Why White People are Afraid (article)

[InRareForm]

http://www.alternet.org/story/36892/

The Fears of White People
by Robert Jensen
Journalism Prof. @ U of T

It may seem self-indulgent to talk about the fears of white people in
a white-supremacist society. After all, what do white people really
have to be afraid of in a world structured on white privilege? It may
be self-indulgent, but it's critical to understand because these fears
are part of what keeps many white people from confronting ourselves
and the system.

The first, and perhaps most crucial, fear is that of facing the fact
that some of what we white people have is unearned. It's a truism that
we don't really make it on our own; we all have plenty of help to
achieve whatever we achieve. That means that some of what we have
is
the product of the work of others, distributed unevenly across
society, over which we may have little or no control individually. No
matter how hard we work or how smart we are, we all know -- when we
are honest with ourselves -- that we did not get where we are by merit
alone. And many white people are afraid of that fact.

A second fear is crasser: White people's fear of losing what we have
-- literally the fear of losing things we own if at some point the
economic, political, and social systems in which we live become more
just and equitable. That fear is not completely irrational; if white
privilege -- along with the other kinds of privilege many of us have
living in the middle class and above in an imperialist country that
dominates much of the rest of the world -- were to evaporate, the
distribution of resources in the United States and in the world would
change, and that would be a good thing. We would have less. That
redistribution of wealth would be fairer and more just. But in a world
in which people have become used to affluence and material comfort,
that possibility can be scary.

A third fear involves a slightly different scenario -- a world in
which non-white people might someday gain the kind of power over
whites that whites have long monopolized. One hears this constantly in
the conversation about immigration, the lingering fear that somehow
"they" (meaning not just Mexican-Americans and Latinos more
generally,
but any non-white immigrants) are going to keep moving to this country
and at some point become the majority demographically. Even though
whites likely can maintain a disproportionate share of wealth, those
numbers will eventually translate into political, economic, and
cultural power. And then what? Many whites fear that the result won't
be a system that is more just, but a system in which white people
become the minority and could be treated as whites have long treated
non-whites. This is perhaps the deepest fear that lives in the heart
of whiteness. It is not really a fear of non-white people. It's a fear
of the depravity that lives in o!
ur own hearts: Are non-white people capable of doing to us the
barbaric things we have done to them?

A final fear has probably always haunted white people but has become
more powerful since the society has formally rejected overt racism:
The fear of being seen, and seen-through, by non-white people.
Virtually every white person I know, including white people fighting
for racial justice and including myself, carries some level of racism
in our minds and hearts and bodies. In our heads, we can pretend to
eliminate it, but most of us know it is there. And because we are all
supposed to be appropriately anti-racist, we carry that lingering
racism with a new kind of fear: What if non-white people look at us
and can see it? What if they can see through us? What if they can look
past our anti-racist vocabulary and sense that we still don't really
know how to treat them as equals? What if they know about us what
we
don't dare know about ourselves? What if they can see what we can't
even voice?

I work in a large university with a stated commitment to racial
justice. All of my faculty colleagues, even the most reactionary, have
a stated commitment to racial justice. And yet the fear is palpable.

It is a fear I have struggled with, and I remember the first time I
ever articulated that fear in public. I was on a panel with several
other professors at the University of Texas discussing race and
politics in the O.J. Simpson case. Next to me was an African American
professor. I was talking about media; he was talking about the
culture's treatment of the sexuality of black men. As we talked, I
paid attention to what was happening in me as I sat next to him. I
felt uneasy. I had no reason to be uncomfortable around him, but I
wasn't completely comfortable. During the question-and-answer period
-- I don't remember what question sparked my comment -- I turned to
him and said something like, "It's important to talk about what really
goes on between black and white people in this country. For instance,
why am I feeling afraid of you? I know I have no reason to be afraid,
but I am. Why is that?"

My reaction wasn't a crude physical fear, not some remnant of being
taught that black men are dangerous (though I have had such
reactions
to black men on the street in certain cir stances). Instead, I think
it was that fear of being seen through by non-white people, especially
when we are talking about race. In that particular moment, for a white
academic on an O.J. panel, my fear was of being exposed as a fraud
or
some kind of closet racist. Even if I thought I knew what I was
talking about and was being appropriately anti-racist in my analysis,
I was afraid that some lingering trace of racism would show through,
and that my black colleague would identify it for all in the room to
see. After I publicly recognized the fear, I think I started to let go
of some of it. Like anything, it's a struggle. I can see ways in which
I have made progress. I can see that in many situations I speak more
freely and honestly as I let go of the fear. I make mistakes, but as I
become less te!
rrified of making mistakes I find that I can trust my instincts more
and be more open to critique when my instincts are wrong.

