayed as the standard of beauty. Blond, blue-eyed, thin, sexually inviting and even fairer than her male counterpart, this female body is portrayed in postures and roles that convey submission, availability and seductiveness.

Whiteness represents pure, Christian goodness. White people are almost always central characters, hero or heroine, consistently juxtaposed to images of darker-skinned men and women representing, dirt, animality, danger and moral corruption.2 The marketing of the normalness, naturalness and essential goodness of idealized whiteness prompts millions of women and men, both white and people of color, to spend endless amounts of time and money bleaching, dyeing or straightening their hair, lightening their skin color, losing weight, using cosmetics or having cosmetic surgery.

If we pay attention to the images around us, we will notice the pervasive influence that racism has on our everyday lives. Racial difference and racial hierarchy, like gender hierarchy, are built into our language, our visual imagery and our sense of who we are.

White Benefits, Middle-class Privilege 

It is not necessarily a privilege to be white, but it certainly has its benefits. That’s why so many of our families gave up their unique histories, primary languages, accents, distinctive dress, family names and cultural expressions. It seemed like a small price to pay for acceptance in the circle of whiteness. Even with these sacrifices, it wasn’t easy to pass as white if we were Italian, Greek, Irish, Jewish, Spanish, Hungarian or Polish. Sometimes it took generations before our families were fully accepted, and then it was usually because white society had an even greater fear of darker-skinned people.

Privileges are the economic extras that those of us who are middle-class and wealthy gain at the expense of poor and working-class people of all races. Benefits, on the other hand, are the advantages that all white people gain at the expense of people of color regardless of economic position.1 Talk about racial benefits can ring false to many of us who don’t have the economic privileges that we see others in this society enjoying. But though we don’t have substantial economic privileges, we do enjoy many of the benefits of being white.

We can generally count on police protection rather than harassment. Depending on our financial situation, we can choose where we want to live and choose safer neighborhoods with better schools. We are given more attention respect and status in conversations than people of color. Nothing that we do is qualified, limited, discredited or acclaimed simply because of our racial background. We don’t have to represent our race, and nothing we do is judged as a credit to our race or as confirmation of its shortcomings or inferiority.

These benefits start early. Others will have higher expectations for us as children, both at home and at school. We will have more money spent on our education, we will be called on more in school and given more opportunity and resources to learn. We will see people like us in textbooks. If we get into trouble, adults will expect us to be able to change and improve and therefore will discipline or penalize us less harshly than children of color.

These benefits accrue and work to the direct economic advantage of every white person in the United States. First of all, we will earn more in our lifetime than a person of color of similar qualifications. We will be paid $1.00 for every $.60 that a person of color makes.2 We will advance faster and more reliably and, on average, accumulate eight times as much wealth. A white family will, on average accumulate $170,000 in assets, a black family $17,000, and a Latino/a family $21,000.3 The gap for single women-headed households is even more stark — in 2007 a white female-headed household had on average $41,000 in assets, a black female-headed household $100, and a Latina-headed household $120.4

There are historically derived economic benefits too. All the land in the US was taken from Native Americans. Much of the infrastructure of this country was built by slave labor, incredibly low-paid labor or by prison labor performed by men and women of color. Much of the housecleaning, childcare, cooking and maintenance of our society has been done by low-wage-earning women of color.
Today men and women and children of color still do the hardest, lowest-paid, most dangerous work throughout the US. And white people enjoy plentiful and inexpensive food, clothing and consumer goods because of that exploitation.

We have been taught history through a white-tinted lens that has minimized our exploitation of people of color and extolled the hardworking, courageous qualities of white people. For example, many of our foreparents gained a foothold in the US by finding work in such trades as railroads, streetcars, construction, shipbuilding, wagon and coach driving, house painting, tailoring, longshore work, bricklaying, table waiting, working in the mills or dressmaking.

These were all occupations that blacks, who had begun entering many such skilled and unskilled jobs, were either excluded from or pushed out of in the 19th century. Exclusion and discrimination, coupled with immigrant mob violence against blacks in many northern cities (such as the anti-black draft riots of 1863), meant that recent immigrants had economic opportunities that blacks did not. These gains were consolidated by explicitly racist trade union practices and policies that kept blacks in the most unskilled labor and lowest-paid work.5

It is not that white Americans have not worked hard and built much. We have. But we did not start out from scratch. We went to segregated schools and universities built with public money. We received school loans, Veterans Administration (VA) loans, housing and auto loans unavailable to people of color. We received federal jobs, apprenticeships and training when only whites were allowed.

Much of the rhetoric against more active policies for racial justice stem from the misconception that all people are given equal opportunities and start from a level playing field. We often don’t even see the benefits we have received from racism. We claim that they are not there.

