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A Safe Space Within Stereotypes
There would be no welcome basket or friendly note in the mailbox. No plainly dressed, well-intentioned grandmother with fresh cookies. Still, someone needed to welcome the new neighbors in person, and certainly no later than a week after their arrival.
I did not hear them knock which was probably why they opted to break-in. I was awakened by the smashed glass 15 feet from where I was sleeping.
Welcome to Detroit, 1980.
Shortly thereafter (and unrelated), vengeful gang members beat my friend so severely that he nearly died simply because his dad was a police officer.
A few years later, my younger brother was chased by a neighbor with a gun.
Late one night my mother watched a semi-truck crash into a laundromat only to watch the driver exit the truck and flee into the night. To this day she compares his gait to Goofy’s (we can laugh now).
On the day before Halloween, aka “Devil’s Night,” in 1980’s Detroit, vandals would burn vacant houses while the smell of smoke crept in through the windows like a massive urban bonfire.
The city was literally on fire and poverty was the fuel.
From our kitchen window, we witnessed robberies, drunk driving accidents, fights between neighbors, gunfire, police chases, and the list goes on. A real-life crime drama was unfolding right outside our house. Maybe this was why my parents didn’t bother to get a color television until 1985.
My family’s income was at, or below, the poverty line until we moved from Detroit. I am also White.
If you talk with the majority of intellectual elites today, they will snidely discredit my experience and lecture you about power and White Privilege. For most of my childhood, I happened to be this unusual combination of both White skin and poverty, akin to spotting the Chupacabra (the kids think I was just tired that night).
Or is it that unusual?
The first mistake we make when we talk about poverty is separating it between races and percentages. Let’s talk about actual people. People trying to pay bills. Percentages don’t pay bills. Percentages belong on a spreadsheet to serve as PowerPoints for sociologists or talking points for politicians. Actual people pay bills and many aren’t very successful at it.
The U.S. Census Bureau’s 2013 statistics tell us that 45.3 million people live below the poverty line.
Tens of millions.
Actual people.
In the United States.
Who are these poor people?
A 2014 Huffington Post article’s discussion of these statistics would lead you to believe that the poor are mostly Black and Hispanic. The article framed poverty as a color issue and focused on the use of percentages rather than a measure of actual people in poverty. Percentages are being used to feed a politically-expedient narrative. Yes, minorities are disproportionately poor but that’s not the whole story.
18.8 million are White (non-Hispanic), which is 7 million more than Blacks and 5.3 million more than Hispanics (non-White).
Not only is this the largest group but the effects of poverty are worsening, too. White lifespans are getting shorter. Since 1999, Black and non-White Hispanic life spans have steadily improved while, at the same time, decreasing among whites.
If you ask me, the well of White Privilege has run dry.
Empirically, we could consider the loss of 5 million manufacturing jobs from 2000-2014 as a starting point. If Whites account for 62.4% of the population then 18.8 million poor Whites seems plausible. These job losses affected all ethnicities but in terms of actual people, Whites comprise the largest segment by a long shot. Millions.
Many struggling Whites tend to blame themselves for their situation. Their fear of the stigma attached to state and federal assistance programs often exacerbate their problems. Independence is a source of pride in White America. Loss of independence is a loss of dignity. Maybe that’s one of the reasons the suicide rate for Whites is now higher than Blacks, Hispanics, or Asians.
I know because I’ve been there. During a lengthy period of unemployment in early adulthood, I found myself avoiding these same perceived stigmas. I was more comfortable going to a church food bank than discuss my needs with a state agency. God forbid I have to go into a grocery store with food stamps and hold up the line while everyone judges what is in my cart. A church basement full of food never judged me and even invited me back.
If you are liberal and white, you are likely becoming uncomfortable with this conversation because of how you have been conditioned to view race as an American. You may have already discredited the data and even rolled your eyes once or twice while reading this. Maybe you even looked over your shoulder to see if anyone noticed you were reading this privileged garbage.
If you are being honest with yourself, that discomfort you feel likely comes from the socially-accepted belief that the White experience can never include incidents of discrimination, disenfranchisement, or dysfunction. Further, to have these feelings implies an ignorance of the minority experience and may even indicate a willful insensitivity. Not everyone fits neatly into a racial or ethnic category with a nicely-crafted checklist of preconceptions and generalizations.
To overcome the appearance of ignorance or insensitivity, many liberal Whites, especially within the Democratic Party (rhymes with Shwarren), choose to compensate by targeting those within their own race or ethnicity as a public confirmation of their own self-actualization. This behavior can reveal itself as stereotyping or even as a type of self-loathing for one’s own ethnic biology. In fact, this behavior is often celebrated by those hell-bent on proving their own intellectual superiority or political intuitiveness.
Woke, they say.
Stereotyping one’s own ethnic community is the most dangerous sort because it lends a pseudo-credibility to the claims, thereby, reinforcing stereotypes and perceptions. The result is a politically-protected safe space free from accusations of racism. It’s really quite ingenious in its simplicity. So ingenious that we barely even notice it. Well, Attorney General Sessions may have noticed it.
