First of all, where has Tim Wise been all my life? I can't get enough of this man's speeches. Even when I am not 100% in agreement with his theorical framework, the lucidity and simplicity of his exposition is an amazing breath of fresh air over a rather complex and sometimes stale discussions around race, class, privilege and empire. What I most enjoy is the "materiality" of his arguments; how he immerses every observation in historical facts and not emotional or ideological fiction.

Am going to come back to this particular speech for what he says about "state rights" because it will serve me as a jump-off point in another post about abortion rights, state rights and health care reform:

Fast forward to the civil war era. You have rich white folks in the south, where I come from, standing up and admitting that the reason they are willing to seceded from the union, and the only reason they ever articulated publicly ever, was to maintain and extend slavery and white supremacy. Not only where it already existed, but into the newly acquired, that is to say, stolen territories, from Mexico to the west.

Now we lie about it, and say it wasn’t about slavery, and say it was about states’ rights. Yes, the right of the states to keep and maintain slaves, exactly. But back then, they had no shame. So they didn’t try to cover it up. They openly said it. But once again, the rich didn’t want to go do the work, are you kidding? No. They are going to get poor people to go fight for them. And the poor folks didn’t even own slaves.

Now think, how do you get poor people who don’t even own the shirt on their back, let alone slaves, to go fight to go keep your slaves for you? You’ve got to convince them that their skin is more important than their economic interest. Because, think about it. If I am a farmer who has to charge you a dollar a day, or two dollars a week to work on your farm, and harvest that tobacco or pick that cotton, but you can get a black person to do it for free because you own them, whose going to get the job? Not me. In other words, slavery actually undermined the wages and the wage based the economic floor of the typical white working class, or low-income person. But they were told, “If these people are free, they are going to take your jobs.” No fool. They’ve got your job. That’s the point.

And so at some level, working class white people are being harmed by white privilege. Relatively being advantaged, right? Being given a leg up, being given a membership to the club, but in absolute terms, being kept economically subordinated by the very thing that gave then a sense of superiority. How’s that for irony?

I urge to go to MediaEd.org and read the whole speech this clip is based on and wich runs 40± pages long. It's at The Pathology Of Privilege (PDF) found in Tim Wise on White Privilege Racism, White Denial & the Costs of Inequality.

THE CREATION OF WHITENESS
Because if you know the history of the whole concept of whiteness, if you know the history of the concept of the white race, where it came from and for what reason, you know it was a trick, and it’s worked brilliantly. You see, prior to the mid 1600s, in the colonies of what would become the United States, there was no such thing as the white race. Those of us of European decent did not refer to ourselves in that term really ever before then. In fact, in the old countries of Europe, we had spent most of our time killing each other. We didn’t love each other. We weren’t one big happy family. The side of my family that comes from Scotland, hell, they didn’t even worry about fighting people outside of Scotland. Highlanders and lowlanders just fought the hell out of each other.

So there was no white race. But in the colonies that would become the United States, what did we see in the 1660s, the 1670s? We began to see the Africans of indentured servant status, many of them not enslaved yet. They were not necessarily permanently enslaved. Some others were indentured, like many poor Europeans, for periods of 7-11 years. They could work off their indenture, and then they would be free labor, technically.

Realize, as did the white indentured servants, the Europeans, who hadn’t even been called white yet, that they had a lot of things in common, like the fact that they were all getting their clock cleaned by the elite, and so they would get together, more than our history books taught us, to ferment rebellion, against the elite to try to get a better deal for themselves on the basis of economic necessity and economic justice. And what did the elite do when you see that you are out numbered by black and white folks who are penniless, landless, peasants? You have to do one of two things: You either have to kill them all. But you can’t do that, because who is going to work?

Rich folks are not going to work. They had to get poor people to work. The whole point was to be a person of leisure. That was the goal, was not to work. So you couldn’t kill them all. You didn’t want to kill them all. You’d have to do the work yourself. You’d have to build your own levy, build your own house, pick your own tobacco, harvest your own cotton. You aren’t going to do any of that.

So you can’t kill them, but you can coop them. And so the elite in Virginia, for example, begins to give certain carrots to people of European decent, saying things like, “you know, we are going to let you own a little land. Not much, but just a little, and we are going to get rid of indentured servitude. Now you are a free laborer.” And by the way, once you are a free laborer, you get 50 acres of land just because you are a free laborer. “So we are going to cut you in on this deal. We are going to let you enter into contract. We are going to let you testify in courts. And here’s the best of all, we are going to put you on the slave patrol, to keep those people in line.”

The idea was: you’re still going to get your clock cleaned. We still don’t like you. We still aren’t going to really empower you or change your economic subordination, but we are going to make you honorary members of this team, and you are going to help us keep those other people down. And so they got a little taste of power. And it did effectively divide and conquer those coalitions. Those rebellions began to stop, almost instantly.

Fast forward to the civil war era. You have rich white folks in the south, where I come from, standing up and admitting that the reason they are willing to seceded from the union, and the only reason they ever articulated publicly ever, was to maintain and extend slavery and white supremacy. Not only where it already existed, but into the newly acquired, that is to say, stolen territories, from Mexico to the west.

