Why So Many US-American Whites are So Messed Up on Race

Listening by chance to some United States of America (USA) “heartland” Caucasians spew racist nonsense in defense of the fascist teen vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse (the killer of two Black Lives Matter protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin), I was reminded once again that millions upon millions of US-American whites are badly F’d in the head when it comes to race. Vast swaths of white America believe wildly inaccurate things about race in their country, including the notions that Blacks make up 30% to 40% of the U.S. (the nation is 12% Black), that Blacks have become economically equal to whites (median Black household net worth is less than one sixteenth of median white household wealth), that Blacks are moving ahead of whites in terms of economic and political power, that Black people are criminal and indolent, and that whites and not Blacks are now the main victims of racial discrimination and oppression in the USA. For many if not most white Americans outside progressive Left and advanced liberal circles, racism no longer poses any significant barriers (if it ever did in their view) to Black advancement, safety, prosperity, and equality. The problem is especially dire, of course, on the right, amongst those who opinion pollsters label as “conservatives” – the predominantly white right-wingers who are militantly opposed to government action that might begin redress a small portion of the nation’s massive racial disparities.

Insofar as they can acknowledge Black poverty and misery, millions and millions of white USAers understand Black pain and suffering as essentially self-inflicted and deserved. Never mind the plethora of research and investigation showing US-American social, political, and economic institutions function in such a way as to produce stark white-Black disparities in every relevant statistical measurement: wealth, poverty, income, employment, infant mortality, maternal mortality, exposure to pollution, life span, health coverage, criminal branding, incarceration, home ownership, police brutality, access to full service grocery stores, access to green space, access to doctors and dentists, access to banks and loans, exposure to COVID-19, and on and on.

Why are so many US whites so frankly full of shit on race? Here are an unlucky 13 interrelated and overlapping factors, all working within the fundamental historical context of a nation founded and expanded on the basis of Black chattel slavery:

+1. Blinding Segregation and Deceptive Media Images. The USA remains residentially segregated by race to an extreme degree. Besides concentrating Black people in communities where opportunities and resources are scarce (housing markets distribute much more than housing) – and we must include the nation’s giant archipelago of racist jails and prisons – this American Apartheid renders Black experience and reality invisible to most white USAers. (Of course, one does not want to advance this explanation as an excuse: segregation is a result as well as a cause of white racial attitudes and we should not assume that residential proximity and desegregation would necessarily make whites less racially stupid, ignorant, and vicious.). Largely without contact with Black human beings in their daily lives, most whites’ image of Black America relies heavily on media images. And here two very different images predominate: (a) a plethora of wealthy, celebrated, and successful Blacks mostly but not exclusively in the envied spheres of sports and entertainment and (b) a plethora of thug-i-fied violent Black criminals paraded on the nightly news “if it bleeds it leads” crime reports. There’s not a lot of everyday working-class Black people – bus drivers, schoolteachers, nurses, and retail clerks and so on – in US movies and television. There are super-successful Black stars (LeBron and Beyonce et al. and an occasional top Black government official like Barack Obama or Colin Powell) and there’s menacing inner-city gangbangers and car-jackers and little in-between. The first group is taken by many whites as proof that racism no longer poses meaningful barriers to Black advancement in the “land of opportunity.” It also encourages white fears of Black superiority. The second group reinforces white beliefs that Blacks who aren’t living the American Dream deserve their lowly status, police crackdown, and incarceration.

At the same time, television and movies exaggerate the extent to which Black Americans have been integrated into the professional class and the white world more broadly, further damaging whites’ capacity to understand racial disparity and oppression. It is now routine for commercials to portray happy upper middle-class people (consumers) as being far more racially integrated than they really are. This helps feed racial delusion and (on the right) paranoia. Here we see an unintended consequence of the longstanding and frankly childish liberal-Myrdalian program of trying to solve the American Dilemma of race by manipulating public racial representations along integrationist lines. When combined with the upward class bias of the corporate media, which targets people with money, the strategy feeds white racial ignorance and resentment by projecting a wildly overstated picture not just of racial integration but also of Black upward mobility.

+2. Neoliberal/Capitalist Ideology. The dominant neoliberal capitalist ideology erases any societal, structural, and institutional barriers to any Americans’ advancement and equality, reducing everything to “personal responsibility.” Insofar as Black poverty and racial disparity can be acknowledged under the rules of this ideology, it is attributed to Black peoples’ alleged personal and cultural failures. When I was frequently interviewed by reporters on racial matters during my five-year stint as the research director of the (bourgeois) Chicago Urban League, I noticed the recurrent “no context rule” in corporate media: the local papers and evening news crews would report my department’s various depressing findings on racial inequality but routinely deleted our findings on the causes of the disparities. They left out our analysis of the central role that objectively racist (and classist) institutions and social structures played in the creation of the savage inequalities we discovered and documented, leaving news consumers free to blame it all on Blacks’ supposed personal, cultural, and even natural inferiority.

