Dear White America (7 page)

But now, white normativity is being challenged, and not only on one front, but on four: political, economic, cultural, and demographic. And each of these, in turn and especially together, poses a direct challenge to whiteness on yet a fifth front, the narrative front, by which I mean that battlefield of ideas within which the national character and story itself are defined and told to others.

First among the recent challenges to white normativity is the election of a black man to the very pinnacle of power: president and commander in chief of the United States of America. Although this may not seem a big deal to some—especially those who are younger and lack the historical context to understand the magnitude of such a thing—rest assured, there are millions for whom it is a very big deal indeed. Having grown up in a society where the leaders
all
looked like us, and had names like ours, and biographies similar to ours, to now have the nation led by someone whose father was
African
—not even African American, but
African
—and whose name is
Barack Hussein Obama
, and who lived
outside
the United States for a few of his earlier years, is to have our notions of political Americanness fundamentally challenged.

This is why during the run-up to the election, one could see T-shirts displaying the question: “If Obama wins, will they still call it the White House?” It's why so many white folks could be seen on YouTube expressing openly their fears about a black president,
85
wondering whether he would enslave white people or in some way try to exact payback for centuries of racial inequity, or questioning his citizenship or his religion in ways never attempted for white candidates. Birtherism—the school of thought that holds Barack Obama to be something other than American—is inherently about the attempt to “other” those whose backgrounds are different from the so-called national norm. It is a way of saying he is
not
one of us, no matter the documentation provided, no matter the mountains of evidence that attest to his citizenship.

Then of course there is the economic insecurity that has caught us so off-guard. Double-digit unemployment, housing foreclosures, unaffordable health care, failing schools: none of this is new for those who are black or brown, but for us it is horrifyingly unique. It has been roughly three-quarters-of-a-century—three full generations dating back to the Great Depression—since we have collectively faced that kind of financial trauma and anxiety. Although some among us have known hardship and deprivation, to be sure (and I count myself in that number), as a group, as a collective body, white America has not seen this level of uncertainty in a very long time, well past the memories of most of us still alive. So that too proves unsettling and keeps us up at night. Even when we've faced periods of hardship before, we always had the faith that things would get better, and relatively soon, that this too would pass, and that our children would certainly do better than we had.

People of color had never been able to take any of this for granted, but we could, and that confidence buoyed us, even in our roughest days. But now, that faith has been shaken. Our assumptions about the opportunity structure have been thrown off balance, and having been so ill-prepared for such a thing, we find ourselves suffering not only the material insecurity that comes from a faltering economy, but also the psychological trauma borne of realizing that everything so many of us assumed about our country and the system under which we live may well have been wrong.

The economic insecurity we are now facing, for the first time in a long time, poses a challenge to one of the most cherished elements of the American narrative; namely, that the nation is a land of opportunity and meritocracy, where hard work and initiative allow even the lowliest individual to rise in the ranks, to go from rags to riches, and to make a way for themselves and their families. The notion that rugged individualism is all that is needed to “make it” has little credence in a society where millions—including millions who had long had the ultimate faith in its veracity—find themselves struggling no matter their effort.

What most of us never realized, but persons of color have always known, is that the U.S. economy is far more similar to a game of “Chutes and Ladders” than “Monopoly.” It has long been a place where one's personal strategy for success and wealth building mattered far less than circumstance, or even the lucky or unlucky roll of the proverbial dice. One could begin to move up, climbing the ladder of intergenerational advance, only to land on a downward slide that could and often did send you or your children back to the metaphorical beginning. For us, the game was always upward and onward—ladders without chutes—but for everyone else, the chutes predominated and were to be found around every turn. Coming to terms with the reality—a reality about which persons of color have long been aware—can't be easy.

But in addition to the political and economic challenges to white normativity, there is more. A third concern is the rather dramatic cultural transformation of modern American society. Just a few decades ago most all the popular culture icons—in film, television, music and the like—were white like us. Even MTV, during its first several years on the air, refused to play any videos by black artists, with Michael Jackson being the first (and for a while the only) exception to a generally white rule. The cultural images beamed not only around the nation but also around the world were of a white America. But now, it is fair to say that American culture is thoroughly multicultural, with each thread of that cultural garment being intrinsically interlaced with the others. From the foods we eat to the music we hear to the clothing styles, there is no way to separate the various cultural and ethnic threads any longer. Hip-hop has become the dominant popular cultural form in the United States, and comprises a significant part of the soundtrack of most young people's lives, including most young whites. We've got rap artists making records with country artists, and that Hootie guy is now one of the fastest rising stars in Nashville. Even small towns now have Indian and Vietnamese restaurants, authentic Mexican food and bodegas. And let's not forget the transformation of the religious landscape, in which we can see the addition of mosques and Hindu temples in communities that once held only churches and the occasional synagogue.

Finally, and perhaps most important, there is that rapidly changing demographic landscape that we keep hearing about in the media, or about which we ourselves whisper in hushed and occasionally nervous tones. According to projections, by no later than 2050, we will cease to be the majority in the Unites States. By then, we will have dipped to just under half of all Americans, while people of color will comprise the collective majority. In several states, this population shift has already happened, with whites comprising half or less of the population.