This essay is excerpted from The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting
Race,

[Anti.Hero]

I am an individual. Not a "white person". Self-imposed racism will only hold you back.

The first, and perhaps most crucial, fear is that of facing the fact
that some of what we white people have is unearned. It's a truism that
we don't really make it on our own; we all have plenty of help to
achieve whatever we achieve. That means that some of what we have
is
the product of the work of others, distributed unevenly across
society, over which we may have little or no control individually. No
matter how hard we work or how smart we are, we all know -- when we
are honest with ourselves -- that we did not get where we are by merit
alone. And many white people are afraid of that fact.

the
distribution of resources in the United States and in the world would
change, and that would be a good thing. We would have less. That
redistribution of wealth would be fairer and more just. But in a world
in which people have become used to affluence and material comfort,
that possibility can be scary.

lmao

[Ignignokt]

http://www.alternet.org/story/36892/

The Fears of White People
by Robert Jensen
Journalism Prof. @ U of T

It may seem self-indulgent to talk about the fears of white people in
a white-supremacist society. After all, what do white people really
have to be afraid of in a world structured on white privilege? It may
be self-indulgent, but it's critical to understand because these fears
are part of what keeps many white people from confronting ourselves
and the system.

The first, and perhaps most crucial, fear is that of facing the fact
that some of what we white people have is unearned. It's a truism that
we don't really make it on our own; we all have plenty of help to
achieve whatever we achieve. That means that some of what we have
is
the product of the work of others, distributed unevenly across
society, over which we may have little or no control individually. No
matter how hard we work or how smart we are, we all know -- when we
are honest with ourselves -- that we did not get where we are by merit
alone. And many white people are afraid of that fact.

A second fear is crasser: White people's fear of losing what we have
-- literally the fear of losing things we own if at some point the
economic, political, and social systems in which we live become more
just and equitable. That fear is not completely irrational; if white
privilege -- along with the other kinds of privilege many of us have
living in the middle class and above in an imperialist country that
dominates much of the rest of the world -- were to evaporate, the
distribution of resources in the United States and in the world would
change, and that would be a good thing. We would have less. That
redistribution of wealth would be fairer and more just. But in a world
in which people have become used to affluence and material comfort,
that possibility can be scary.

A third fear involves a slightly different scenario -- a world in
which non-white people might someday gain the kind of power over
whites that whites have long monopolized. One hears this constantly in
the conversation about immigration, the lingering fear that somehow
"they" (meaning not just Mexican-Americans and Latinos more
generally,
but any non-white immigrants) are going to keep moving to this country
and at some point become the majority demographically. Even though
whites likely can maintain a disproportionate share of wealth, those
numbers will eventually translate into political, economic, and
cultural power. And then what? Many whites fear that the result won't
be a system that is more just, but a system in which white people
become the minority and could be treated as whites have long treated
non-whites. This is perhaps the deepest fear that lives in the heart
of whiteness. It is not really a fear of non-white people. It's a fear
of the depravity that lives in o!
ur own hearts: Are non-white people capable of doing to us the
barbaric things we have done to them?

A final fear has probably always haunted white people but has become
more powerful since the society has formally rejected overt racism:
The fear of being seen, and seen-through, by non-white people.
Virtually every white person I know, including white people fighting
for racial justice and including myself, carries some level of racism
in our minds and hearts and bodies. In our heads, we can pretend to
eliminate it, but most of us know it is there. And because we are all
supposed to be appropriately anti-racist, we carry that lingering
racism with a new kind of fear: What if non-white people look at us
and can see it? What if they can see through us? What if they can look
past our anti-racist vocabulary and sense that we still don't really
know how to treat them as equals? What if they know about us what
we
don't dare know about ourselves? What if they can see what we can't
even voice?

I work in a large university with a stated commitment to racial
justice. All of my faculty colleagues, even the most reactionary, have
a stated commitment to racial justice. And yet the fear is palpable.