+3. An Overfocus on Subjective Prejudice. A routine and pervasive misunderstanding of racism sees the problem only at the subjective level of personal psychological prejudice, deleting the underling context of white systemic and institutional racism. It’s great that millions of white Americans claim not to be personally prejudiced against people of color, but (a) the claims are often disingenuous and (more to the point), (b) American racism is at bottom systemic, institutional, societal, and indeed (more on this below) historical, deeply rooted in how the nation has been structured from its very origins through the present day. It’s nice that your liberal white aunt voted for a Black mayor and president and put a Black Lives Matter placard sign on her front lawn in a 99% white neighborhood and that many of her neighbors compliment her anti-racist yard sign, but financial and real estate markets have privileged her and her Caucasian community while consigning most Black Americans to communities where resources are woefully inadequate and opportunities are scarce.

+4 “We Had a Black President!” “Don’t talk to me about racism anymore: we had a Black president, Barack Obama, for 8 years for God’s sake!” I have heard some version of this statement from whites since November of 2008 so many times I lost count. It is both problematic and revealing. The white Obama vote was often predicated on him being a deeply conservative and white-pleasing (“Black but not like Jesse”), even Reagan-praising and 1960s-dissing candidate who promised to do very little beyond the symbolic for the nation’s Black population (he delivered on that promise). Serious anti-racism is about changing how the society and its institutions function to replicate and expand white privilege and Black misery, not just putting some nonwhite faces in high places.

With Obama, the nation had an objectively white-supremacist, victim-blaming, and neoliberal kind of half-Black president who posed no threat to existing racial and class rule while helping give capitalist-imperialist America something of a fake-“progressive” and pseudo-multi-cultural makeover. And his racial identity was part of what made him particularly reluctant to do or say much (beyond a goofy “beer summit” with the white cop who mistreated the Black Harvard professor Louis Gates and the statement that Trayvon Martin could have been his son) of anything about racial inequality, which actually deepened during his two presidential terms. While Obama gave the nation a deceptive re-branding at home and abroad, objectively racist financial, labor, and real estate markets and numerous government policies and practices continued to grind down Black America beneath the symbolic civil rights victory of a “first Black president in the land of cotton slavery.” At the same time, the presence of a technically Black man in the White House helped drive untold millions of white Amerikaners out of their racially paranoid minds and into the hands of the paranoid racist white-nationalist right and Donald Trump – ironically enough since Obama did nothing substantive to elevate Black status in the USA.

Obama was actually a nightmare for the struggle for Black equality.

+5. Lost Labor Solidarity. Without exaggerating the anti-racist content of 20^th Century U.S. industrial and business unionism, it is fair to say that the long neoliberal-era accelerated deindustrialization and de-unionization of America has taken away key workplace and organized labor sites and spaces where some substantive measure of working-class solidarity across racial lines was required for union formation and power.

+6. Demographic Change: the nation is heading towards whites being less than half of the total US population by 2050. This simple fact helps fuel white racial paranoia and white nationalist politics and policy, including a post-2020 pandemic of voter suppression and election nullification measures across “red state” America. It lends a certain previously unimaginable credibility to white racial paranoia. It is intimately related to the next point.

+7. Fear of Payback: “They Know They Would Not Like to be Black Here” …for centuries of savage racial oppression (see point 12 below). James Baldwin said it well in a 1979 interview on ABC news:

“White people go around, it seems to me, with a very carefully suppressed terror of Black people—a tremendous uneasiness. They don’t know what the Black face hides. They’re sure it’s hiding something. What it’s hiding is American history. What it’s hiding is what white people know they have done, and what they like doing. White people know very well one thing; it’s the only thing they have to know. They know this; everything else, they’ll say, is a lie. They know they would not like to be Black here. They know that, and they’re telling me lies. They’re telling me and my children nothing but lies.”

Baldwin’s reflections strike me and haunting and germane in a time of ascendant white nationalism with numerous “red states” having made it illegal to tell the truth about the nation’s living racist past and a newly elected right wing Virginia governor calling for the banning of books that honestly discuss the USA’s historical racism.

