The Culture of Fear (38 page)

Americans have paid, Joffe suggests, what he dubs a “fear tax” in the form of hundreds of millions of potentially productive hours lost in security lines; freight delays at borders, ports, and airports; and lost revenues and opportunities from abroad. As an example of the latter, Joffe cited a survey of international travelers that examined factors behind the 17 percent decline in overseas visitors to the United States in the five years following 9/11. The largest factor: a perception that U.S. policies made international visitors feel unwelcome. Seventy percent of respondents said they worried about how they’d be treated by U.S. immigration officers.

The total cost of the Bush administration’s reaction to the 9/11 attacks will be the subject of reflection for decades to come. Surely the heaviest toll was paid by the tens of thousands of American, Iraqi, and Afghan soldiers and civilians who were killed or seriously wounded, and by their families, and the trillions of dollars the United States spent is hardly trivial. Harder to measure are the losses in civil liberties from the USA Patriot Act. Signed into law by President Bush in October 2001, the act gave broad surveillance powers to intelligence agencies. (To those who protested the Patriot Act, John Ashcroft warned back then, “Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity.... They give ammunition to America’s enemies.”)
⁶⁰

A fear campaign can eventually become sufficiently stale and suspect that adept politicians benefit from challenging it. By the time of the presidential election of 2008, frustration with the administration, its
terror scares, and its war in Iraq opened the door for a presidential candidate who had opposed the war from the start and held out promises of a brighter future. Republicans yammered on about how “the terrorists” hoped the Democrat would win, and Barack Hussein Obama’s full name (emphasis on Hussein) was pointedly used at rallies for presidential candidate John McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin, who claimed that Obama was “palling around with terrorists.”
⁶¹

During the campaign, Obama refused to take the bait. While he never opened himself to charges of being weak or reckless by downplaying the risks of terrorism—or for that matter, other overblown frights I’ve discussed—Obama deftly mounted a campaign of optimism whose byword was
hope.

His election was hopeful not just on issues, but in one important regard, in its outcome as well. The election of an African American offered real hope that large numbers of Americans had put aside the long-entrenched fears of black men that I discussed in chapter 5.

It would be a mistake to presume, however, as did a range of commentators after the 2008 presidential election, that prejudice played little or no role in that contest. Obama beat his Republican challenger decisively in the general election—by a 7-point margin. But among white voters, he lost to McCain, and by a still wider margin—12 points. Nationally, 43 percent of the white electorate voted for Obama, and in some states in the Deep South, only about one in ten whites voted for him (10 percent in Alabama and 11 percent in Mississippi).
⁶²

Nor should anyone imagine that fears of black men will not continue to be exploited by advocacy groups in search of contributions; ratings-hungry media outlets; and local, regional, and national politicians. Contrary to Larry King’s claim the day after Obama’s inauguration, that “there’s a lot of advantages to being black,” studies that came out around that time give lie to the Panglossian view. Among the more revealing was conducted by sociologists from the University of Oregon and University of California. In a clever analysis, they looked at how interviewers classified nearly 13,000 people they surveyed every year or two from 1979 to 2002. At the end of each survey, the interviewers, the great majority of whom were white women, were asked to classify
the race of the person they’d interviewed. The results show that racial stereotypes of African Americans as criminals and on the dole are so powerful, they actually influence what someone’s race is assumed to be. A person the interviewers initially perceived as white was almost twice as likely to be classified as black the next time they were surveyed if they had become unemployed, impoverished, or incarcerated.
⁶³

Or consider another study released in the late ’00s, in which sociologists from Northwestern and Princeton looked at how Americans estimate various risks. Whites give realistic assessments of risks related to work and health, the researchers found, but greatly overestimate the likelihood of being the victim of crime, especially if they live in areas with substantial numbers of African Americans. “White respondents overestimate their risk of crime victimization more than twice as much in heavily black zip codes relative to areas with few black residents,” Lincoln Quillian and Devah Pager reported. Noting that the misperceptions come not from actual crime levels in these areas, they suggest the main cause is exaggerated emphases in the media on crimes committed by African Americans, and the sociologists point out how these biases are costly and self-perpetuating.

