Who benefits from the the whitewashing of class?

Over at Feministe's No racism here, no sir!, Jill Filipovic is continuing a discussion about race, welfare and class at Jane Galt's blog that was based on another of Jill's posts : A Conservative Trifecta: Fat-shaming, welfare-state-hating, and victim-blaming.

I haven't asked Jill, but it seems she is doing some really interesting work at NYU Law that has led her to write now some really interesting posts about race and class. The conservative trifecta post is brilliant because it really deconstructs all the conservative bull around discussions of welfare; in particular the "work for food" rhetorical scam around welfare.

Yet ... and yet. I am always disatisfied with discussion like these.

As Jill rightly points out, poverty is almost always falsely equated with race. Yet, I feel the next step is to ask why is it necessary to propagate the myth that social class is somehow only the product of biology? Why is it important to have an Polish-American kid from Far Rockaway believe that doors will open to him just because his skin is "white" and his hair is maybe two shades away from a dirty blonde?

Hence, the discussions offered by naysayers end up being about why they should not blamed with having been borh with white skin. For example, one of her commenters, Henry, wrote some of the following :

I have no problem with welfare per se (although I’d prefer it be done at the state level as opposed to the federal level). My issue is with the idea that it’s my responsibility to provide for the poor, as opposed to an act of voluntary virtue, and that somehow I’m a selfish prick because I feel that I should have as much control over the money I earn as possible. I’m all for private charity, and the more, the better. The idea that I owe anyone anything is ridiculous. I didn’t cause poverty, I haven’t exploited anyone, and no one gave me or my family anything. My father worked 10-12 hour days turning a wrench for everything we had, and I’ve worked my whole life. Yet somehow, those of you who support using the power of the state to steal from some people to give it to others are more virtuous than people who give money privately. Which is nice, as it allows everyone to feel morally superior without affecting their wallet directly.

Lovely isn't. That's compassionate conservatism for you. This guy represents the common apolgists for economic apartheid. To him, whiteness is part of a Darwinian natural selection that he has not control over. It would never occur to this guy to go back through history and see how whiteness has been constructed in his country as a socio-economic tool of opression.

Here's what I have to say about that:

Henry : You ... You ... You ... You are what is all wrong about the United States. Economic charity is neither welfare nor a virtue. Economic charity serves a very specific economic purpose : to kill economic mobility. Welfare, on the other hand, is used to correct economic imbalances that would prove more costly to manage --economically and socially-- if the government were not to interevene.

Ok, not the most articulate thing I've written of late, but at least it's honest.

It is really amazing how people just believe that somehow We The People have no social, economic or political responsibility whatsoever to wrongs committed in our name by our governments --as if somehow my shopping for a Hummer as oppossed to a Prius has more to do with fashion than an actual reassessment of citizen and corporate responsibility as agenced by a truly democratic government.

Jane Galt went over to the blog to contribute to the discussion. Let me first highlight her comment on race, social mobility and education :

As I wrote in the comments to my site, I don’t assume that all black people know what food stamps are; I’m well aware that most African Americans are solidly middle class. But in every city I’ve ever lived in (New York, Chicago, Philadelphia), the supermarket checkers are blacks or hispanics serving people who tend to be white or Asian, and much more affluent than they are. They are not only of a different economic class than the people whose groceries they bag, but if recent economic evidence is anything to go by, will have a harder time exiting that class than whites, unless they get a significant amount of education.

(Emphasis mine)

This one last line really gets my dander up, not because I think she personally is wrong in thinking this is accurate but because I feel it's one of those myths about the American Dream that needs to be shattered.

So, just to be clear, it's the kind of kool-aid many people across the race and ethnic spectrum have heavily libated. Many people who consider themselves middle class believe in the truthiness of education being a necessary step out of poverty or blue-collar servitude.

I've spat that kool-aid out a long time ago.

It's a myth that Richard Florida gloriously shatters in Rise of the Creative Class. One of the first things he points out in that book is how much more money his plumber made than him with about a third of his educational level.

Florida does not diss universities, as he is a professor himself. Yet his focus on universities is not on some Roussesian dream of using universities to transform and "better" socio-economic savages. Florida has been arguing for years that universities are important in economic development as the first step to social, economic and political development that will allow for better distribution of affluence (PDF).