+8. FOX News, aka Fatherland News, a major corporate white-nationalist television network watched by tens of millions of white Amerikaners and dedicated to the propagation of a savagely whitewashed, racist, and racism-denying fascitization of Amerikan history past and present. Tucker Carlson and other influential Fatherland News proponents of FRT (fascist replacement theory) regularly advance, mock, demonize, and otherwise assault and disparage the elementarily accurate notion that the USA is systemically racist. Curiously enough, white nationalists found allies on the grifter “left,” linking up with former portside mini-celebrities (examples include Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and Jimmy “Boogaloo” Dore) who join the right in mocking anti-racism and defending race- and racism-denying white fascists like Trump and his Capitol Rioters against “liberal totalitarianism.”

+9. Progressive and economist class reductionism. There’s a certain mode of “left” thought claiming that antiracism and even race itself are just silly, “virtue-signaling,” and bourgeois “diversions” – Machiavellian divide-and-rule constructs and games meant to divide the working class and keep it from seeing and uniting to fight the real enemy, the economic One Percent (Berniebro laborite Trumpenelfty white guys are heavy into this narrative.) This is fake and vulgar Marxism – economistic class reductionism that fails to understand key things: the difference between bourgeois anti-racism and Left revolutionary anti-racism; the fundamentally white-supremacist, inherently racialized foundational nature of U.S.-American capitalism- and imperialism (more on this below); the profoundly anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist nature of serious/radical Left anti-racism, which pushes the critique of racism beyond what can be addressed under capitalism-imperialism; the significant extent to which horrific racial oppression and disparity possess “relatively autonomous” lives of their own within (yes) the historical framework of bourgeois class rule; the need for the proletariat and indeed for all people to embrace radical anti-racism not just for the cause of working class solidarity but also for the related sakes of basic morality and human emancipation. Any white “leftist” foolish enough to write that “race…[is] just [one] of the scams and scapegoats that the Lords of the Universe deftly deploy to divide us and divert our gaze from economic and political reality in the United States” needs to get out of their Caucasian bubble and spend some time on the other side of the nation’s savagely separate and unequal racial apartheid wall.

+10. Bourgeois Identity Politics. At the same time, there is in US media, political, and educational culture a pervasive and perverse, elitist liberal and bourgeois racial madness and self-righteous identity obsession that is stripped of proper anti-capitalist content. This often cringeworthy bourgeois identititarianism drives a certainly segment of the (formerly?) progressive community – what might be called “the white male grievance left” – somewhat understandably bonkers. Bourgeois identity madness (and the anti-scientific “standpoint epistemology” that advances and reflects that madness in academic circles) are real and reactionary problems in supposedly left liberal forms as well as in revanchist, white-nationalist forms. Endlessly celebrating the real and alleged colorization of elite positions and media imagery and wearing superficial “diversity” and identity brands like badges of honor while tens of millions of Black, brown, red, and white USAers are pushed further down the class hierarchy, the superficial bourgeois approach to race (and other identity markers) makes a mockery of serious anti-racism (and serious anti-sexism/-nativism/-homophobia) and helps delegitimize principled materialist opposition to racial oppression. Five years ago, the left historian Nancy Fraser aptly described what she somewhat oxymoronically called the “progressive neoliberalism” of the Clinton-Obama (and now Biden) Democratic Party:

‘progressive neoliberalism…is a real, if perverse, political alignment …[It] is an alliance of mainstream currents of new social movements (feminism, anti-racism, multiculturalism, and LGBTQ rights), on the one side, and high-end “symbolic” and service-based business sectors (Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood), on the other. In this alliance, progressive forces are effectively joined with the forces of cognitive capitalism, especially financialization. However unwittingly, the former lend their charisma to the latter. Ideals like diversity and empowerment, which could in principle serve different ends, now gloss policies that have devastated manufacturing and what were once middle-class lives…. [The neoliberal] assault on social security was glossed by a veneer of emancipatory charisma, borrowed from the new social movements. Throughout the years when manufacturing cratered, the country buzzed with talk of “diversity,” “empowerment,” and “non-discrimination.” Identifying “progress” with meritocracy instead of equality, these terms equated “emancipation” with the rise of a small elite of “talented” women, minorities, and gays in the winner-takes-all corporate hierarchy instead of with the latter’s abolition. These liberal-individualist understandings of “progress” gradually replaced the more expansive, anti-hierarchical, egalitarian, class-sensitive, anti-capitalist understandings of emancipation that had flourished in the 1960s and 1970s. As the New Left waned, its structural critique of capitalist society faded, and the country’s characteristic liberal-individualist mindset reasserted itself, imperceptibly shrinking the aspirations of “progressives” and self-proclaimed leftists. What sealed the deal, however, was the coincidence of this evolution with the rise of neoliberalism. A party bent on liberalizing the capitalist economy found its perfect mate in a meritocratic corporate feminism focused on “leaning in” and “cracking the glass ceiling.”’

