If you’ve ever wondered about the origins of such a thing as “white anxiety,” then you may have thought it best explained as the rising fear among certain groups of white people who perceive the swelling of American minority populations as a threat to the prevailing system or order, one created by and for an increasingly diluted ethnic majority of white people. According to Ross Douthat, a conservative op-ed columnist at the New York Times, this explanation falls far short of accurate. In Douthat’s July 18 column entitled “The Roots of White Anxiety,” he makes the case that affirmative action policies coupled with media bias against white conservative Christians form the actual roots of White Anxiety, an anxiety often whipped up by conservative TV and radio talk show hosts and channeled through angry Tea Party protesters and the like. Douthat’s stance is very much that of an apologist for today’s ever-angrier, ever disenfranchised white Right Wing. In substantiating his claim of discrimination via affirmative action, Douthat cites a study of admissions and affirmative action at eight highly selective colleges and universities. “Unsurprisingly” the study shows that the admissions process seems to favor African American and Hispanic candidates over whites, however, the most “striking” finding of the study involves the preference for upper-class whites over poor working class whites among white candidates. Specifically, the study finds that candidates involved in certain extracurricular activities such as R.O.T.C, 4H, and Future Farmers of America are less likely to be accepted in colleges and universities despite the favorability of students who take part in extracurricular activities granted in most admissions processes.
“Consciously or unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right wing or ‘Red America,’” laments the conservative columnist. Of course there could be other reasons why these poor white candidates are not selected other than their seeming too “Red America,” but they are conveniently left out of the article. Douthat goes on to describe how such systematic discrimination has fueled America’s current political divide, breeding paranoia on the right and contempt on the left. Such paranoia on the right is manifest in conspiracy theories often exploited by Glenn Beck and other talking heads; theories claiming that Barack Obama is a foreign-born Marxist frontman for a secret liberal cabal, or that Wall Street and Washington intend to “flood the country with third world immigrants, and so forth,” are run of the mill among such company. To further the spiral of separation, the right is often lambasted by the “highly educated and liberal” and treated suspiciously for its ideological proximity to history’s most infamous domestic terrorists and terrorist groups, the KKK and Timothy McVeigh, to name a few. Douthat doesn’t outright endorse the Right or pick sides in the battle; instead he provides a justification for the worst of Right Wing behavior and warns that not addressing the current social and systematic discrimination will only further divide the political landscape. It should also be noted that Douthat has no opinion as to the proportionality of Right Wing and Tea Party rhetoric in the context of the actual injustices having befallen these groups; instead he treats their behavior as a natural reaction to this particular discrimination, however slight it may be.
Douthat’s logic seems to suggest that systematic discrimination of certain groups of people that share a particular socio-economic status, political persuasion, ethnicity, or all three combined often precipitates backlashes in the form of paranoia, political division, conspiracy theories, threats of force, and the like. In expanding this view, it could be said that a decrease in discrimination leads to a decrease in the abovementioned backlashes, while an increase in discrimination leads to a proportional worsening of the situation. To further demonstrate this logic, Douthat proposes a solution to the problem of “White Anxiety” that begins in the American universities charged with creating “an elite as diverse as the nation it inhabits.” Douthat states that America and its schools “might be better off if they admitted a few more R.O.T.C cadets, and a few more aspiring farmers.”