For a people who have been able to take our fundamental Americanness for granted, to suddenly be faced with the realization that we will have to share that designation with people who look different and pray differently and whose primary language may be different from our own, can be quite jarring for some of us. The club is no longer exclusive. The membership rolls are being opened up. In the process, the sense of “specialness” that American identity once held for us is being bid downward by the inclusion of some within its ranks who never would have qualified in decades and eras past. Within perhaps a decade or two, it may no longer be automatic that we envision a white person from the so-called “heartland” when the terms “all-American boy” or “all-American girl” are used; rather, we might envision a first-generation Latina immigrant in the Southwest, a Hmong farmer in Wisconsin, or an Arab Muslim in Dearborn, Michigan. How does that feel? Be honest.

Any one of these transformations on its own would be difficult for many of us to swallow, but together they create something of a perfect storm for white anxiety. And each of them poses a direct challenge to the national narrative, to the understanding of who we are and who we will be in years to come. These various blows to white normativity have made race salient for us for the first time. The old saying that “being white means never having to think about it,” while perhaps true for most of our history, is becoming less and less true with each passing year. We
are
beginning to think about it. As the nation and our own communities become less white, as the popular culture becomes more multicultural, as the economy melts down, and as political leadership is exercised by a man of color with a name that seems strange and exotic to many of us, whiteness suddenly becomes highly visible. It becomes marked space: now we are
different
from the president; we are
different
from the celebrities on the posters in our kids' rooms; we are
different
from a lot of the people we see at the mall, or in the schools, or in our neighborhoods, and we are, surprisingly,
not that different
from millions of people of color when it comes to economic insecurity and hardship.

For centuries we have defined our status by way of our distance from the racial other. The closer we were to the black and brown, the less status we enjoyed. So a good neighborhood meant a white neighborhood, a good school meant a white school—those were the underlying assumptions of white flight, which began as soon as communities and schools came to have even small numbers of people of color in them. The custom of defining our status by the distance we were able to put between ourselves and racial others is the reason labor unions kept blacks and other people of color out of their ranks for so long. To integrate the workforce would be to diminish what W.E.B. DuBois called the “psychological wage of whiteness,” by which he meant the kind of benefit one receives from being able to say that while you may not have much, at least you aren't black.

And so, as the social, cultural, political and perceived economic distance between us and
them
shrinks, it is predictable that such developments might come as a shock to our sense of all that is right and good; that such developments might make us anxious about the future and what it holds for us. A recent survey actually found, for instance, that despite the much worse conditions facing black America relative to white America—black folks are still far more likely to be out of work, poor, or in bad health, among other markers of social inequality—black people are far more optimistic about the future than we are. Whites, despite our ongoing advantages relative to the black and brown, are the most pessimistic of all racial groups in the nation.
86
How do we make sense of such a thing? Clearly it cannot be because of objective evidence suggesting that we are the ones in the worst shape, because we are not, by any rational calculus. But we are the group that is having the hardest time adjusting to change, and that, one supposes, is what makes the difference.

In a strange way, it has been the very advantage and privilege that we have enjoyed relative to persons of color that has left us ill-equipped to deal with the setbacks of the current moment. With our expectations ever high, our sense that we were in control of our own destinies always secure, we could not conceive of the kind of downturn that so many of our number are now facing. Perhaps that's why
Newsweek
could run a cover story in spring 2011 concerning “beached white males,” and how even white-collar white men were having trouble (so now, it was
really
a crisis!), and how so many of these former members of the corporate elite were completely unable to cope with the financial uncertainty to which they were, for the first time, being exposed.
87

Likewise, as the distance between us and people of color narrows, some appear to believe that whatever gains the black and brown have made in recent years—in terms of jobs or higher education access—have come directly at our expense. If
they
are making progress, it must be because
we
are being oppressed, discriminated against, or held back in some way. One recent Harvard study of our opinions about racism in America discovered that most of us actually think (despite the voluminous data to the contrary) that discrimination against
us
is more common than discrimination against people of color.
88

Having traveled across the country over the past sixteen years, and having spoken on hundreds of college and university campuses, I have often heard many fellow white Americans lament the existence of “minority scholarships” for which only students of color qualify. For many of us, such support amounts to a horrific and racist injustice against our people. Where are the white scholarships, some ask? What about
us
? And yet, to say these kinds of things requires a profound unwillingness to look at the bigger picture. After all, how can one view the rather minimal monies afforded by so-called minority scholarships as the racial injustice in the educational system, when we continue to have such embedded, institutionalized advantages from kindergarten on, as referenced previously?

More to the point, please keep in mind that according to a national study by the General Accounting Office, less than 4 percent of scholarship money in the United States is represented by awards that consider race as a factor at all, and only 0.25 percent (one-quarter of one percent) of all undergrad scholarship dollars come from awards that are restricted to persons of color alone.
89
In other words, we are fully capable of competing for and receiving the other 99.75 percent of scholarship funds out there for college. Not to mention the fact that very few students of color actually receive these kinds of scholarships, with only 3.5 percent of all black and brown collegians receiving any award even
partly
based on race.
90
So while we may
think
the people of color on our campus or our kids' campus are all the wards of some race-based preference scheme, the evidence suggests that at least 96.5 percent of them received no race-based scholarship funds at all.