The reigning counterfeit “progressive neoliberal” Obamanist anti-racism of what has passed for the “liberal left” since the Clinton years has discredited serious/radical left anti-racism and thereby encouraged a disastrous over-identification of anti-racism and anti-sexism with corporate, globalist, and bourgeois elitism. “Anti-racism” in bourgeois hands – the sort of anti-racism that pats itself on the back for voting for Obama while saying and doing nothing about racist mass incarceration – is a demobilizing disaster and a gift to the right. It doesn’t just demobilize white votes for the non-fascist US major party; it also demobilizes Black votes for that organization. It encourages the kind of intellectual degradation that can lead a retired white and “left” political scientist to drunkenly write that race itself is just a bourgeois “scam” meant to divide the proletariat.

+11. The Psychological Wage of Racism. The United States is no magical exception to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’ 1848 observation:

‘The bourgeoisie…has resolved personal worth into exchange value…for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation…The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers…. In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed — a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.’

Why has this horrific class oppression – very much alive in the US today – not generated the revolutionary working-class consciousness that the brilliant young German communists dreamed about, fulfilling the proletariat’s supposed historical mission of overthrowing the rapacious, surplus value-extracting capitalist class, which is literally running the world into the ground today? At least one part of the puzzle lay in the way that British colonial North American and then US-American capitalist history has encouraged the white majority of workers to, in historian David Roediger’s words, “define and accept their class position by fashioning identities as ‘not slaves’ and ‘not blacks.’” As the great Black Marxist W.E.B. DuBois noted in 1935, anti-black racism grants lower and working-class whites a “public and psychological wage” – a false and dysfunctional measure of status used to compensate for alienating and exploitative class relationships. As the socialist Martin Luther King Jr. observed in 1968, racialized capitalism has given downtrodden white folks “the [false] satisfaction of…thinking you are somebody big because you are white.” And when one’s status depends on the diminishment, degradation, and even demonization of racialized Others, one is not very likely to develop an accurate understanding of those Others’ real experience and situation.

One does not have to be an impoverished proletarian to get fooled into thinking one’s whiteness makes one a “somebody” under a system that makes hundreds of millions into nobodies. As wealth and power are concentrate ever upward, many middle and upper middle-class whites are turned into relative nonentities by a system that has “stripped of its halo every occupation” and “converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.” Millions of petit-bourgeois and professional class Amerikaners and Trumpenvolk have shown themselves susceptible to the sick “satisfaction of thinking [they] are somebody big because [they] are white.”

+12. “A Sickness That Defines Our History.” Racial delusion has long been an essential component of British colonial North America and (after 1776) the United States’ political culture for the simple reason that it is required to provide moral cover for capitalist America’s fundamental, foundational, and ongoing reliance on the subjugation and exploitation of non-whites – Black slaves and sharecroppers especially. Here’s how the left historian and journalist Terry Thomas answered my simple and open-ended online question “Why are so many white Americans so F’d in the head on race?”

How about 245 years of slavery, followed by the violent overthrow of Reconstruction and the ensuing era of Jim Crow, and finally the ongoing backlash against the Civil Rights gains of the 1960s (which, in some instances, have been terribly compromised and in the case of the Civil Rights Act virtually obliterated)? The privilege US whites have benefited from and exploited for various purposes is as old as the first successful European settlement in what would become the US. (And indeed, even older when one considers European interactions with Native people). From the start Europeans considered the benefits and privileges to be part of the natural order, that they were superior to other humans, which absolved them of their behavior. Moreover, the behavior has been rewarded…For whites, the strategy has worked, and so it has reinforced the ideology. White people always win, say white people, so white people must be better. So not to be f*cked in the head on this issue is unnatural, something akin to challenging their very essence. It is a sickness that defines our history, which is why the current generation of white supremacists has become obsessed with replacing ugly blood-soaked history with fables/myths of white genius: the whole thing with CRT.”