“African-American neighborhoods suffer from perceptions of high crime, beyond any actual association between race and crime. Even in the case of affluent blacks moving into white neighborhoods, white observers are likely to perceive elevated risks of crime. Likewise, in the location decisions of white households and businesses, the attribution of high crime rates to mostly black neighborhoods is likely to deprive these areas of local jobs and more affluent residents.”
⁶⁴

Add to all that studies that find that black men are significantly more likely to be stopped, searched, and arrested by police than are whites, and it is little wonder that African Americans are 13 percent of the U.S. population but 55 percent of the population of federal prisons. At the time of Obama’s election, one in nine black men between the ages of twenty and thirty-four was behind bars. In the late ’00s, though the statistics attracted little media attention, blacks also had the highest rates of poverty in the United States—24.5 percent, about twice the rate for the nation as a whole. During the economic crisis of that period,
African American homeowners were two and a half times more likely to be in foreclosure than were whites.
⁶⁵

As well, there continue to be newsworthy, if underreported, health disparities of the sort I noted in chapter 5. Overall death rates are significantly higher for blacks than whites—1,027 per 100,000 for blacks and 786 for whites—and for some fatal diseases, things actually got worse since I wrote the earlier edition. In the mid-1900s, death rates from heart disease for blacks and whites were roughly equal. At the start of the twenty-first century, blacks had a 28 percent higher rate than whites. And even as prospects improved for AIDS patients, the gap in death rates between whites and blacks with AIDS was strikingly large. Blacks who died from HIV lost about eleven times as many years of potential life as whites.
⁶⁶

Each of these disparities resulted in no small measure from discrimination and unequal access—to decent health care, education, jobs, and unpolluted neighborhoods (whites are 79 percent less likely than African Americans to live in polluted neighborhoods)—and in the case of home ownership, outright targeting of blacks by lenders pushing subprime mortgages. Black applicants were significantly more likely than whites to receive high-cost mortgages, even where the incomes of the two groups were roughly the same.
⁶⁷

Still, none of those disturbing states of affairs cancels out the fact that an anti-fear candidate won the White House. Very early in that race, in August 2007, several months before even the Democratic primaries began, the would-be president’s wife, Michelle Obama, spoke to supporters in rural Iowa about why she agreed to let her husband run. “Barack and I talked long and hard about this decision. This wasn’t an easy decision for us,” she explained, “because we’ve got two beautiful little girls and we have a wonderful life and everything was going fine, and there would have been nothing that would have been more disruptive than a decision to run for president of the United States.

“And as more people talked to us about it, the question came up again and again, what people were most concerned about. They were afraid. It was fear. Fear again, raising its ugly head in one of the most important decisions that we would make. Fear of everything. Fear that
we might lose. Fear that he might get hurt. Fear that this might get ugly. Fear that it would hurt our family. Fear.

“You know the reason why I said ‘Yes’? Because I am tired of being afraid. I am tired of living in a country where every decision that we have made over the last ten years wasn’t for something, but it was because people told us we had to fear something. We had to fear people who looked different from us, fear people who believed in things that were different from us, fear one another right here in our own backyards. I am so tired of fear, and I don’t want my girls to live in a country, in a world, based on fear.”

May her words reverberate well into the future.

