Whiteness as Zero Sum Game

Kali Holloway considers the recent poll showing whites thinking they suffer from racial discrimination and the recent study of growing death rates for middle-aged whites to explore whiteness as a zero-sum game:

That is, they perceived racism, and the limitations it sets on African Americans in every sphere of American life, as beneficial to whites. Equality, by white Americans’ curious logic, doesn’t serve us all: The more equal some of us become, the less equal others of us get. For blue-collar white Americans, who are more vulnerable than their more affluent and better educated peers, this fear is particularly pronounced. The terror of slipping down a rung on an already precarious ladder is transformed into a sort of paranoia.

Deaton and Case write that white working-class disillusionment is driven by slow “growth in real median earnings” and the dismay of finding “they will not be better off than their parents.” But what lurks beneath this deserves even greater historical context, because this is far bigger than a single-generation status change. If you believe, consciously or not, that not just your parents, but every generation of white people before you not only benefited from the systematic disenfranchisement of black folks and other people of color, and that the (painstakingly slow) dismantling of that system will necessarily hinder your own chances for success, you are not likely to support that kind of social change. If you believe you were promised a level of success that, at the very least, is beyond those who are “less American,” or somehow inherently “less than,” you will be angry when you feel that those people, however few they number, are passing you by. If you could derive no pride from class but only from race, believing a place at the bottom of the dominant culture hierarchy is still at the top of any other in this country, when the order of things changes you may place your blame and shame on those who do not deserve it. If you believe these things are your birthright—one passed down over time and deserved by virtue of the longevity of its existence—you’re likely to be resentful about what you perceive as the sudden end of everything you believe you’re entitled to.

By this warped and fear-driven logic, every black success necessarily means a white failure; every Hispanic employee costs a white career. Diversity, a milquetoast word that generally means the least effort at inclusiveness to achieve a presentable level of tokenism, can only seem threatening in this context. “Multiculturalism” is transformed into a sinister plan for white cultural erasure. Immigration, the changing face of the country, the looming specter of America as a “minority-majority” country in 2042, all of these, seen through the lens of racism and xenophobia, are interpreted as threats to white power and agency. And don’t even get me started on the election of a black president.

The dashed hopes of white Americans in general, and working-class white Americans in particular, were built on a crumbling foundation of white privilege and supremacy. Despite the fact that it remains a pretty solidly built structure with reinforcements throughout, here is evidence of real fear of its collapse. Politicians know this, they’ve capitalized on it forever, and today’s political aspirants make the architects of the Southern Strategy look like ardent communists. The PRRI study found that Tea Party identification has dropped by nearly half since 2010, falling from 11 percent to 6 percent. But who needs the Tea Party when extremism has gone so mainstream? Racist and xenophobic dog whistles from the right in the 2008 election seem almost polite judged by the yardstick of today’s conservative rhetoric. The Tea Party has nothing on Donald Trump.

I do think this gets at the fundamentals of the entire right-wing revolt of recent years, including the embrace of gun culture no matter how many Americans die and support for killing brown people abroad. Whites, and especially working class whites, long felt that any rights for black Americans or other racial minorities were direct attacks upon them. We can see that at least as far back as the New Deal era with the Detroit Hate Strike as well as Detroit workers voting Republican even in the 30s when early public housing projects attempted to integrate. We can see it through the civil rights movement of course and the anti-busing movements throughout the nation in the 60s and 70s which reflected racism through the individual right to keep your children near their homes while in school, erasing the residential segregation that helped create these inequalities. It may not seem to many of us that African-Americans have won that many rights in recent years. Certainly the need for the Black Lives Matter movement shows that they have not. But reality is not what’s most important here, it’s perception. The sheer existence of Barack Hussein Obama as president is an affront to the values of whiteness so many whites hold dear. And every advance by racial minorities, every non-white face on TV, the supposed threat of Ebola infecting the U.S, everything is part of the broader attack on what it means to be American for working-class whites, which is in fact to be white.