It is a fear I have struggled with, and I remember the first time I
ever articulated that fear in public. I was on a panel with several
other professors at the University of Texas discussing race and
politics in the O.J. Simpson case. Next to me was an African American
professor. I was talking about media; he was talking about the
culture's treatment of the sexuality of black men. As we talked, I
paid attention to what was happening in me as I sat next to him. I
felt uneasy. I had no reason to be uncomfortable around him, but I
wasn't completely comfortable. During the question-and-answer period
-- I don't remember what question sparked my comment -- I turned to
him and said something like, "It's important to talk about what really
goes on between black and white people in this country. For instance,
why am I feeling afraid of you? I know I have no reason to be afraid,
but I am. Why is that?"

My reaction wasn't a crude physical fear, not some remnant of being
taught that black men are dangerous (though I have had such
reactions
to black men on the street in certain cir stances). Instead, I think
it was that fear of being seen through by non-white people, especially
when we are talking about race. In that particular moment, for a white
academic on an O.J. panel, my fear was of being exposed as a fraud
or
some kind of closet racist. Even if I thought I knew what I was
talking about and was being appropriately anti-racist in my analysis,
I was afraid that some lingering trace of racism would show through,
and that my black colleague would identify it for all in the room to
see. After I publicly recognized the fear, I think I started to let go
of some of it. Like anything, it's a struggle. I can see ways in which
I have made progress. I can see that in many situations I speak more
freely and honestly as I let go of the fear. I make mistakes, but as I
become less te!
rrified of making mistakes I find that I can trust my instincts more
and be more open to critique when my instincts are wrong.

This essay is excerpted from The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting
Race,

WTF?

White liberals are the dumbest pussiest people on earth.

[Extra Stout]

At last year's national White Privilege Planning Meeting, I proposed an initiative to start inviting selected Hispanics to become members so that we can keep the other races down as a team. The initiative failed; however, I plan to keep bringing it up.

[Ignignokt]

At last year's national White Privilege Planning Meeting, I proposed an initiative to start inviting selected Hispanics to become members so that we can keep the other races down as a team. The initiative failed; however, I plan to keep bringing it up.

We don't want them Jose's and Lopezs infiltrating our pure nordic heritage! Git out of here!

[shelshor]

wTF? Sounds like his biggest fear is that he might have to get a real job, instead of teaching the future members of the M$M how to spew inane drivel

[BradLohaus]

A liberal arts professor at UT wrote this? I would have never guessed.

[InRareForm]

LOL @ most playing the typical liberal label game and going from there instead of talking about valid points about the topic of race that many people want to ignore.

[Sec24Row7]

What a pussy dumb .

His IQ may be high, but I could punch him in the face and take his girlfriend and he would be too distraught about the state of the world to do anything about it.

Where does that leave him on the evolutionary ladder?

[2centsworth]

i didn't read much that was legitamate unless it was directed at the KKK and not white people as a whole.

[Oh, Gee!!]

What a pussy dumb .

His IQ may be high, but I could punch him in the face and take his girlfriend and he would be too distraught about the state of the world to do anything about it.

****internets tough guy alert****

[Extra Stout]

LOL @ most playing the typical liberal label game and going from there instead of talking about valid points about the topic of race that many people want to ignore.

Jensen's treatise was not an honest discussion about race. At least not outside, perhaps, of his personal experience. He indulges a lot of fictions which are en vogue on the left. I have some ideas about why he and other liberals do this.

As for his first point, I can understand why somebody who has spent his whole life in academia might feel some guilt about enjoying a high standard of living on the backs of others. Generalizing that to all white people is a fiction.

His first idea is that whites enjoy prosperity because they have stolen from the fruit of nonwhites. This is often expressed as the notion that American wealth was built on the backs of slave labor. Unfortunately, that is a fiction. The injustice there was that blacks were systematically excluded from the system of wealth creation for several hundred years. The fruits of the economy based on slavery did not survive the end of slavery.

The instance where whites really benefitted from the labors of blacks unfairly was the aftermath of integration. What we did in this country was integrate labor and integrate customers, but we never integrated capital. As a result, only the "talented tenth" (really more like a third) of blacks benefitted from integration.

The analogy I always use here is Black Baseball. We're all so proud of ourselves for letting Jackie Robinson play for the Dodgers. Oh, how magnanimous of us for letting white owners benefit from the best black players, and from the richest black customers coming to see those black players.