When I began to take careful stock of my family’s history, I began to see the numerous ways that my father and I, and indirectly the women in my family, have benefited from policies that either favored white men, or explicitly excluded people of color and white women from consideration altogether. Of course, the fact that my foreparents were considered white enough to immigrate to the United States during a period that most people of color could not was a monumental white benefit and provided the foundation for all the future ones.
My father had an overseas desk job in the military during World War II. When he returned he was greeted by many government programs specifically designed to reintegrate him into society and help him overcome the disadvantage of having given his time to defend the country.

The benefits from these programs were primarily available to white men. As one study explained, “Available data illustrate clearly that throughout the post-WWII era the benefits provided by each and every component of the MWS [militarized welfare state] disproportionately accrued to whites. Jim Crow and related overt exclusionary policies ensured that African Americans’ proportion of WWII veterans [benefits] was significantly less than their portion of the total population. In the Korean War veterans population, they were nearly as underrepresented.”1

During most of World War II, the armed services had been strictly segregated. After the war, many people of color were denied veterans’ benefits because they had served in jobs that were not considered eligible for such benefits. Many more were deliberately not informed about the benefits, were discouraged from applying when they inquired about them or simply had their applications for benefits denied. The report cited above concluded, “Thus, not only were far fewer blacks than whites able to participate in these programs, but those blacks who could participate received fewer benefits than their white counterparts.”2

My father was able to continue his education on the GI Bill (attending the nearly all-white and largely male University of Southern California). He was not unique; 2.2 million men received higher education benefits from the GI Bill. In fact, by 1947, half of all college students were veterans.3

My father applied for a training program to become a stockbroker — just one of many lucrative professions reserved for white men. When my father completed his training and joined the firm, he was on the road to economic success with all the resources of a national financial corporation behind him. Besides the immediate income from his wages and commissions as a stockbroker, there were other financial benefits he had privileged access to. The company had a generous pension plan. That had a significant effect later on in our family’s life, but at the time it meant that my parents could save money for a car and for their children’s college education because they knew their retirement was secure.

My father was also able to contribute to Social Security, which had been set up primarily to benefit white male workers during the Depression. My father (and mother and, indirectly, their children) benefited from the program when he retired. Although many people with jobs were eligible to contribute to Social Security, millions more were not. US President Franklin Roosevelt knew he could not pass the Social Security bill without the votes of southern agricultural and western mining interests that controlled key Congressional committees.
These interests were unwilling to support the bill if people of color, particularly agricultural workers, were included.4 Their compromise was to create a system in which the benefits were specifically set up to exclude large numbers of people of color (and, incidentally, white women) by excluding job categories such as agricultural and domestic work. Many hundreds of thousands more people of color were in job occupations that qualified for Social Security, but earned too little to be able to participate.5

My father had secured a good job and was eligible for a housing loan because of affirmative action. Of course, he still had to find a house that could be both a shelter for his family and an investment. Like most white people of the period, he wanted to live in a white suburban neighborhood with good schools, no crime and rising property values. Many people, however, were excluded from buying houses in precisely those areas because they were not white males.

For example, the FHA specifically channeled loans away from the central city and to the suburbs, and its official handbook even provided a model restrictive covenant (an agreement not to sell to people of color or, sometimes, Jews) to prospective white homebuyers and realtors.6 The FHA and the VA financed more than $120 billion worth of new housing between 1934 and 1962, but less than 2% of this real estate was available to non-white families.7

In addition, the federal home-mortgage interest tax deduction meant that the government subsidized my father’s purchase of a house at the direct expense of people who did not have affirmative action programs or other means to help them buy a house and therefore were renters. This provided my father additional tens of thousands of dollars of support from the government over his adult lifetime. Researchers estimate that these affirmative action housing programs for white men have cost the current generation of African Americans alone approximately $82 billion.8

The results of all of this affirmative action provided my family with more than just financial benefits. For me, specifically, I was able to go to a public school with many advantages. These included heavy investments in science programs, sports programs, college preparatory classes and leadership programs. There were no students or teachers of color at my school, so these advantages were only for white people. And most of these programs were designed for the boys; girls were discouraged from participating or straightforwardly refused the opportunity.

Meanwhile the government was subsidizing suburban development, and my family enjoyed parks, sports facilities, new roads — an entire infrastructure that was mostly directed to the benefit of white men and their families, even though the entire population paid taxes to support it.

Of course my mother and my sister enjoyed substantial benefits as long as they stayed attached to my father. They did not receive these benefits on their own behalf or because they were felt to deserve them. They received them because they supported and were dependent on a white man. Even though my father was verbally and emotionally abusive towards my mother, she did not contemplate leaving him, partly because she did not have the independent financial means to do so nor did she have access to the kinds of affirmative action that he did.