And liberal Whites are certainly not the only perpetuators of this socially-acceptable behavior.
The Black community suffers from similar challenges. Many are pressured by those within their own communities to avoid “selling out” and should instead choose to maintain a street-tough identity. Fellow Blacks may even mock or ridicule each other when those within their community seek higher education or a white collar job. Viewing success and independence as being an exclusively White experience may come from the overt messages of White Privilege we see in liberal America. The perception of abandoning the preconceptions of your own race forces many to make a choice between upward mobility and social acceptance. This is the epitome of a zero sum game.
And while part of America believes some are held back by racism, another, rather large group, believes many are held back by a lack of opportunity.
And we can’t solve inequality if there is no opportunity.
The foundation for opportunity is built on safe neighborhoods, equal access to a quality education, job creation, and incentives for entrepreneurship. These areas, alone, are not the only solution to inequality but they are far and away the most profound steps towards it. Opportunity provides a path to economic freedom and many overlooked Americans voted for that message in the most recent Presidential election. Without economic freedom, equality is artificially propped-up by laws and executive actions that control speech and behavior but don’t necessarily put food on the table.
If these conversations are more focused on creating opportunity, we can better determine where it does not exist. If we continue to ignore the fact that challenges exist beyond racial boundaries, people will be left behind and we will not have a truly diverse discussion. Right now, 18.8 million Americans feel that way but aren’t allowed to talk about it because of their race.
The Democratic Party’s obsession with identity politics has prevented a more honest conversation about equal opportunity for all Americans. A large portion of the country is struggling and our current climate does not allow us to talk freely about everyone’s needs. The alternative should be a conversation about opportunity creation, which is far more complicated and challenging than simply blaming racism for all our economic problems.
Poverty, unemployment, and under-employment affect all Americans and need a solution, not a racial scapegoat. People need opportunities, not political opportunists. Instead, many Democrats have created a safe space within stereotypes that conveniently leaves millions of Americans outside of the conversation.
Published in Politics
Excellent thought-provoking post. Thanks for starting this discussion.
Thank you for this very articulate piece on a subject people don’t like to acknowledge or talk about. Lets hope this new leaf our government is turning over will redirect into the opportunity solutions you suggest.
There are many shades of poverty.
The ones that impress me are the ones who get along with less because they are working at low-paying jobs that deprive them of benefits that would entirely replace the wages. They are striving to rise up to self-sufficiency, but are one car repair bill away from dropping back to square one.
I have observed both whites and blacks rise out of poverty. It takes a lot of drive and grit no matter your color.
We are in desperate need for low-skill positions that lead to higher-skill jobs. Hopefully, improvements to the business climate will allow the growth of the needed jobs.
Wonderful post. Thank you.
Very powerful essay. Thanks.
Lot of wisdom about where success comes from in this comment.
Funny how the minimum wage, originally meant to price blacks out of work, has resulted in a negative effect on everybody.
I was more comfortable going to a church food bank than discuss my needs with a state agency. God forbid I have to go into a grocery store with food stamps and hold up the line while everyone judges what is in my cart. A church basement full of food never judged me and even invited me back.
Great essay all around!
My wife tells me about all the dirty looks she got as a 22 year old on food stamps. Had any of those people known her story they’d have hung their heads in shame for their knee jerk condemnations.
So much wisdom here.
My favorite Bill Cosby Show episode occurred near the end of the series. He was taking a stint with a detention class at his daughter’s high school, as I recall. At any rate, he spoke to the class about jobs–that is, get one.
One of the kids said, “Why bother? I won’t make any money.”
Whereupon Cosby replied, paraphrasing, “You start out selling newspapers on the corner. You work hard. You do a good job. Someone notices, and you get a promotion to inspire and manage a small group of newspaper sellers. You work hard. You do a good job. You get promoted to inspire and manage a group of managers of newspaper sellers. That’s how it works. You work your way up. One step at a time.”
Our fast-food chains (and Home Depot and Lowe’s) have been great sources of middle management creation in the last two decades. That’s because they oversee bastions of low-skilled workers.
We can get back there.
But first we have to stop penalizing companies for hiring and firing people. Make it easy for them to do that, and we will see people climbing up the income and benefits ladders once again.
Yes. They are also lectured about their “privilege” by people who earn many multiples of what they earn,
America is a very diverse country, and we ignore geographical diversity. White poverty tends to exist in rural areas (or, as in Detriot, in cities outside of the coasts). The solutions to rural poverty are vastly different than the solutions to urban poverty. Crime levels are different; the crime itself is different. School choice is a great thing for urban areas, when there is a critical mass that can sustain multiple school systems; that might be a non-starter out in the countryside when there are barely enough kids to support one high school. Job training is different when you are poor but living next door to the corporate headquarters of Fortune 500 companies, than when you are poor and living near, well, not much.
Great essay.
We need to change benefits so there is no disincentive to work – your benefits go down less than your income rises. Also, cut off low skill immigration & encourage industry in low income areas.
Great post. Thank you.
Thank you. Very thought provoking.