Whether or not the Tea Party’s anger is justified is a subjective call, and in order to make such a judgment it is necessary to examine not only the demographic makeup of the group but also the ideas that serve to motivate its action. Douthat may be surprised to find that the Tea Party consists mostly of better educated, older white people who report their economic situation as “fairly” or “very good,” and are equally likely to be employed. These demographics alone don’t lend much credit to the idea that discrimination against poor white farm boys is a driving force behind the discontent of the Tea Party. On the other hand, affirmative action has always been an incendiary issue for the Far Right, so there’s no reason to believe that their reaction to affirmative action policies in American universities would be any different. Affirmative action aside, what are their major complaints and demands? For starters, they are staunchly opposed to any perceived redistribution of wealth often referred to as “socialism” or “communism”, an idea that goes hand in hand with a dreaded expansion of government and the evil twins of spending and taxation. Many of the Tea Party’s ideas or themes, usually the products of base sloganeering, can be found encapsulated on written signs or shouted in chants at Tea Party rallies, one example of such a sign reads: “I’m the 50% stuck paying for the other 50%.” Another expression of this idea comes in a quote from a retired Air Force officer who believes that “…there is a welfare class that lives for having children and receiving payment from the government for having those children.” It should be noted that, even though these sentiments originate from two individuals within the Tea Party, they happen to be widely shared within the group and among the far Right, and are often repeated in more or less the same words. To the Tea Party, the issue of social programs is supposedly tangential to an overarching concern for government spending, and in no way related to views on race, a point to which we will return later. Further, a larger government imbued with a sense of social responsibility is believed to inherently spend with reckless abandon in pursuit of its values at the expense of fiscal conservatism, which somehow leads to the subjugation of hard working Americans by a tyrannical and insatiable welfare class. It only takes a few seconds of internet research to discover that the proportion of US tax dollars dedicated to social programs is not really an issue next to the budgetary black hole that is defense spending, a hole that devours hard work and creative energy from all corners of the country only to spit out a less secure and fractured world on the other end (1). On the subject of defense spending, Tea Party supporters prefer silence, as summed up in this quote from Tea Party leader Sarah Palin: “Something has to be done to stop the Obama-Reid-Pelosi spending machine…We must make sure, however, that we do nothing to undermine the effectiveness of our military. If we lose wars…we risk losing all that makes America great!”
To quickly sum up with Douthat’s argument in mind, the Tea Party is typically made up of well-to-do, older white people who deplore social spending that doesn’t amount to much, but tolerate or wholeheartedly support the most expensive military adventures the planet has ever seen. Fortunately, US Federal law doesn’t bar the harboring of extreme inconsistency. However, since, according to Douthat, discrimination against poor whites is a driving force behind some of the Tea Party’s angry rhetoric, the Tea Party’s view on race must also be examined. If discrimination is truly a concern of the Right Wing, then it should follow that all forms of discrimination are found to be offensive, and that there is plenty of room on the Right for minority groups other than poor white farmers to express this mutually held concern. So, how does the Tea Party feel about race (2)?
“Congress = Slave-owner, Taxpayer = Niggar,” reads a sign proudly owned by Tea Party activist and Teaparty.org operator Dale Robertson. A photograph of Dale Robertson with his sign was taken at a Houston Tea Party rally on February 9, 2009, and is posted below.
If such a display of superior ignorance isn’t shocking enough, there have been numerous other equally offensive declarations of hate from the Tea Party and friends. At a Tea Party protest against health care reform in Washington, angry demonstrators outside the US Capitol shouted “Nigger!” at Georgia congressman John Lewis, spat on other members of the Black Caucus, and shouted “faggot” at Barney Frank, an openly gay congressman from Massachusetts. Of course, it can be argued that a few isolated incidents of wide open racism and bigotry do not prove that the Tea Party itself is bigoted, for that you would need to ask all of them how they feel about such a topic (4). Fortunately, the University of Washington Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race & Sexuality conducted a comprehensive survey examining the racial attitudes of the Tea Party and individuals with similar political leanings. The study reveals that there’s not much difference between Dale Robertson, the angry spitting protestors outside of the Capitol and the rest of the Tea Party and its sympathizers. In fact, this particular political grouping is more likely than any other category of individuals to be “racially resentful,” “25% more likely, to be exact.” When asked to read the following statement; “if blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites,” 73% of Tea Party supporters agreed. In addition, the Far Right is also much more inclined to believe that “Barack Obama favors blacks over whites,” and that “too much has been made of the problems facing black people” (5). All of this begs the question; hasn’t too much been made of the problems facing poor white farm boys? And, if these poor white farm boys just tried harder, wouldn’t they be able to do as well as their wealthier white counterparts? Douthat obviously doesn’t agree. Apparently, the only group facing systematic discrimination is poor rural whites, while the blame for black disenfranchisement more likely falls on their poor black genetics or their aversion to “real work.”
