Affirmative Action for White People, Part One of six
Part One
No other democratic nation revels so blatantly in such self-deceptive innocence, such self-paralyzing reluctance to confront the night-side of its own history. – Cornell West
Question: What’s the difference between ignorance and apathy?
Answer: I don’t know, and I don’t care!
From the very beginning, the essential core of the white American psyche was formed in opposition to the imagined “Others” of the world: those who threatened the innocent community from the outside (Native Americans) and those whose presence on the inside (African slaves) who, by their very existence, constantly called that sense of innocence into question.
Because of its innate contradictions, white identity was and always has been highly unstable, and it required the construction of an entire mythology to hold it together. Very early on, the notion of privilege became one of the prime ways in which this was accomplished.
One of the most fundamental aspects of privilege – the privilege to ignore, the privilege to remain innocent in the mind – remains durable among far too many, perhaps especially among liberals. Although it is constant and obvious to almost all people of color, privilege is utterly invisible to most whites. It provides them with a place in the social hierarchy, a belief in the possibilities of upward mobility and, most importantly, a sense of identity – they can know who they are because they are not “the Other.”
America established that privilege – in law – from the very beginning, indeed, from before the beginning. In other words, I’m talking about America’s long history of Affirmative Action for white people. In another article on privilege, I write:
Privilege allows whites to patronize minorities, to disagree with perspectives that challenge their worldviews, when in fact they don’t understand those perspectives. Since half of all whites believe that blacks enjoy economic parity with them, 61% say that blacks and whites have equal access to health care, and 85% say that blacks have equal chances to get any housing they can afford – despite the contrary views held by the great majority of black people, they are privileged to say to blacks, in effect, “I know your reality better than you do.”
If whites need an example of this particular kind of privilege, consider a survey from 2005, when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. Three months afterwards, 20% of whites denied that the federal government’s failure to respond had anything to do with race, while 90% of blacks, 200,000 of whom had lost their homes, did. Fifteen years later, as Mike Ludwig writes, “Right-Wing austerity set New Orleans up to be a coronavirus disaster zone.”
The privilege to remain innocent shows up strikingly in the idea of affirmative action. Along with abortion, immigration, gay rights and most recently, transgender rights, this has been among the most controversial and divisive issues of the past fifty years.
Opportunistic politicians have used it to create a wedge between working class whites and blacks. Well versed in the imagery of American myth, they have repeatedly posed the question (in soft terms, careful to not appear overtly racist) of whether it is right for hardworking people (read: white people) to be taxed to support people who are too lazy and irresponsible to better themselves. As I write in Chapter Seven of my book Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence,
Reactionaries invoke (the myth of) equality by claiming that legal equality is sufficient and calling affirmative action “reverse discrimination” and ethnic liberals “reverse racists.” Some even argue that since prejudice no longer exists, minorities should require no assistance (which only encourages the sin of laziness). This false argument has potency because it contains some truth; since individuals have occasionally “pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps,” then conservatives claim that everyone should. If they can’t, says the myth, Puritan at its core, then failure is their own fault.
In doing so, these politicians (and many religious leaders) have duped three generations of misinformed whites into perceiving themselves as victims of people whom they once regarded as natural allies. And (when we discuss the New Deal and the G.I. Bill) we should note that the demographic most opposed to taxes for welfare – those over the age of 65 – are themselves the beneficiaries of the greatest welfare programs in world history. And the vast majority of them are white.
But this is hardly the first time this has happened. In Chapter Ten I write:
The narrative veils the issues of corporate welfare, financial corruption and deindustrialization and the fact that most white males vote Republican, partially because they fear affirmative action. Few admit the racial dimensions of the issue and the degree to which even poor whites have privilege. Actually, the generosity of state welfare reform varies according to demography: those with overwhelmingly white populations have stronger safety nets and impose softer sanctions.
So, whites need to learn how the federal government has instituted affirmative action for them many times, and that this reality is a fundamental aspect of the Myth of American Innocence. Indeed, it began long before the creation of the federal government itself. For a much more detailed version of this timeline, see my essay series “Who Is An American?”
We have to begin with the foundational factor, that a series of American Presidents and Supreme Court Justices, most of whom were themselves slaveholders, as well as over 1,700 slaveholding congressmen (some of them serving into the twentieth century), did nothing to change the condition of millions of black people (four million in 1860) who were legally enslaved and deprived of almost any possibility of economic or personal improvement for 245 years. These were the people whose unpaid labor, brutal treatment and family separation were the foundations for the creation not only of most personal American fortunes (in 1860, half of America’s millionaires lived in Mississippi), but as many academics argue, of the world-wide industrial revolution itself.
A just society would at least begin the conversation of how to compensate their descendants for the condition of entering civil society as free people, but with none of the accumulated equity that gener-ations of whites were already enjoying, or into a social environment of extreme terrorism. Estimates of those murdered by the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists run into the tens of thousands. At least 4,000 of these deaths occurred as lynchings.
And, as Orlando Patterson has written in Rituals Of Blood: The Consequences Of Slavery In Two American Centuries, a significant number of these murders happened as large, public spectacles – rituals – that served to re-confirm white identity in times of social change.
Perhaps one day we will quantify such reparation payments in economic terms. But it will be even harder to understand the accumulated emotional scars on those 25 generations of people, or of the five generations who then endured institutionalized Jim Crow segregation. The result is what Dr. Joy DeGruy has termed post traumatic slave syndrome, with its multi-generational patterns of low self-esteem, internalized abuse, depression, propensities for anger and violence and physical symptoms such as heart disease and diabetes.