Nobody ever so much as entertained the notion of true integration -- that is, merging the Major Leagues with the Black Baseball Leagues. It never even entered their minds.

The result of this is that a whole bunch of people lost their jobs.

The same thing happened with integration. The artificial structures of segregation created a black economy wherein even though blacks were denied equal access to capital to run businesses, they had a captive market of fellow blacks. With the way we did integration, those black businesses were swiftly exposed to compe ion from white businesses offering superior goods and services owing to their easier access to capital. The black economy was devastated in just a few years.

Unfortunately, it is not so easy to fix this as just making capital access easier for blacks, which the government does, because the sudden economic collapse in the 1960's and 1970's effected a major cultural collapse, when black men in masse no longer had any means to take care of their families and said families imploded, a catastrophe which we still see the effects of today.

The reason I think Jensen et al promote this fiction about black slave labor somehow being the backbone of American prosperity today (the Civil War destroyed that economy, and agriculture as a source of meaningful national wealth anywhere in the world disappeared around the turn of the 20th century), is because of another unspoken problem nobody is honest about: black self-loathing.

Blacks don't have the wealth of cultural legacy that other people groups have. The past 550 years have been terrible for people of African descent worldwide. The disruption of millenium-old trade routes by the fall of Constantinople along with the relentless expansion of the Sahara desert snuffed out African human development. Until then, trade in gold made kingdoms like Ghana and Djenne wealthy and powerful. Byzantine and Arab chroniclers tell of the splendor of these kingdoms and of their beautiful art. Timbuktu was a world cultural center of the order of Granada, Baghdad, or Ani. A great civilization flourished in what we call Zimbabwe.

Most of what we might have known about those peoples is lost. The legacy since then has been that of domination by other peoples, Arab and European. Slavery. Colonization. Segregation. Poverty. Disease.

And then in America, when blacks finally were starting to get something like a fair shake, their communities promptly collapsed, for the reasons I described above. They look at the African homeland and see a basket case. The upshot is that a lot of blacks have internalized the message of inferiority. Oh, they might talk a good game about how it's all because of systematic oppression, but it's a halfhearted argument. This self-loathing is manifested in widespread aversion to achievement, because they're convinced ultimately it is futile.

Another thing people aren't honest about is how the black talented "tenth" (third, really) is embarrassed and ashamed of the underclass.

So what I think Jensen and the liberals are doing is patronizing blacks. They lie and say, "There, there, really, you built America." Honesty isn't in the cards. Honesty would say that there is no difference whatsoever in cognitive potential across various people groups, that cultural development is a matter of chance, and that history is replete with instances of people groups going from the bottom to the top in a few centuries (Arabs, Goths, Turks, etc.).

Well, enough of the history lesson. His next "fear" is about worldwide wealth distribution. The kernel of truth there is that Americans have been able to live in prosperity largely because the poverty of much of the rest of the world has depressed demand for scarce goods. With the emerge of a nation like China, we observe that the price of commodities skyrockets, and prosperity is tougher to achieve. The fiction is the idea that if we redistributed wealth to blacks, whites somehow would lose out. This is utter nonsense. I spoke above of the benefit to the mainstream American economy when the "talented tenth" was granted admittance.

What would happen if we redistributed wealth to the black underclass is that it would slip right through their fingers and go right back to the people who had it in the first place. This is a nasty effect of the cultural collapse that I spoke of above. The underclass has no concept of how to retain wealth. Rather than say that, again, Jensen and the liberals find it easier to lie to blacks and patronize them. This is easier than trying to figure out how to undo the cultural collapse, which after all is really hard to do.

The third fear is another fiction. Look, the system of white privilege boils down to this: the American system of government, its economy, its social ins utions, you name it, was developed by white English-speaking males (and by white I mean northern European). Everyone else was excluded. Today, all those ins utions still bear the marks of that legacy. Efforts to "deconstruct" that legacy in the culture have proved futile. This means that white English-speaking males still have an inherent advantage, because all the little non-verbal cues and assumptions in society are their own. Everybody else has to adapt to some degree. They have to pry their way into the club. You can no more undo this than you can make China un-Chinese. There is no way anyone will be able to build a parallel culture and topple the dominant one. There is no way some group of nonwhites will ever topple white dominance, because the only way to get into that position in the first place is to tap into the pillars of the dominant culture, at which point that group ceases to be nonwhite. Reference, for example, the Irish and the Italians.