Growing up as the son of a white male who had access to so much, I viewed these benefits as natural and inevitable. I came to believe that because I lived in a democracy where equal opportunity was the law of the land, white men must be successful because they were superior to all others. They must be smarter and work harder; my father must be a much superior person. No one ever qualified his success to me by describing all the advantages he had been given or labeled him an affirmative action baby.

My father made good, sound decisions in his life. He worked hard enough and was smart enough to take advantage of the social support, encouragement and direct financial benefits that were available to him. Many white women, and men and women of color, were just as smart and worked just as hard and ended up with far, far less than my father.

As a result of all of these white benefits, my father retired as a fairly wealthy and successful man at the age of 50. By that time, I was already enjoying my own round of affirmative action programs.

My parents could afford private college tuition, but just in case they could not, my father’s company offered scholarships for white males, the sons of employees. There was a more specific affirmative action program offered at many of these schools — legacy admissions. Children of alumni were given special preferences. I was told that if I wanted to go to my father’s alma mater, USC, I had an excellent chance of getting in regardless of my qualifications because my father had gone there.9

I attended Reed College in the mid 1960s, a school that had no faculty of color, only one white woman faculty member and barely a handful of students of color until my senior year. During my college years, I was strongly encouraged in my studies and urged to go on to graduate school, which I could see was even more clearly a white male preserve.

By the late 1960s the United States was fully engaged in the Vietnam War. The US government reinstated the draft and developed yet another affirmative action program for white males — especially white males from affluent families — the college draft deferment. Proportionately few students of color were attending college in those years, and large numbers of white males were. This deferment naturally resulted in fewer young men being eligible for the draft, so the armed forces lowered its standards in order to recruit more men of color who had previously been rejected. The results of these policies were that, in 1964, 18.8% of eligible whites were drafted, compared to 30.2% of eligible blacks. By 1967, when there was larger-scale recruitment, still only 31% of eligible whites were inducted into the military compared to 67% of eligible blacks. I was able to avoid the draft entirely because of affirmative action for white men and what Michael Eric Dyson has called the affirmative retroaction policies of the military, which targeted men of color for recruitment.10

If I had wanted to serve in the armed forces, I could have used my education to get a non-combat job, or I could have applied to West Point or Annapolis and been assured that, as a white man, I wouldn’t have to compete with women or with most men of color for a position as an officer.

When I graduated from college, I was presented with a wide variety of affirmative action options. In fact, corporate recruiters were constantly at my predominantly white college offering us job opportunities. Many of my working- class friends had to take any job they could get to support themselves or their parents or younger siblings. Since I had no one else to support, I could pursue the career or profession of my choice.

When I eventually became involved in a long-term relationship and my partner and I wanted to buy a house, we were given preferred treatment by banks when we applied for loans in the form of less paperwork, less extensive credit checks and the benefit of the doubt about our financial capacity to maintain a house. Our real estate agent let us know that we were preferred neighbors in desirable communities and steered us away from less desirable areas (neighborhoods with higher concentrations of people of color). In addition, because of my parents’ secure financial position, they could loan us money for a down payment and cosign our loan with us.11

Most of the government programs and institutional policies described above were not called affirmative action programs. Programs that benefit white men never are. They are seen as race and gender neutral, even though most or all of the benefits accrue to white men. These programs were not contested as special preferences nor were the beneficiaries stigmatized as not deserving or not qualified.

Your parents probably did not own slaves. Mine did not even arrive in the US until after slavery. Nor were my parents mean bosses, exploiting workers in factories or otherwise discriminating against people of color. Nevertheless, they and I benefited directly and specifically from public and private policies— various forms of white male affirmative action at the expense of people of color. And these benefits continue to accrue to me and my family.

The purpose of this checklist is not to discount what we, our families and foreparents have achieved. But we do need to question any assumptions we retain that everyone started out with equal opportunity.

You may be thinking at this point, “If I’m doing so well, how come I’m barely making it?” Some of the benefits listed above are money in the bank for each and every one of us. Some of us have bigger bank accounts — much bigger. According to 2007 figures, 1% of the population controls about 43% of the net financial wealth of the US, and the top 20% own 93%.13 In 2009, women generally made about 80 cents for every dollar that men made in an average week of full-time work. African American women made 69 cents and Latinas 60 cents.14 In studies looking at a 15-year period, women’s income averages just 35-40% of men’s.15

Benefits from racism are amplified or diminished by our relative privilege. People with disabilities, people with less formal education and people who are lesbian, gay or bisexual are generally discriminated against in major ways. All of us benefit in some ways from whiteness, but some of us have cornered the market on significant benefits to the exclusion of others.

Reprinted with permission by Uprooting Racism by Paul Kivel and published by New Society Publishers, 2011.