Let’s continue to assume for the sake of argument that the actual cause of “White Anxiety” is systematic discrimination while keeping in mind the great lengths in which the Tea Party and its sympathizers have gone to show their anger, and the sizeable amount of anger they have to show. Let’s also assume that “all men are created equal,” and that discrimination against blacks must also be the cause of widespread and historic black disenfranchisement. If the Tea Party is entitled, as Douthat argues, to be wildly paranoid, to openly carry firearms to rallies, to spit and assault congressmen in expressing anger at perceived systematic injustice, then what are black victims of discrimination entitled to? In order to estimate what degree of public anger black people are entitled to, it is necessary to examine their situation in America, a situation that goes much deeper than recent trends in affirmative action, one that goes back hundreds of years and involves infinitely more outright and violent oppression than American whites have ever experienced as a group. For the purposes of this article, we’ll only explore a few bits and pieces of the current economic and political condition of black America, which is horrible enough.
As noted above, most of those involved with the Tea Party are lucky enough to report their economic situation as “fairly” or “very” good. What about the economic situation of most African Americans? For the purposes of clearly comparing the “economic situation” of black and white households, I will examine current disparities in wealth accumulation while accounting for income. Income is the money you make every week or month, while wealth is the amount of money you are able to accumulate. Public policies in the US have a major role to play in any given family’s ability to accumulate wealth, and, at one point in our history, these economic policies were used as a tool in preventing black Americans from owning property, obtaining business loans or mortgages, and excluding blacks from labor unions (6). Most of these policies proved to be too transparently discriminatory in nature to survive the civil rights movement; however, some of the more subtly racist policies still lurk in the semantic shadows of technical wording.
Evidence of discriminatory policy was found in a recent study conducted by the Institute of Assets and Social Policy where economic data shows that, between the years of 1984 and 2007, the wealth gap between black and white Americans increased fourfold from $20,000 to $95,000 (see graph below). The most shocking aspect of the study comes in the finding that, by 2007, middle-income white households accumulated an average of $74,000 while high-income blacks only accumulated an average of $18,000 (7). The study finds additionally that public policies, in general, tend to favor wealthier Americans, who also happen to be overwhelmingly white. For instance, tax cuts on income and inheritances were found to benefit wealthier individuals and to disadvantage “others through discrimination in housing, credit, and labor markets.” In a system intended to benefit or harm everyone more or less equally, we find that white people who earn less than blacks can save not two or three, but four times as much money as blacks. There are only two explanations for this phenomenon: first, the disparities are the result of systematic racial discrimination, or second, black people, as a whole, don’t value wealth accumulation the same as whites and therefore choose not to save their money on the same level as whites. It must be noted that evidence for the “blacks don’t care about saving money” theory has yet to be found.
It’s difficult to imagine that black Americans were better off economically several decades ago, especially when many of us assume that the civil struggles of the black community are almost over, or “90%” complete, as President Obama would have you believe (8). But, such crushing statistics do nothing if not reveal the outline of a great mountain yet to be climbed by black America. From the perspective of these statistics, promise is nowhere to be seen where dramatic regression is the norm. Racial discrimination in America isn’t restricted to economic policy; it’s more of a pervasive undercurrent that exerts an invisible force in all areas of public and private life, from the work place to the segregation of American cities and from economic policy to the legal system.