The people who are afraid of Mexican immigrants usually are not the ones who are benefitting from white privilege. They are working-class people of limited resources who struggle to adapt to change.

The final fear, about being "seen through," probably is authentically a liberal one. Lots of liberals set up these fictions about race and tell themselves if they repeat them all by rote that they are good, moral people who aren't racists. It is all for show. It serves as a subs ute for actually interacting with real life black people. Because in dealing with American blacks there is both the baggage of history, and also the curious phenomenon of black and white cultures being just similar enough that people think they're getting comfortable and familiar with one another, and just different enough so that when they do they commit cultural blunders that impede understanding (the last time I did this was when I left a neighbor's birthday party after four hours and lots of her relatives took offense because the assumption was that people would stay through the evening).

The lingering effects of what would be called "structural racism" do not require anybody actually actively to oppress other races anymore. In addition, they are intractable in the short to medium term, and nobody seems to have much in the way of good ideas. But in our discourse, being "racist" is basically the worst possible thing a person can be. It is considered the utmost in depravity. Therefore, throwing the word "racism" around immediately stops all communication. So nobody is willing to be honest and say that cleaving to others like oneself and distrust of those who are different is an innate part of human nature that everybody has to struggle with. Nobody is willing to be honest and say that figuring out the black plight in America is going to be really freaking hard.

And, nobody is willing to be honest and say that the biggest problem with white people and the reason most of us don't want to talk about race has a lot more to do with callous indifference than it does with fear or hate, because in America in 2008, a white person never ever really has to deal with race unless he feels like it. That, for blacks, has got to be the most frustrating thing of all.

[jochhejaam]

Nobody is willing to be honest and say that figuring out the black plight in America is going to be really freaking hard.

And, nobody is willing to be honest and say that the biggest problem with white people and the reason most of us don't want to talk about race has a lot more to do with callous indifference than it does with fear or hate, because in America in 2008, a white person never ever really has to deal with race unless he feels like it. That, for blacks, has got to be the most frustrating thing of all.

I may not be on the same page Stout, but by "figuring out the black plight" I assume you mean coming up with a workable solution to reversing their status quo? If that's the case, I think almost everyone would be honest and say that it seems difficult if not next to impossible.

I'm with blacks everyday and there is frequent verbal interaction, but I honestly wouldn't know where to begin in a discussion about race, I don't feel like that fact equates to my being indifferent or callous about discussing it.
What would be the purpose of getting into race dialogue with my African American supervisors or co-workers?

On a National level, the dialogue often seems to end up with talk of affirmative action, quotas or reparations, and none of these offer much, if anything, that would resemble a solution for resolving or reversing their plight.
Obama recently offered up some remedies, similar to those frequently visited by Cosby, Sowell, among others, that offer a step in the right direction, but the medicines needed for these remedies are unpalatable to those in peril to the extent that they are unrealizable.
(getting an education and being a responsible father and husband shouldn't be unrealistic, but for way too many, that's where we're at)

As some columnist wrote recently, we now have a generation of African American men where a vast majority of them are neither married nor marriageable, employed or employable.



<looking forward to an education, anticipating a possible smackdown along with it, if you would be so kind as to keep the latter to a minimum, that would be great>

[MaNuMaNiAc]

Jesus...

Is there anything you're NOT well versed in Extra??

[Sec24Row7]

****internets tough guy alert****

ROFL not at all... wasn't a threat of violence. I'm just saying his philosophy of life seems to put him above human nature and ingrained social structure.

I doubt Human nature and Society have the same respect for him... which make his ideals pointless and irrelevant.

[Spur-Addict]

Jensen's treatise was not an honest discussion about race. At least not outside, perhaps, of his personal experience. He indulges a lot of fictions which are en vogue on the left. I have some ideas about why he and other liberals do this.

As for his first point, I can understand why somebody who has spent his whole life in academia might feel some guilt about enjoying a high standard of living on the backs of others. Generalizing that to all white people is a fiction.