Now we lie about it, and say it wasn’t about slavery, and say it was about states’ rights. Yes, the right of the states to keep and maintain slaves, exactly. But back then, they had no shame. So they didn’t try to cover it up. They openly said it. But once again, the rich didn’t want to go do the work, are you kidding? No. They are going to get poor people to go fight for them. And the poor folks didn’t even own slaves.

Now think, how do you get poor people who don’t even own the shirt on their back, let alone slaves, to go fight to go keep your slaves for you? You’ve got to convince them that their skin is more important than their economic interest. Because, think about it. If I am a farmer who has to charge you a dollar a day, or two dollars a week to work on your farm, and harvest that tobacco or pick that cotton, but you can get a black person to do it for free because you own them, whose going to get the job? Not me. In other words, slavery actually undermined the wages and the wage based the economic floor of the typical white working class, or low-income person. But they were told, “If these people are free, they are going to take your jobs.” No fool. They’ve got your job. That’s the point.

And so at some level, working class white people are being harmed by white privilege. Relatively being advantaged, right? Being given a leg up, being given a membership to the club, but in absolute terms, being kept economically subordinated by the very thing that gave then a sense of superiority. How’s that for irony?

Then in the present era, this hasn’t stopped. This is not ancient history. Now we have people running around insisting that we should close the borders with Mexico, because if we don’t the wages of working class people will continue to fall. The implication being that the only reason workers are paid like crap in this county is because the border is open. But if you believe that, you would actually have to believe that if that border were closed that all these owners of capital and industry would just say, “Oh well, you figured us put, here, it’s a raise.” Do we really believe that the only thing keeping bosses from paying people more is the presence of low-waged, medium-skilled labor from south of this artificial
border? Is that really what we believe?

We know that if that border is closed it isn’t going to be closed to capitol. It isn’t going to be closed to goods. If you have a border that can be crossed by capitol, looking for the highest return on investment or goods looking for the highest price, but labor is chained to its country of origin, how is that going to work for the benefit of working people? By definition, it doesn’t. By definition, it eviscerates the worker class. Divide and conquer.

But the best example of all, perhaps in the contemporary era, in the greater New Orleans area after Katrina. Here you have two communities that were the most hard hit.

Lower ninth ward, mostly black community, 94% African American, about 40% official poverty rate, heavy working class community. And right across the canal, St. Bernard Parish, Chalmette, 95% white, also working class, high levels of poverty. Economically very similar, and at the end of the day, in those first few days in September 2005, more
similar than they probably would have realized, because when those levees broke, they all got they stuff jacked. They all got their stuff destroyed, but if you had asked in Chalmette, and I’ve done it, who was the cause of the problems in the greater New Orleans area prior to that flooding, they would have pointed across that canal at those black folks, wouldn’t have called them black folks, and would have said, there, that’s the problem.

70% of the white folks in Saint Bernard Parish voted for David Duke, white supremacist neo-Nazi, former head of the largest Ku Klux Klan group in the United States, when he ran for Governor in 1991. 7 out of 10 gladly voted for him, because he was blaming black folks for all of their problems, and they bought it.

What’s the irony? The irony is that while they were blaming black people for their problems, while they were blaming black people for the conditions of the greater New Orleans area in which they lived, nobody was paying attention, and least of all they, to the fact that these white elite politicians either in Baton Rouge or in Washington, whose job it was to secure
those levees, to make sure that levy funds were spent in the proper way, and that they were spent at all.

Those mostly white and mostly elite politicians did nothing at the end of the day, and it wasn’t just those black folks in the lower ninth ward they didn’t care about. They really couldn’t have given a rat’s ass about those poor and working class white folks either. And yet when the people of Chalmette, people of St. Bernard parish got back into session, first time they had a city council meeting, a parish council meeting after the flooding; the lights aren’t even on yet; the water isn’t even hooked up and first order of business was to pass an ordinance, saying that you couldn’t rent property in St.
Bernard parish to anyone who wasn’t a blood relative.

Now I’ll leave it to your imagination as to why you’d want to pass that law. That law never existed before, but now that its been emptied out, and you don’t know who might come back, that’s a damn good way to keep black people out, isn’t it? Because if you’re 95% white to begin with, and you pass an ordinance that says that; I mean you can’t say “No blacks need apply,” you can’t say “No blacks allowed,” but that was an ingenious way to get around the law.

Now, they got caught. There was a lawsuit threat, and they got rid of the ordinance. Now, my point of bringing it up is to say, once again, divide and conquer is working.

These white folks in Chalmette need to march across that canal and join hands with the black folks more than willing to work with them for an awful long time and march on Baton Rouge and march on Washington D.C., and march on the core engineers and recognize their commonality of interests. But the whiteness, and the lure of whiteness, has tricked these have-nothing-in-their-bank-account white people into believing that they have more than common with the rich white folks on St. Charles Avenue that didn’t lose anything in that flooding than they have in common with the black working class folks who live about 500 yards away.