In the United States Declaration of Independence it is stated that…”all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” The commitment to the idea that “all men are created equal” is embodied in the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which states that “…no state shall…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” American justice, at its very core, is built to ensure that no man shall exist above the law, a supreme law incapable of recognizing the wealth, color, or infamy of any before it. But, is American justice blind? If so, then what accounts for the revelations of a 2007 study of death sentences in Connecticut by Yale University in which it was found that blacks receive the death penalty at three times the rate of whites in crimes where the victim is white? What accounts for the fact that killers of white victims are sentenced more harshly than those of minorities, or that minorities who kill whites or more likely to be sentenced to death than minorities who kill minorities?
Sentencing patterns in cases of violent crime seem to suggest the assignment of inconsistent values for human life, while similarly, the incarceration rate of individuals found guilty of victimless crimes suggests that skin color is a primary determinate in assessing the severity of such crimes.(9) According to congressional testimony by Marc Mauer on behalf of The Sentencing Project, while black Americans make up 13% of the population and 14% of drug users, they represent 37% of the people arrested for drug offenses. In fact, the incarceration of black men is so widespread that it’s a main contributor in the breakdown of the black family in which a child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a child born during slavery. Many of these black men, upon being released from prison, are relegated to a second-class status in which they can be legally “denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great- grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.” What do the apologists for such a system have to say for these shocking miscarriages of justice and the explosion of the prison population? The most common response will involve pervasive and out of control crime, but this response holds no water in light of the fact that crime rates haven’t changed much over the last few decades and right now they are at an historic low. On the other hand, imprisonment rates have quintupled over the same period of time, leaving everyone scratching their heads as to the nature of the relationship between crime and imprisonment. Legal scholar Michelle Alexander, author of the book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, believes that cynical politics helped to create a system designed to disenfranchise blacks through incarceration, a system that began with Ronald Reagan’s successful push for an all out and bloody War on Drugs (10). This may be the case, but this revelation alone doesn’t go far enough in washing the images of black criminals, the notions of black welfare state dependency, and the fear of black men in general, out of the American mind. To refer back to the quote above from the retired Air Force officer who believes that in America exists a class of people devoted to earning government money from having children, what skin color do you think he sees when he imagines such a class of people?
Maybe it isn’t news that certain public policies are discriminatory in nature or that the American criminal justice system tends to remove the kid gloves for minorities, but what about the ongoing unraveling of the American economy? What does this economic devastation look like through the prism of race? Unsurprisingly, the most recent bubble burst has hit minority communities the hardest in almost every way, especially blacks. This year, the black unemployment rate is set to reach an all time high with a national rate of “17.2 percent and rates in five states exceeding 20 percent,” far higher than that of whites. To make matters worse, Kai Filion, a research analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, believes that, as a result of economic losses, there could be a substantial spike in child poverty for black children from 34 percent in 2008 to above 50 percent (11). The nature of a possible 50 percent child poverty rate in the world’s richest nation, as shocking as it is, rarely garners the media attention is so desperately deserves. In fact, to many of America’s Far Right, this statistic is less of a wake up call to America than an exhibit of proof for their widely held idea that the plight of black America is simply the culmination of a series of bad choices and cultural deficiencies. The history of black poverty and marginalization is so inextricably intertwined with perceptions of blacks in general, that to some it would be a far greater surprise if they were able to pull themselves out of the shadows of history, than it is to just watch them sink deeper into desperation.
