The Sum of Us
Rachel’s note: this was a hard book for me to read: and that’s ok. We all need to read hard books. While I disagreed with the author on some things, her underlying premise is to show, in so many different areas of life, when white people don’t allow or take away something from Black people: they also join that suffering (especially the connection between poor white Americans and Black Americans). That we, as humans, as Americans, are linked in so many more ways than we realize. But the reverse is also true: when we make headway in helping Black people: it also benefits white people. I connected this with the philosopher Paulo Freire, in his discussion of how the liberation of oppressed people can only truly be done by the oppressed people—for themselves and for their oppressors.
Personally, I find it sad that perhaps the only way some people will look at helping Black people is because they want to help themselves and helping others is an unintended consequence, but I get it. I could also tell, in reading this, that the tone would be hard to swallow for the very people who need to read it the most. Many will close the book out of offence before they can get to the many truths they need to hear. I lament the lack of resources out there that can creatively draw and connect those most hardened in their views against even the existence of systemic racism/white supremacy in our history and today into a discussion and honest evaluation of facts that they simply do not see. I hope to fix that someday.
Quotes I grabbed from a very dog-eared book:
“In the Seventeenth century, influential Europeans were starting to create taxonomies of human beings based on skin color, religion, culture, and geography, aiming not just to differentiate but to rant humanity in terms of inherent worth. This hierarchy—backed by pseudo-scientist, explorers, and even clergy—gave Europeans moral permission to exploit and enslave. So, from the United States colonial beginnings, progress for those considered white did come directly at the expense of people considered non-white. The US economy depended on systems of exploitation-on literally taking land and labor from racialized others to enrich white colonizers and slaveholders. This made it easy for the powerful to sell the idea that the inverse was also true: that liberation or justice for people of color would necessarily require taking something away from white people. The colonists in America created their concept of freedom largely be defining it against the bondage of the Africans among them.”
“It turns out the average white person views racism as a zero-sum game. If things are getting better for Black people, it must be at the expense of white people. But that’s not the way Black people see it. For Black respondents, better outcomes for them don’t necessarily mean worse outcomes for white people. It’s not a zero sum. The zero-sum idea that white people are now suffering due to gains among people of color has taken on the features of myth: it lies, but it says so much.”
“Helper was an avowed racist, and yet he railed against slavery because he saw what it was doing to his fellow white southern. The slave economy was a system that created high concentrations of wealth, land, and political power. A governing class will tax themselves to invest in amenities that serve the public because they need to. The wealthy need those assets in a community to make it livable for them, but also, more important, to attract and retain the people on whom their profits depend, be they workers or customers. For the owners in a slave economy, neither was strictly necessary. The primary source of plantation wealth was completely captive and unpaid labor force. Owners didn’t need more than a handful of while workers per plantation. They didn’t need an educated populace, whether Black or white; such a thing was in fact counter to their financial interest. Life on a plantation was self-contained the welfare of the surrounding community mattered little outside the closed system.”
“In America’s smaller towns, where there was only one public pool, desegregation called into question what “public” really meant. If assets were public, they argued, they must be furnished on an equal basis. Instead, white public officials took the public assets private, creating new private corporations to run the pools. In many places, the counsel decided to drain the pool rather than share it with their Black neighbors. Of course, the decision meant that white families lost a public resource as well. Uncomprehending white children cried as the city contractors poured dirt into the pool, paved it over, and seeded with grass that was green by the time summer came along again. Can we swim together in the same pool or not? It’s a political question yes, and one with economic ramifications. But at its core, it’s a moral question. Ultimately, an economy—the rules we abide by and set for what’s fair and who merits what-is an expression of our moral understanding. So if our country’s moral compass is broken, is it any wonder that our economy is adrift?”
“Plutocrats use dog-whistle politics to appeal to whites with a basic formula.” Haney Lopez told me. “First, fear people of color. Then, hate the government (which coddles people of color). Finally, trust the market and the 1 percent.” This type of modern political racism could operate in polite society because of the way that racial resentment had evolved, from biological racism to cultural disapproval: it’s not about who they are; its about what some (okay, most) of them do. He went on, “Dog-whistle politics is gaslighting on a massive scale: stoking racism through insidious stereotyping while denying that racism has anything to do with it. The idea that Black people are the “takers” in society while white people are the hard working taxpayers—the “makers” has become a core part of the zero-sum story preached by wealthy political elites.”
“The option to treat poverty and drug addiction as a public health and economy security issue rather than a criminal one has always been present. Will our nation choose that option now that white people, always the majority of drug users, make up a soaring population of people for whom addition takes over?”
“In a study conducted in President Obama’s final year in office, researchers found that simply switching the race of man posing in front of a home with a Foreclosure sign from white to Black made Trump-supporting whites angrier about government mortgage assistance programs and more likely to blame individuals for their situation.”
“In a hierarchical system like the American economy, people often show more concern about their relative position in the hierarchy than their absolute status. Norton and his colleagues used games where they gave participants the option to give money to either people who had more money than they had, or those who had less. In general, people gave money to those who had less—except for people who were in the second-to-last place in the money distribution to begin with. These players more often gave their money to the people above them in the distribution so that they wouldn’t fall into the last place themselves. Even though raising the minimum wage is overwhelmingly popular, people who make a dollar above the current minimum “and thus most likely to ‘drop’ into last place” along side the workers at the bottom expressed less support. “Last-place aversion suggests that low-income individuals might oppose redistribution because they fear it might differentially help a last-place group to whom they can currently feel superior.”