It is a much positive point of view than my take on university education and social mobility. This is what I wrote at Feministe :

Jane : Capitalists don't send their kids to college so they can get a leg up in the world. Capitalists send their kids to college --and only the colleges that matter-- for the networks of capital.

Education is one of the myths about economic advancement in this country that really drives me nuts. If you want to go from a lower paying service job to a higher paying service job, then yeah, maybe getting a college diploma will help. Yet capital is capital is capital.

When I read Jane's initial comments though, I had not read closely what she had written about class and being Irish-American :

I don’t think anyone on this site needs to be told that race and class interact in complicated ways. The point is no tthat she is black, and all black people are on food stamps; the point, rather, was that my ignorance made it clear how much easier my life was across many dimensions. I don’t think I’m imagining that some people resent this–hell, I know I’m not imagining this; every Irish American of my age has at least a few elderly relatives tucked away who were seething hives of resentment–or that they focus their resentment on random affluent white people who, deliberately or no, twist the knife. Any more than my black friends are imagining the white salesclerks who follow them around stores.

I am glad she brought this up because the rest of my comments tie in nicely with this exact point :

Economic success has always hinged on the acquiring of capital and equity. Equity came to a lot of lower class european immirants during the post-war era in the guise of pension funds and suburban homes.

For a whole generation of colored people, capital came in the guise of the social connections made through a college education. It was not the education what got colored social advancement. It was the access to people with capital (in all its shapes and forms) that allowed for social mobility.

What astounds me about discussions like this is how much in denial are the american descendants of european immigrants.

A lot of the ancestors of today's white Americans were not considered white in the first place. Take the case of the Irish, they were not even considered good enough to have the privilege of being the servants of the landed or capitalist classes in this country --until there was a shortage of black servants in places like New York. Hence the rise of the Bridgets. Italians and Greeks, with their lack of English literacy, fared worse.

Today's descendants of Irish, Italians, Greeks, Germans were given opportunities not because your relatives deserved it as "Americans" but because it was part of a contractural agreement. Many of the men (and some women) in these groups of immigrants joined the US military forces because there was an economic incentive waiting for them in the guise of GI BIlls and 0-down mortages --if they came back alive. Many took the army contracts, like my Irish-American FIL. He had nothing to loose. The poverty he was mired in Pennsylvania during the 30's and 40's could not be worse than a foxhole in Okinawa.

Yet the WW2 economic incentives for military indentured servants could never compare with economic reparations denied to grandchildren of African slaves.

John Kenneth Galbraith understood this. He understood that there's a matrix of social, political and economic forces too complex to distill into mathematical equations or simple government handouts. He understood that capital, if left unchecked, could destroy a country's political and social infrastructure because the only responsibility of capital is to produce more capital.

It's because of JKG that we had a welfare system in the first place. It's he reason why so many of the "scourge of Europe" were able to live their own "American Dream". And it's why he was an advisor to Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson.

Too many whites with ethnic names bask in the glow of their whiteness because, I mean c'mon, who wants to admit their grandfathers or grandmothers came from a family of Polish/Russian/Albanian goatherders with no money in their pockets and who had to take all sorts of welfare and charity --along to selling themselves to a life of indentured servitude to maybe a sweatshop or two-- in order to give their grandchildren the gift of an American Dream?

At last December's conference Race and Immigration: Challenges and Opportunities for the New American Majority, William Darrity presented highlights to a paper he co-wrote about the US Latino's preference for whiteness (PDF to the article, "Bleach in the Rainbow: Latin Ethnicity and Preference for Whiteness").

His presentation was quite lively and funny but it sent chills down the spines of a lot of people in the audience, particularly because the man was talking with his observation of census numbers and statistics, not with theory. At the conference he summarized this latino tendency to blanquamiento as one based solely on economic opportunity --there really is no economic advantege to identifying oneself as black.

Which is why the last conclusion to "Bleach in the Rainbow" is the most important because if anybody can call themselves "white" for census purposes, then the dream of a brown majority in 2015 will be completely co-opted by the rising self-categorized latino whites. As the writers of the paper say, "sufficiently flexible boundaries of Whiteness could maintain a White majority in the United States indefinitely".

Which goes to show that the privilege of Whiteness is a social construct; and one that is used to create and/or exploit economic opportunities.

The question still begs to be answered : Who benefits from the construct of Whiteness?

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