In an America where being born black makes you three times as likely to be poor as a white person, less likely to be educated, less likely to come from a stable household, and more likely to be imprisoned and imprisoned for longer, what else could possibly add to an already dismal starting point? Hatred and violence. According to the FBI’s 2009 report Confronting the New Faces of Hate: Hate Crime in America, “African Americans remain by far the most frequent victims of hate crimes,” an absolutely dire situation that has “changed little over the last ten years.” It seems that only in the realm of hatred and violence against blacks can you find the opposite of discrimination; a favorable treatment of the most unwelcome kind. American blacks’ being the focal point of race-fueled hate and the tacit acceptance of this state of affairs by American history’s most power-friendly media isn’t at all surprising given that Fox News has recently hit its 100th consecutive month as the top cable news network (12). Fox News is also the number one platform, energizer, and fund raising base of the Tea Party and the Far Right, which also happens to be the central hub of wealthy, white American racists. While it is true that certain “left-leaning” news outlets criticize and trivialize Far Right movements, it is also true that these movements have a sound and well funded base in the American media, and further, the American conscience. The Far Right’s issues with the Obama administration and Democratic law makers in general are aired ad-nauseum regardless of their newsworthiness or substance. One only needs to hear the words “birth certificate” to immediately recall the recent non-controversy over Barack Obama’s citizenship status. Similarly, the idea of health care “death panels” effectively hijacked the national dialogue in the debate over an issue of far greater importance, that of healthcare as a human right. In sharp contrast, how often does one hear of a possible 50 percent black poverty rate, or the disproportionate share of hate crimes experienced by blacks? The very fact that such infantile propositions as “death panels” and “birth certificates” are given priority on the national stage goes a long way in showing just how much voice and opportunity is granted to the rich white community. It is not the case that the issues of the Far Right are more important than those of black people; it is more the case that the Far Right is itself more important than black people. Which brings us to conservative columnist Ross Douthat and his article “The Roots of White Anxiety?”
Douthat sincerely believes that discrimination against “Red America” in the halls of our liberal, elitist universities coupled with “liberal media” bias and contempt is justification enough for all of the gun-carrying vitriol displayed shamelessly by the Tea Party and the Far Right. If one study exposing a few of the first recorded incidents of systematic discrimination against whites warrants the irrational anger accompanied by threats of force brought forth from the Far Right, then, certainly, a centuries long history of violent oppression continuing to this present day warrants a response of far greater proportion from the black community, and to add to it, a follow-up article/apology on the roots of black anxiety written by none other than Ross Douthat. In this article, “The Roots of Black Anxiety,” we may read about how the Watts Riots of 1965 and the Los Angeles Riots of 1992 were the result of widespread and systematic racial discrimination fixed to a targeted and ageless public smear campaign against black America. We may read further that, the powers that be would be well served in correcting all of the existing systems that propagate racial discrimination against blacks in addition to reversing the caustic images of blacks as welfare queens, criminals, drug addicts, and degenerates purposefully and cynically generated throughout history by a wealthy, white-dominated media. In this way, “The Roots of Black Anxiety” would at least lend Douthat an air of consistency, even if racial discrimination is obviously not what has the Tea Party literally up in arms. A very simple thought experiment solidifies this point, and goes as follows: For every over-the-top display of anger and white nationalism by the Tea Party and its ilk, just imagine the media’s reaction if all those faces in a crowd foaming with anger were black. Imagine hoards of pissed-off black people numbering in the thousands, some armed to the teeth, fueled by an overwhelming sense of entitlement, openly threatening revolution and separation while echoing slogans dipped in thinly veiled racism. Further, what would be the reaction if these black patriots expressed a strongly-held desire to “Take America Back!?” Would conservatives refer to this movement as a “freedom movement” made up of true American patriots, one which signals a glimmer of hope in a nation overshadowed by a towering and tyrannical socialist government? I’ll let you decide.
- http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/weekinreview/18zernike.html?_r=1&emc=eta1
- http://www.unitedliberty.org/articles/6246-tea-party-embraces-neo-conservatism
- http://washingtonindependent.com/73036/n-word-sign-dogs-would-be-tea-party-leader
- http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/03/20/90772/rep-john-lewis-charges-protesters.html
- (http://www.newsweek.com/2010/04/25/are-tea-partiers-racist.html
- http://academic.udayton.edu/race/04needs/housing06.htm
- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8690329.stm
- http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/study-shows-blacks-will-never-gain-wealth-parity-whites-under-current-system
- http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/node/2245
- http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/03/new-jim-crow-war-on-drugs
- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/14/AR2010011404085.html
- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/28/cable-news-ratings-april_n_554295.html
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