The story begins a century before the American Revolution.
1620-1710: Although African slaves first arrived in Virginia in 1619, and the colonists did attempt to enslave Native Americans, there was little evidence of a white/black racial hierarchy until around 1675. Large numbers of Irish and Scots had arrived as indentured servants and worked alongside blacks, under terrible conditions. But neither “blackness” nor “whiteness” firmly established them-selves in the American mind until the defeat of Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676, when the oppressed challenged the oppressors, attempting to overthrow the system of indentured servitude. This was a watershed moment. Historian Theodore Allen writes:
…laboring-class African-Americans and European-Americans fought side by side for the abolition of slavery…If the plan had succeeded, the history of…America might have taken a much different path.
The Virginia colony eventually suppressed the rebellion, but its implications of class warfare were terrifying to the propertied classes. To make certain that nothing like it could ever occur again, they resorted to the ancient technique of “divide-and-conquer.” The first step was to pardon only the white rebels and severely punish the blacks. The state then codified its bondage and legal systems. It replaced the terms “Christian” or “free” with “white,” gave new privileges to Caucasians, banned interracial marriage and removed certain rights from free blacks. Other laws contributed to what Allen calls the “absolutely unique American form of male supremacism” – the right of any Euro-American to rape any African-American without fear of reprisal. Most of the colonies soon copied this system, which became more or less universal and lasted for decades.
This early white privilege – the privilege to hunt down and punish another human being – became the genesis of policing throughout America. In 1704, South Carolina, responding both to the fear of insurrection as well as to concern for lost property, established the first slave patrols, which soon spread throughout all the colonies. The patrols discouraged any large gatherings of blacks and generally perpetuated the atmosphere of fear that kept the slaves in line. In some areas, killing a slave was not considered a crime by the courts, although property considerations limited extreme violence.
Some states required every white man to arrest any slave found away from their home without proper verification and return them to their masters. Many happily served on the patrols, since the benefits included tax exemptions. Others who may have been reluctant on moral grounds were taxed severely for not participating, so universal white participation became institutionalized. By 1860, few Southerners could remember times when such conditions had not applied.
White Americans commonly subscribed to a narrative that rejected European class hierarchies. Instead of social class, however, their model of group conflict became relations between white planters and black slaves, rather than between rich and poor. The new system, writes Allen, insisted on “the social distinction between the poorest member of the oppressor group and any member, however propertied, of the oppressed group.”
Three and a half centuries after Bacon’s Rebellion, scholars still wonder why a strong socialist movement never developed in America, as it did almost everywhere else. Characteristically, they rarely consider the overwhelming presence of the Other – no other nation combined irresistible myths of opportunity with rigid legal systems deliberately intended to divide natural allies. Whiteness implies both purity (which demands removal of impurities) and privilege. For several generations, no matter how impoverished a white, male American was, he heard subtle messages every day that divided him from the impure. And now, of course, social media algorithms absolutely guarantee that these messages are all he hears.
Without racial privilege the concept of whiteness is meaningless. Often, Americans have had nothing to call their own except for white privilege, yet they cling to it and can be reliably expected to support those whose coded rhetoric promises to maintain it.
Slavery, of course, had much more than a psychological wage. Tim Wise estimates that as much as a trillion dollars of unpaid labor was provided to whites.
So, the first example of affirmative action for white people was well established by the end of the 17th century, well before the westward migration began. It meant that every single white person was indoctrinated to believe that their condition, no matter how limited, was by nature better than that of practically any black person and that they were privileged to enjoy a range of opportunities (in theory, at least) that even a well-educated black or Native American could never aspire to. The poorest of whites, home-grown or immigrant, started life assuming the most fundamental American value – this was the land of opportunity – and even if they failed utterly, their children started out with the same assumption. It would take some 330 years before blacks could also say Yes We Can. And for those few whites who were able to rise above the level of bare working class, slavery stood as one of the positive qualities of a free man. Some writers claimed, writes Barry Alan Shain, that “…one of the characteristics of the free man was to have slaves in his control.”
1790s: In the second example of affirmative action for white people, the “Three-fifths Compromise” in the new Constitution counted three out of every five slaves as people. Its effect was to give the Southern states a third more seats in Congress and a third more electoral votes than if slaves had been ignored, but fewer than if slaves and free people had been counted equally. As a result, Southern states had disproportionate influence on the presidency, the speakership of the House, and the Supreme Court all the way up to the Civil War. The clause remained in force until the post-war 13th Amendment freed all enslaved people. However, as Louis Menand writes,
…one of the reasons the South was able to exercise a stranglehold on race relations in nation-al politics was the supervention of the famous three-fifths clause, once the focus of abolitionist attacks on the Constitution. When the former slaves were counted as full persons, the former slave states gained twenty congressional seats, a 25% bump. They also gained votes in the Electoral College. They suppressed the votes of their African-American residents, then got full representational credit for them.
The Naturalization Act of 1790 was one of the first foreign policy measures of the fledgling government, and its racist implications set the tone for 200 years of restrictive definitions of what it means to be an American and who is allowed to enjoy the benefits of citizenship.
This was the third case of affirmative action for whites, since it allowed virtually any European immigrant to become a citizen, while expressly denying that privilege to Asians. Over the next 120 years, Congress would pass many other definitions of who was “us” and who wasn’t – especially concerning black people – which served as models for the almost entirely invisible white privilege that would bolster the Reagan and Trump “revolutions” many decades later. By then, structures of oppression would be so effective precisely because they seemed so natural.