Dear White America

White Americans have long been comfortable in the assumption that they are the cultural norm. Now that notion is being challenged, as white people wrestle with what it means to be part of a fast-changing, truly multicultural nation. Facing chronic economic insecurity, a popular culture that reflects the nation's diverse cultural reality, a future in which they will no longer constitute the majority of the population, and with a black president in the White House, whites are growing anxious.

This anxiety has helped to create the Tea Party movement, with its call to "take our country back." By means of a racialized nostalgia for a mythological past, the Right is enlisting fearful whites into its campaign for reactionary social and economic policies.

In urgent response, Tim Wise has penned his most pointed and provocative work to date. Employing the form of direct personal address, he points a finger at whites' race-based self-delusion, explaining how such an agenda will only do harm to the nation's people, including most whites. In no uncertain terms, he argues that the hope for survival of American democracy lies in the embrace of our multicultural past, present and future.

What follows below is an excerpt from the 2012 edition of the book Dear White America by Tim Wise.

....And I think we know, white America, if we allow ourselves to be honest, the color of the people we perceive to be the beneficiaries of all that taxation, and the color of the victims of the same. Which then brought us to the part about “smaller government.” She had said after all, that the conservative desire to “take the country back” meant no more than the desire to limit the degree of government intervention in our daily economic lives. But government had not been small prior to the 1960s, far from it. For whites it had always been huge, in fact, and we rather liked it that way.

Although the debate about the size of government has been a long standing one, dating back to the earliest days of the republic, for almost the entire national history, it was a debate between political and economic elites. Some believed in a more activist government and some believed in a far smaller one, but the persons lining up to participate in that argument were always those at the pinnacle of the social order. Among average everyday folks—workaday peoples— there was never much of a debate about this matter. Working-class folks, including virtually all working-class white folks, believed without a doubt in the necessity and legitimacy of government intervention in the economy to help those in need, to create opportunities and to make lives better.

That’s why, white America, we had no objection to (and indeed supported mightily) the “big government” intervention known as the Homestead Act, passed in 1862, which gave over 200 million acres of essentially “free” land to white families: land that had been confiscated from indigenous people or from Mexico and was then made available to white settlement. Millions of us today still live on that land, procured thanks to government intervention, or we have in some way benefited from the sale of that land and the passing down of the assets intergenerationally; and I haven’t seen one among us go to Washington and, in a fit of self-conscious embarrassment, offer to give back the house, the ranch, the farm or the money gleaned from their sale, out of a concern that were we to keep them we might be partaking in a form of socialism. 
 
Likewise, average, everyday white folks had no objection to (and indeed, supported quite stridently) the New Deal programs of the 1930s. The rich didn’t like them much, as they offered poor people alternatives to exploitative pay in the private market— whether government jobs or various forms of social insurance to serve as a safety net for the desperate—but among the masses they were almost uniformly popular. Average everyday white folks loved the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) home loan program, and later the Veterans Administration (VA) home loan programs—both huge government interventions in the workings of the private housing market—and with good reason: they were largely responsible (along with the GI Bill—another big government initiative) for creating the American middle class.

The FHA and VA programs alone financed over $120 billion in home equity for our people from 1934 to 1962, and by 1960 were responsible for nearly half of all white mortgages in the country. And we loved the Interstate Highway program—more big government— because it made long-distance travel on the open road possible for so many of us, and because it made it easier for us to run to the suburbs, where only we could live, and which were being created thanks to low-cost, government-subsidized loans. In other words, for most of the nation’s history, white folks like the ones partic- ipating in Tea Party rallies—average, somewhat middling white people—absolutely loved government intervention. But somewhere along the way, things changed. And when that change happened (and why) is the critical point for us to interrogate, for it tells us a lot about how race has influenced even philosophical matters that seem at first glance to have nothing to do with it.

Almost all of those big government programs I just mentioned, which retained such high levels of support from the white masses, had been racially exclusive in design and implementation. In fact, the only way President Roosevelt could get most of the New Deal passed was by capitulating to the racist whims of white Southern senators who insisted that blacks be excluded from most of its benefits.

Social Security was, in effect, racially exclusionary for its first twenty years, thanks to language that blocked agricultural workers or domestic workers—about 80 percent of the black workforce—from par- ticipating. The FHA program operated with underwriting guidelines that essentially kept anyone who wasn’t white from receiving the government-guaranteed loans for the first thirty years of its existence. Even the GI Bill, theoretically open to all returning veterans, worked in a racially discriminatory way, with persons of color far less likely to receive substantial job or educational opportunities under its aegis than our people were. Employers and colleges were allowed to exclude people of color from their ranks, no matter the latter groups’ “right” to use GI Bill benefits; hence those veterans of color who could make use of the benefits were still relegated to the lowest rung employment opportunities and limited to a small number of potential educational institutions. In other words, government had always been big for people like us, and we were fine with that. But beginning in the 1960s, as people of color began to gain access to the benefits for which we had always been eligible, suddenly we discovered our inner libertarian and decided that government intervention was bad, perhaps even the cause of social decay and irresponsible behavior on the part of those who reaped its largesse.

Indeed, even cash welfare—created as part of the 1935 Social Security Act—was originally supported as a way to help white women whose husbands had died or left home to look for work during the Depression, so they could stay home, raise their kids, and not have to work in the paid labor force. Interesting isn’t it? Cash welfare was originally conceived and defended on these grounds: as a way to foster benign dependence on the state. And virtually no one balked. But as soon as women of color gained access to the same benefits, those programs came to be seen as the cause of all that was wrong with the poor. They made you lazy, encouraged you to have babies out of wedlock (forget that the states with the most generous welfare programs always had the lowest rates of such births), and needed to be cut back, perhaps even eliminated.

Doesn’t it seem convenient that growing opposition to government intervention in the economy, the housing market, the job market and other aspects of American life parallels almost directly the racialization of social policy, and the increasing association in the white mind between such efforts and handouts to the undeserving “other”? Are we to believe that this correlation is merely coincidental? That people who had long reaped the benefits of big government simply came to a deeper understanding of the inherent dangers of such a thing, only after they had ridden the wave of such benefits for generations? Surely we can’t expect anyone to believe that. No, the backlash against government was directly related to the increasingly common belief that those people were abusing the programs. And so, beginning in the early 1970s—even as antipoverty efforts had helped bring down poverty rates by roughly half between 1960 and 1973, and by a third in just the first eight years of the Great Society programs—safety net pro- grams began to be cut, or frozen in place, their benefits eroded by inflation over the years, guaranteeing that whatever potential they had to work would be eroded as well.

So it isn’t that opposition to an activist government is racist per se. There are surely many of us who would stake out the limited government position even in a society where everyone looked the same. But in this society, where the debate about the size and scope of government has been intrinsically bound up with the debate about race— and the negative perceptions of racial others—it is patently impossible to suggest with any intellectual integrity that the two can be fully separated. That is why the Tea Party narrative, and the narrative of the American right, is properly considered one of white racial resentment and anxiety.