Here is another useful reflection, from communist leader Bob Avakian:

From the beginning of this country, white supremacy has been poured into the foundation and built into the institutions and the ongoing functioning of this system…. This… is fundamentally because of the nature of the system itself and the historically-evolved requirements and dynamics of this system of capitalism-imperialism…This country was founded on the enslavement of masses of African people, as well as the genocidal subjugation of Native Americans and theft of their land (and its further development involved the conquest of huge parts of Mexico, reducing people of Mexican origin to second-class status as well). This required the propagation of racism to “justify” all the horrific oppression. Then, when the Civil War broke out over the question of slavery, and even when slavery was abolished as a result of that Civil War, given that white supremacy had been, and remained, such a crucial part of the “glue” holding the country together, the only way to “put it back together,” on the foundation of the capitalist system, was to once again forcefully assert white supremacy. That is why, very soon after the end of the Civil War, Black people were subjected to the system of Jim Crow segregation (backed up by systematic terror, punctuated by repeated lynchings), while the genocidal aggression against and theft of the land of Native Americans was stepped up, and immigrants from Mexico were subjected to ongoing discrimination and violence by the enforcers of this system.

(For an introduction to the historical class-race and capitalist foundations, readers should start with three classic texts: Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom [1976]; Edward Baptiste, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism [2016]; Sven Beckett, Empire of Cotton: A Global History [2015].)

This basic reality has continued into the present period, with racism still providing much of the “glue” to justify the capitalist oppression and dehumanization of Black America in deindustrialized ghettoes, badly underfunded schools, a racially tilted labor market, and a viciously racist criminal justice system that warehouses millions of Black people for whom capitalism no longer has any profitable use. Anyone who thinks this problem of racial oppression and racial disparity can be solved under the US-American profits and empire system is living in a dream world. And anyone who thinks that talking and writing honestly about and fighting against this racial oppression is a “scapegoating” diversion from the struggle against capitalism is a fool.

13. A Reigning US Political Party Has Gone Fascist. Along the way, one of the nation’s two major and viable capitalist political parties, the Trump-Gosar-Boebert-Mo Brooks-Ron Johnson-Capitol Riot-Taylor-Greene-Carlson-QAnon-Greenwald Republican Party, has gone Amerikaner neofascist (the other major party is its appeaser, offering only hollow and passive resistance to this minority rule juggernaut of authoritarian white nationalism that Noam Chomsky rightly identified as “the most dangerous organization on Earth”). And at the heart of fascist politics lay fairy-tale and vengeful notions of a glorious, “golden age” national past of patriarchal racial purity betrayed – “stabbed in the back” – by selfish and evil liberal and Left elites. The fascist political codebook includes a quest for national re-birth linked to “palingenetic ultra-nationalism” meaning, in historian Roger Griffin’s word, a drive “to regenerate the social, economic, and cultural life of a country by basing in on a heightened sense of national belonging or national identity.” There is in fascist politics a dreaded sense of the decline of the nation and/or a once properly dominant ethnic or religious group under the destructive impact of class struggle, radicalism, liberal individualism, multi-culturalism, and outside/alien influences. And there is a passionate belief that one’s national, ethnic, and/or religious group is being unfairly victimized under the direction of nefarious elites and in dire need of redemption and revitalization. There is a fierce attachment to one’s national, ethnic, and/or religious group coupled with the belief that any action without legal or moral confines is defensible to eliminate perceived threats to one’s national, ethnic, and/or religious group. There is horrific Othering – the chronic “Us and Them” scapegoating of demonized Others and foreigners, with singular, plural, and/or merged “Them”/Other groups accused of causing great harm. This involves the dehumanization and degradation of racial, ethnic, religious, cultural Others and political enemies, intimately related to a cold willingness to forsake past legal and moral conventions when it comes to eradicating the threat these demonized Others are said to pose. It posits the right of the good “chosen people” to rule the bad Others without restraint from existing legal, moral, or religious proscriptions since the “right” is granted by Darwinian and/or moral superiority. And there is the promotion and glorification of traditional social and political hierarchy beneath revolutionary and transformative claims. (These and other aspects of the fascist political playbook are behind the Republican assault on Critical Race Theory – really on telling basic truths about the central roles of Black experience, racial oppression, and racism in the making of American history past and present.)

These are among the “fatherland” values and narratives promoted by one of the nation’s two dominant political parties, the stronger and more constitutionally protected one, with a massive toxic impact of tens of millions of white Amerikaners. That party could well be running the country again atop all three white minority rule branches of the federal government within three and half years. The dismal, “progressive neoliberal” Democrats have nothing but hollow resistance and “inauthentic opposition” (Sheldon Wolin’s 2008 description of the Democratic Party) to offer in response. Only a mass prolonged and popular rebellion, one that would include principled and radical anti-racism among its key attributes, can stop this chilling rightward drift. As the leading liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman says, “if you’re not terrified, you’re not paying attention.”