“Texas introduced a voter ID law requiring photo IDs and specifying what kinds of IDs would be permitted (gun permits, 80 percent of which are owned by white Texans) and denied (college IDs, in a state where more than 50 percent of students are people of color). 19 percent of white people with household incomes below $25,000 have neither driver’s license nor a passport. The same is true of 20 percent of white people ages 17-20. Of the fifty thousand already registered Alabama voters estimated to lack proper photo ID to vote in 2016, more than half were white.”
“The elimination of the poll tax in particular freed up the political participation of lower-income white voters. After the civil rights movement knocked down voting barriers, white as well as Black registration and turnout rates rose in former Jim Crow states.”
“Researchers found that while Black and Latinx people actually search for housing in neighborhoods that match their desired level of diversity, white people search in neighborhoods that are 68 percent white, and they end up living in areas that are 74 percent white. They say they want to be outnumbered by people of color; instead they end up choosing places where they outnumber others three to one. Somewhere in between their stated desires and their actions is where the story of white racial hierarchy slips in—sometimes couched in the neutral-sounding terms of “good schools” or “appealing neighborhoods” or other codes for a racialized preference for homogeneity-and turns them back from their vision of an integrated life, with all its attendant benefits.”
“Is social dominance correlated to climate change?” Jylha responded: “There is some sort of unconscious risk calculation going on there. Social dominance orientation comes into play here. Based on this risk allocation, they think that, “Hmm, it sounds quite horrible, but I don’t think that I will be the one who would suffer if (climate change) is true…future generation will suffer.” But if white American men who buy the zero-sum story don’t see themselves as suffering, their bias will be toward retaining the status quo that rewards them, even if it leads to the suffering for others. If you’re in a society where you’ve already let someone go without shelter, then what does it matter if they drown? If it’s okay for people to suffer, then it’s okay for people to suffer. And if your wealth has protected you from that suffering, then your wealth can probably protect you from another kind of suffering.”
“We found that one hundred percent of all the city-owned landfills were located in Black neighborhoods (in their city)…six out of eight of the city-owned incinerators were in Black neighborhoods. And three out of four of the private-owned landfills were in Black neighborhoods. From the thirties up ‘til 1978,, eighty-two percent of all the garbage, waste, was dumped in predominately Black neighborhoods, even though Blacks only made up twenty-five percent of the population.”
“Prominent white nationalists are clear they want to maintain a white America, but most people justify having animus toward immigrants in a “nation of immigrants” in moral terms: it’s not the immigrant part, it’s the “illegal” part. They broke the law; they’re criminals. As history shows us, once a group is criminalized, they’re outside the circle of human concern. The elite adds in the urgency of the zero-sum story—they are taking what you have—they are a threat to you.”
“Color-blind racism is an ideology that “explains contemporary racial inequality as the outcome of non-racial dynamics…whites rationalize minorities’ contemporary status as the product of market dynamics, naturally occurring phenomena, and Blacks imputed cultural limitations.” Such explanations exculpate white people from any responsibility for the status of people of color.”
“By denying the reality of racism and their own role in it, Berry explained, white Americans have denied themselves critical self-knowledge and created a prettified and falsified version of American history for themselves to believe in, one built on the “wishful insinuation that we have done no harm.” Of course he understood the impulse of white people-himself included- to protect themselves from the “anguish implicit in their racism.” Wendell Berry calls this suffering “the hidden wound.” He counsels that when “you begin to awaken to the realities of what you know, you are subject to staggering recognitions of your complicity in history and in the events of your own life.” Of this wound—this psychic and emotional damage that racism does to white people- he writes, “I have borne it all my life…always with the most delicate consideration for the pain I would feel if I were somehow forced to acknowledge it. If white people have suffered less obviously from racism than black people, they have nevertheless suffered greatly; the cost has been greater perhaps than we can yet know.”
“You all have been told or taught or learned how slavery was common, and slavery was all over the world. But we uniquely did something. We Christians, in fact—British and American—were the ones who decided that we couldn’t do to Indigenous people and kidnapped Africans what we were doing, if they were indeed people made in the image of God. So we said they weren’t. They weren’t humans made in the image of God. What we did is we threw away Imago Dei. We throw it away to justify what we’re doing…at the heart of the sin was a lie. Perhaps the most powerful role white Christianity has played in the gruesome drama of slavery, lynching’s, Jim Crow, and massive resistance to racial equality is to maintain an unassailable sense of religious purity that protects white racial innocence. Through every chapter, white Christianity has been at the ready to ensure that white Christians are alternatively- and sometimes simultaneously—the noble protagonist and the blameless victims. As long as white people think that the issue of race is mostly about people of color and minorities and what has happened to them and what happens to them that we could help with—as long as that is the mindset, they’re still stuck and will remain stuck until we understand as white people that the problem of racism is about us. To confront racism is not a question about charity or virtue for white Christians, this is to save our souls.” --Jim Wallis
“For the leitmotif of the Jewish tradition, we have a redemption narrative at our core. The Exodus from Egypt is a Jewish story. And that story has been utilized for liberation movements throughout history. Redemption isn’t a miracle. It’s actually built into the structure of the world… and therefore, racism is an impediment to the structure of the world, of a redeemed world. The story goes that God was trying to make the world, and the world wouldn’t stand up until teshuvah—repentance—was created. I find that a deeply compelling narrative. Racism actually has a dehumanizing aspect not only for those who experience racism, but also for those who perpetuate it. Jewish tradition articulates that everyone is stamped in the image of God.” Rabbi Felicia Sol
What to do?
1. Cut the zero-sum economic model and aim for a solidarity dividend
2. Refill the pool of public goods, for everyone
3. One size has never fit all
4. Uproot the zero-sum thinking by knowing we truly need each other
5. Tell the truth of our American racial past so we can move forward with a new story, together.