His first idea is that whites enjoy prosperity because they have stolen from the fruit of nonwhites. This is often expressed as the notion that American wealth was built on the backs of slave labor. Unfortunately, that is a fiction. The injustice there was that blacks were systematically excluded from the system of wealth creation for several hundred years. The fruits of the economy based on slavery did not survive the end of slavery.

The instance where whites really benefitted from the labors of blacks unfairly was the aftermath of integration. What we did in this country was integrate labor and integrate customers, but we never integrated capital. As a result, only the "talented tenth" (really more like a third) of blacks benefitted from integration.

The analogy I always use here is Black Baseball. We're all so proud of ourselves for letting Jackie Robinson play for the Dodgers. Oh, how magnanimous of us for letting white owners benefit from the best black players, and from the richest black customers coming to see those black players.

Nobody ever so much as entertained the notion of true integration -- that is, merging the Major Leagues with the Black Baseball Leagues. It never even entered their minds.

The result of this is that a whole bunch of people lost their jobs.

The same thing happened with integration. The artificial structures of segregation created a black economy wherein even though blacks were denied equal access to capital to run businesses, they had a captive market of fellow blacks. With the way we did integration, those black businesses were swiftly exposed to compe ion from white businesses offering superior goods and services owing to their easier access to capital. The black economy was devastated in just a few years.

Unfortunately, it is not so easy to fix this as just making capital access easier for blacks, which the government does, because the sudden economic collapse in the 1960's and 1970's effected a major cultural collapse, when black men in masse no longer had any means to take care of their families and said families imploded, a catastrophe which we still see the effects of today.

The reason I think Jensen et al promote this fiction about black slave labor somehow being the backbone of American prosperity today (the Civil War destroyed that economy, and agriculture as a source of meaningful national wealth anywhere in the world disappeared around the turn of the 20th century), is because of another unspoken problem nobody is honest about: black self-loathing.

Blacks don't have the wealth of cultural legacy that other people groups have. The past 550 years have been terrible for people of African descent worldwide. The disruption of millenium-old trade routes by the fall of Constantinople along with the relentless expansion of the Sahara desert snuffed out African human development. Until then, trade in gold made kingdoms like Ghana and Djenne wealthy and powerful. Byzantine and Arab chroniclers tell of the splendor of these kingdoms and of their beautiful art. Timbuktu was a world cultural center of the order of Granada, Baghdad, or Ani. A great civilization flourished in what we call Zimbabwe.

Most of what we might have known about those peoples is lost. The legacy since then has been that of domination by other peoples, Arab and European. Slavery. Colonization. Segregation. Poverty. Disease.

And then in America, when blacks finally were starting to get something like a fair shake, their communities promptly collapsed, for the reasons I described above. They look at the African homeland and see a basket case. The upshot is that a lot of blacks have internalized the message of inferiority. Oh, they might talk a good game about how it's all because of systematic oppression, but it's a halfhearted argument. This self-loathing is manifested in widespread aversion to achievement, because they're convinced ultimately it is futile.

Another thing people aren't honest about is how the black talented "tenth" (third, really) is embarrassed and ashamed of the underclass.

So what I think Jensen and the liberals are doing is patronizing blacks. They lie and say, "There, there, really, you built America." Honesty isn't in the cards. Honesty would say that there is no difference whatsoever in cognitive potential across various people groups, that cultural development is a matter of chance, and that history is replete with instances of people groups going from the bottom to the top in a few centuries (Arabs, Goths, Turks, etc.).

Well, enough of the history lesson. His next "fear" is about worldwide wealth distribution. The kernel of truth there is that Americans have been able to live in prosperity largely because the poverty of much of the rest of the world has depressed demand for scarce goods. With the emerge of a nation like China, we observe that the price of commodities skyrockets, and prosperity is tougher to achieve. The fiction is the idea that if we redistributed wealth to blacks, whites somehow would lose out. This is utter nonsense. I spoke above of the benefit to the mainstream American economy when the "talented tenth" was granted admittance.

What would happen if we redistributed wealth to the black underclass is that it would slip right through their fingers and go right back to the people who had it in the first place. This is a nasty effect of the cultural collapse that I spoke of above. The underclass has no concept of how to retain wealth. Rather than say that, again, Jensen and the liberals find it easier to lie to blacks and patronize them. This is easier than trying to figure out how to undo the cultural collapse, which after all is really hard to do.