1
Rick Ginsberg and Leif Frederick Lyche, “The Culture of Fear and the Politics of Education,”
Educational Policy,
22, no. 1 (January 2008): 10-27; Kerri Augusto, “The (Play) Dating Game: Our Culture of Fear Means that We Can No Longer Count On Spontaneity to Bring Children Together,”
Newsweek,
8 September 2008, p. 19. Discussion of both the concept and the book has been vigorous in the blogosphere, with bloggers offering their own interpretations of discussions in the chapters that follow, and finding echoes of my argument in movies and literature. My favorite example is an entry on a film discussion website in 2009 that quoted from Frank Capra’s 1938 classic,
You Can’t Take It With You. A
character in the film “sounds like she’s been cribbing from Barry Glassner’s
TheCulture of Fear,
[though] she is actually speaking to her fiancé over four decades before Glassner’s book was written,” the blogger remarks. He quotes a scene in which a character relays her grandfather’s view that “most people these days are run by fear—fear of what they eat, fear of what they drink, fear of their jobs, their future, fear of their health.” The blame, the character suggests, lies with “people who commercialize on fear. You know they scare you to death so they can sell you something you don’t need.”
http://1morefilmblog.com/wordpress/you-cant-take-it-with-you-capra-1938/
.

2
Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Terrorized by ‘War on Terror,’”
Washington Post,
25 March 2007.

3
Brzezinski, “Terrorized.”

4
“Chubb Personal Insurance: Masterpiece Family Protection,”
http://www.chubb.com/personal/family_protection.jsp
; Robert J. Flores, “National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children,” U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, October 2002, pp. 2, 11,
http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffilesl/ojjdp/196467.pdf
.

5
Charles Piller and Lee Romney, “State Pays Millions for Contract Psychologists to Keep Up with Jessica’s Law,”
Los Angeles Times,
10 August 2008.

6
Piller and Romney, “State Pays Millions.”

7
Dennis C. Blair, “Annual Threat Assessment of the Intelligence Community for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence” (unclassified statement for the record), 12 February 2009,
http://intelligence.senate.gov/090212/blair.pdf
.

8
David Ropeik,
Risk: A Practical Guide for Deciding What’s Really Safe and What‘sReally Dangerous in the World Around You
(Boston: Mariner Books, 2002); Kids Risk Project:
http://www.kidsrisk.harvard.edu
; Alan Woolf, “What Should We Worry About?”
Newsweek,
22 September 2003.

9
Elizabeth Gudrais, “Unequal America: Causes and Consequences of the Wide-and Growing—Gap Between Rich and Poor,”
Harvard Magazine,
July-August 2008.

10
Daniel McGinn, “Marriage by the Numbers,”
Newsweek,
5 June 2006.

11
Mike Cooper, “‘Crack’ Babies’ Future Bleak,”
CDC AIDS Weekly,
21 May 1990, p. 8; Susan Okie, “The Epidemic That Wasn‘t,”
New York Times,
27 January 2009.

1
Crime data here and throughout are from reports of the Bureau of Justice Statistics unless otherwise noted. Fear of crime: Esther Madriz,
Nothing Bad Happens to Good Girls
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), ch. 1; Richard Morin, “As Crime Rate Falls, Fears Persist,”
Washington Post
National Edition, 16 June 1997, p. 35; David Whitman, “Believing the Good News,”
U.S. News & World Report,
5 January 1998, pp. 45—46.

2
Eva Bertram, Morris Blachman et al.,
Drug War Politics
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 10; Mike Males,
Scapegoat Generation
(Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1996), ch. 6; Karen Peterson, “Survey: Teen Drug Use Declines,”
USA Today,
19 June 1998, p. A6; Robert Blendon and John Young, “The Public and the War on Illicit
Drugs,”Journalof the American Medical Association
279 (18 March 1998): 827-32. In presenting these statistics and others I am aware of a seeming paradox: I criticize the abuse of statistics by fearmongering politicians, journalists, and others but hand down precise-sounding numbers myself. Yet to eschew all estimates because some are used inappropriately or do not withstand scrutiny would be as foolhardy as ignoring all medical advice because some doctors are quacks. Readers can be assured I have interrogated the statistics presented here as factual. As notes throughout the book make clear, I have tried to rely on research that appears in peer-reviewed scholarly journals. Where this was not possible or sufficient, I traced numbers back to their sources, investigated the research methodology utilized to produce them, or conducted searches of the popular and scientific literature for critical commentaries and conflicting findings.