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.
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.
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