The third fear is another fiction. Look, the system of white privilege boils down to this: the American system of government, its economy, its social ins utions, you name it, was developed by white English-speaking males (and by white I mean northern European). Everyone else was excluded. Today, all those ins utions still bear the marks of that legacy. Efforts to "deconstruct" that legacy in the culture have proved futile. This means that white English-speaking males still have an inherent advantage, because all the little non-verbal cues and assumptions in society are their own. Everybody else has to adapt to some degree. They have to pry their way into the club. You can no more undo this than you can make China un-Chinese. There is no way anyone will be able to build a parallel culture and topple the dominant one. There is no way some group of nonwhites will ever topple white dominance, because the only way to get into that position in the first place is to tap into the pillars of the dominant culture, at which point that group ceases to be nonwhite. Reference, for example, the Irish and the Italians.

The people who are afraid of Mexican immigrants usually are not the ones who are benefitting from white privilege. They are working-class people of limited resources who struggle to adapt to change.

The final fear, about being "seen through," probably is authentically a liberal one. Lots of liberals set up these fictions about race and tell themselves if they repeat them all by rote that they are good, moral people who aren't racists. It is all for show. It serves as a subs ute for actually interacting with real life black people. Because in dealing with American blacks there is both the baggage of history, and also the curious phenomenon of black and white cultures being just similar enough that people think they're getting comfortable and familiar with one another, and just different enough so that when they do they commit cultural blunders that impede understanding (the last time I did this was when I left a neighbor's birthday party after four hours and lots of her relatives took offense because the assumption was that people would stay through the evening).

The lingering effects of what would be called "structural racism" do not require anybody actually actively to oppress other races anymore. In addition, they are intractable in the short to medium term, and nobody seems to have much in the way of good ideas. But in our discourse, being "racist" is basically the worst possible thing a person can be. It is considered the utmost in depravity. Therefore, throwing the word "racism" around immediately stops all communication. So nobody is willing to be honest and say that cleaving to others like oneself and distrust of those who are different is an innate part of human nature that everybody has to struggle with. Nobody is willing to be honest and say that figuring out the black plight in America is going to be really freaking hard.

And, nobody is willing to be honest and say that the biggest problem with white people and the reason most of us don't want to talk about race has a lot more to do with callous indifference than it does with fear or hate, because in America in 2008, a white person never ever really has to deal with race unless he feels like it. That, for blacks, has got to be the most frustrating thing of all.

“The fruits of the economy based on slavery did not survive the end of slavery”

Saying that the system of slavery did not survive post slavery is certainly disagreeable. Slavery certainly helped prop up the economy as a whole prior to the abolishing of slavery. Certainly it contributed as a working piece of the economy and made the economy as a whole a larger and a more powerful force. If it weren’t for slavery, the economy wouldn’t be as mighty as it was. This is comparable to losing a portion of a business. Let’s say I own a KFC, a clothing store and a cell phone distribution outlet. Let’s say I own these businesses for over a hundred years. The money I earn obviously reinvests itself many times over and makes my establishment as a whole that much stronger. If one of these businesses are cut short or eliminated, the money just doesn’t disappear. It doesn’t disappear because it is apart of the DNA of the structure as a whole. The money made can also be reinvested into a new avenue of business.

“The instance where whites really benefitted from the labors of blacks unfairly was the aftermath of integration.”

Once again I must disagree. In no way (except human rights of course) does paying your work force benefit you more than not paying your work force. Untaxed money is better than taxed money. A different avenue of business, perhaps a better product may yield more profits, but take away the labor costs and it’s a greater profit. One product may be better than the next so it’s not fair to compare profits. Also, will we just forget about the whites who lose their employment to blacks? Not just a whole bunch of people lost their jobs, more importantly to this debate is that whites lost jobs.

“With the way we did integration, those black businesses were swiftly exposed to compe ion from white businesses offering superior goods and services owing to their easier access to capital.”

Yeah, just like the Black Wall Street situation in Oklahoma, right?

“What would happen if we redistributed wealth to the black underclass is that it would slip right through their fingers and go right back to the people who had it in the first place.”

This is a gross universal statement which gives zero respect to any intellectual capability. If you would have said “some”, or even “most”, there would be a greater possibility of agreement. Also, it’s not like the majority of the white underclass is doing a great job with the retaining of wealth. I personally know a few people who’ve received large settlements and they’ve metaphorically “pissed” it away.

