On "White Supremacy"

Introduction

Median household income: $45,915.* Per capita income: $22,414. Just a tick above Brooklyn’s median and lower than New York's second-poorest borough per capita stands my hometown of Bath, Pennsylvania. A place where thrift stores are for more than ironic sweaters (suits, housewares, furniture), where a “new car” is always used, where the one remodeled house downtown sticks out like a sore thumb. Where the high school sent six students to the Ivy League (one for athletics) between 1997 and 2011; where the school is more worried about counseling students who bring guns to school than students who don’t know if college is right for them; where residents lobbied for years against building a new school to accommodate a population nearly double the size the school was first built for. Where the population is 98% white.

For this, our dialogue on white supremacy in America in some ways rang hollow to me. As a Georgetown University alumnus I am more than familiar with the elitist thought prevalent in America. But even the boat shoe-wearing prep school grads knew the value of “diversity”; it was only poor whites left subject to candid scorn, left out of any conversation of class in America, left with one of the few openly derogatory names left in American society: "white trash." That "white trash" includes the kids I played sports with as a child and to whose family’s mobile home I retreated after the game. The high school students who, if they decided to limp through high school, now have jobs at Arby’s alongside teenagers from nearby, more affluent areas. Today, some of the 20,437, 539 adults – 6.9% of America – both white and below the poverty line.**

Digging Deeper

Of course it would be pandering to my own preconceptions to end there. The existence of poor whites does not alone undermine white supremacy, nor does the fact that so many white people are subject to the derogation and subjugation of the ruling class. 24,140,297 people are nonwhite and below the poverty line, totaling 8.2% of America. Using race as denominator, 23.8% of nonwhites are below the poverty line compared to just 10.6% of whites. I do not believe that such denominators do enough work to undermine my first notion. There are nearly as many poor whites as poor nonwhites -- if whiteness was supreme, the numbers should be far from comparable as the nonwhite class includes many immigrants as well as those recovering from the history of slavery and segregation (itself a relic of overt white supremacy, to be sure).

However, figures from Tom Hertz cut against this interpretation of census data. In particular, Hertz finds two figures relating to social mobility and race in the United States: (1) 62.9% of blacks born in the bottom quartile between 1942 and 1972 stayed there (as compared to just 32.3% of whites) and (2) controlling for many human capital measures, being black had a negative, statistically significant correlation for social mobility for children born in the same time period.***

To be fair, the data is not current -- the oldest of those children were entering the workforce just as the Civil Rights Act was passing and the youngest not long after the first Bush left office -- but social mobility does not lend itself to of-the-moment analysis and nearly all of the children in the sample reached adulthood after 1965. This support for white supremacy must coexist with the fact that the oh-so-supreme whiteness I encountered at Georgetown was substantially at odds with the humble whiteness I grew up knowing (and which 7% of America continues to know very well). In response to this, I suggest specifying the conception of white supremacy. In 2012, it is not that elite whites have a preference for those with white skin; it is that those in the elite class have a preference for those like them – which, because of America’s history, means those who act like the wealthy white people who so long have run this country.

Clarifying “White Supremacy”

For support of this conceptualization are many instances of “diversity” in America. Although affirmative action programs began as government-mandated measures, today they are not only voluntarily engaged-in programs by employers and universities but are also points of pride and part of marketing pitches. If the supreme culture that runs these organizations was so concerned with skin color it would instead view affirmative action programs as an occupation, a forced measure getting in the way of its preferences.

But while the culture embraces nonwhites it has little interest in these peoples’ unique perspectives – it simply wants a new face on the same worldview. In 2004 Henry Louis Gates commented how the majority of Harvard’s black population was African or West Indian (and of course our first black president is half-white/half-Kenyan), while our most prominent Hispanic politician opposes the DREAM Act. "Diversity" initiatives are most interested in finding those of different races who are willing to and do act like the ruling class. A subgroup with a culture and history of its own embedded so far in its collective memory – as African-Americans have – is the least likely to give. And the least likely to get much accommodation in return.

What makes poor whites “trash,” then, is that they don’t take advantage of what’s been handed to them. Without ever facing de jure discrimination, they’ve been allowed all this time to be one of elite class but haven’t put down their hunting rifles and Kid Rock CDs long enough to do so. But poor whites with no motivation to leave their community – poor whites who are raised to look at the supreme culture as an enemy, not a community easily joined – have much in common with the nonwhite groups struggling against the supreme culture. It should come as no surprise that Kid Rock has a collaboration with Ludacris.

*All data pulled from the U.S. Census Bureau’s “American Factfinder” website.

**”White” in this context – and all references to whites throughout the paper – excludes Hispanics and Latinos.

***Hertz does not find any statistically significant, controlled data that supports a conclusion that other nonwhites have a more difficult time with social mobility, hence my change in vocabulary from “nonwhite” to “black” when discussing Hertz’ figures and, thus, the rest of the essay.

-- MatthewCollins - 20 Apr 2012