“There is no way some group of nonwhites will ever topple white dominance”

I’m sure this has been said before, just insert some other race.

“because in America in 2008, a white person never ever really has to deal with race unless he feels like it”

Neither do the blacks of 2008. Things are better than they’ve ever been for blacks. There are more black millionaire than any other time in U.S history.

[Aggie Hoopsfan]

Summary: racism is only okay if it's minorities committing it against whitey.

[Spur-Addict]

Summary: racism is only okay if it's minorities committing it against whitey.

Nope...

[Aggie Hoopsfan]

LOL @ most playing the typical liberal label game and going from there instead of talking about valid points about the topic of race that many people want to ignore.

What valid points?

I grew up in what was labeled a middle class white American family.

* I got no scholarships to college because of this label, but several minority classmates of mine that had lower grades and weren't involved in any extracurricular activities did.

* I had to take out student loans to go through college as the costs were higher than what my parents could reasonably afford.

* Now I'm out, and will be paying off student loans for approximately another 15 years or so.

* I busted my ass in school and have a pretty good job to show for it.


What scares me is...

I already see a lot of my paycheck eaten up for welfare programs, and we have a candidate in Obama who has vowed to increase the government handouts to those already receiving a load of welfare.

I'm educated enough to see the looming financial insolvency of social security and Medicare and see none of our sorry ass politicians talking about it.

I see a growing push from the minority segment of our society that reparations should be made to descendants of African slaves, and if it came to that point it would undoubtedly be out of my pocket either a) because I have a job and government taxes would cover it or b) because I'm white.

I see our cons utionally guaranteed rights under assault every day from activist (mainly liberal) judges.

I pay into SS, but know I will never see a ing dime of it.

Because I know I will never see a dime of it, I am being proactive about my own retirement via the stock market and 401k, but our government continues fiscal irresponsibility that is eroding all of that with the decline of the dollar.

Most of the other people at my company feel the same way (the ones I have had talks like this with). So when the author cited says that white people are afraid of losing stuff we don't really deserve, frankly I think he doesn't have a ing clue.

But I don't expect anything less from some liberal professor at UT, which has also provided safe haven for another liberal professor who feels that like the 9/11 attacks on our country are justified and should continue because 'we deserve it'.

[cool hand]

I do not like black people, but I am voting for Obama.

[Ya Vez]

I think obama will have a problem with older hispanics he hasn't seem to have done well with them in the primaries.. so I guess they or we are afraid as well... lol

[2centsworth]

the white man is keeping us down!

[boutons_]

If HUSSEIN loses, it will very probably be because, for many voters, the ONLY issue is the color of his skin.

These people outnumber the blacks who will vote for him because of ... the color of his skin.

Racism is just one more wonderful aspect of America the Beautiful, and proves, again, that America is no different from any other country.

Everybody who votes for tired, old senile McMuzzled:

http://www.jedreport.com/2008/08/mccains-new-pre.html

... should receive a draft notice to go fight in McLame's bull wars-forever.

[Anti.Hero]

It's weird how Asians, Indians, etc are able to eventually do well in America. In a lot of cases, VERY WELL.

What needs to be said, will never be said in the public venue because of political correctness. Oh well.

[Aggie Hoopsfan]

If HUSSEIN loses, it will very probably be because, for many voters, the ONLY issue is the color of his skin.

These people outnumber the blacks who will vote for him because of ... the color of his skin.

Racism is just one more wonderful aspect of America the Beautiful, and proves, again, that America is no different from any other country.

Ignorance personified, good job boutons!

Maybe, just maybe, the election should be about issues. And perhaps McCain will win because people think he'll do a better job at addressing them than the Chosen One.

There's been media reports about blacks who are going to vote for Obama simply because he's black. Obama and his staff have played the race card twice.

If blacks are going to vote for him just because he's black, it's pretty damn hypocritical to have a problem with anyone voting against him because he is (not saying that's the case, just addressing your racist smear).

Everybody who votes for tired, old senile McMuzzled:

http://www.jedreport.com/2008/08/mccains-new-pre.html

... should receive a draft notice to go fight in McLame's bull wars-forever.

If we are going to play that game, everyone who votes for Obama should be the first ones to have their paychecks, no matter how big or small, docked to pay for Obama's bull welfare programs.

Deal?