We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation (2 page)

We know now that implicit bias, stereotype threat, and the empathy gap are real things. People harbor subconscious biases that are hard to root out but can be unlearned. Social psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt, for example, has argued that training police to see the way in which people subconsciously associate criminality with Black faces can reduce rates of racial profiling.

But the social structures that create premature death do not harm only those individuals who have the misfortune to come into contact with bigots or quick-trigger authorities who have not yet learned how to see. They also prevent people from getting adequate food, shelter, and housing. They limit physical, economic, and social mobility. They refuse to let us all be free. Over time, these structures have proven extraordinarily adaptable.

Inequity and injustice are not abstract things. They impact real people and real lives. In terms of poverty, annual income, wealth, health, housing, schooling, and incarceration, persistent gaps separate whites from Black, Latino, Southeast Asian, Pacific Islander, and American Indian populations.
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And in the specific case of premature death—defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as death among persons under the age of seventy-five—the death rate of Blacks is over 50 percent higher than that of whites, and higher than that of all other major ethnic groups, except for some American Indian cohorts.

Only a small part of this statistic is attributable to homicide and that favorite digression of conservative pundits, “Black-on-Black violence.” In fact, most of the reasons have to do with large disparities in access to quality food and regular and preventative health care, and with diseases such as cancer, stroke, and HIV. A shockingly large portion is the result of an African American infant mortality rate that is more than double that of white Americans, triple that of Swiss citizens, and five times that of Japanese citizens.
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Racism kills.

Extrajudicial police shootings have been the organizing spark of the Movement for Black Lives. But the facts of inequality and death hang over us all like a toxic haze. In the United States, segregation and resegregation happen through the disappearing of the signs of inequality. Whether through white flight, the optics of diversity, or metaphorical and actual wall building, the privileged spare themselves the sight of disparity, and foreclose the possibility of empathy and transformation.

Now this haze has blown into white America as well. More white U.S. women and men in their forties and fifties—particularly those with lower levels of educational attainment—are dying prematurely. This reversal of fortune for middle-aged whites is unprecedented in American history and unique among the wealthy nations. When examining the causes, researchers Anne Case and Angus Deaton found significant rises in painkiller abuse, liver disease, suicides, and drug overdoses. “Future financial insecurity may weigh more heavily on U.S. workers,” they wrote, calling middle-aged whites a “‘lost generation’ whose future is less bright than those who preceded them.”
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At the height of the Reagan-Bush era the writer Barbara Ehrenreich named this condition: whites, whose once solid destinies were melting into air, harbor a deep “fear of falling.” That tumble is now all too real.

A turn in fortune should move us toward empathy and solidarity. When a natural disaster tears apart a village, the human tendency is for one neighbor to help another, regardless of whatever feelings they may have had for one another before the catastrophe. But we live in a time when merchants of division draw us away from mutuality and toward the undoing of democracy itself.

David Graeber proposes that their demagoguery is not so different from schoolyard bullying, which is “a kind of elementary structure of human domination.”
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Trump, the silver spoon–fed child who, as a second grader, punched his music teacher in the eye, aspired “to be the toughest kid in the neighborhood.”
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He described himself as “very well liked … the kid that others followed.”
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Bullies, Graeber argues, don’t usually lack self-esteem. They do not see themselves as outcasts but as heroes.

Dylann Storm Roof, the young man who murdered nine Black parishioners in a prayer meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, in the hope of starting a race war, wrote that he “was not raised in a racist home or environment.” He had Black friends, or at least acquaintances. One who had known him from childhood said, “He wasn’t like: ‘When I grow up I am going to show all these kids.’” Instead, Roof wanted to lead by example.

The bully needs an audience to enable his act. “When researchers question children on why they do not intervene [to protect the bullied], a minority say they felt the victim got what he or she deserved,” Graeber writes, “but the majority say they didn’t like what happened, and certainly didn’t much like the bully, but decided that getting involved might mean ending up on the receiving end of the same treatment—and that would only make things worse.”
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Culture-war extremists do two things. They water the seed of insecurity into a weed of hate. They do so by seizing on white fears of the future, conflating economic insecurity and looming demographic eclipse. The first is as tangible as monthly bills, specific, looming, and real; the second is as subrational and inarticulate as seeing Taylor Swift perform with Kendrick Lamar.

Dylann Storm Roof wrote in his conflicted, contradictory manifesto, “Why should we have to flee the cities we created for the security of the suburbs? Why are the suburbs secure in the first place? Because they are White … Who is fighting for these White people forced by economic circumstances to live among negroes? No one, but someone has to.” Roof, like other extremists, believed in the restoration of white power. The main way Roof departed from the rest was in his insistence that the restoration be violently begun and maintained. He took the metaphor of war seriously.

But even for those who say they don’t like the bullying and don’t like the bully, the culture wars allow them cover to do nothing. Demagogues evoke restorationist dreaming, a deeply imagined past of order and tranquility. Reactionaries do not even need to sustain the belief or the anger of the fearful; they need only the silence and the complicity of the masses. In this way, from Wallace and Nixon to Palin and Trump, the energies of anxious whites have been diverted from class uprising toward racial division.

The culture wars continue through justificatory innocence and willed inaction. They
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the structures that produce inequality and segregation to persist. They even generate the ideas that adapt those structures to better enforce racialized exclusion.

Before the 1980s, it was mostly Marxists who used the term “politically correct” to mock other Marxists. Since then, charging someone else with political correctness has become the first line of defense for racists, one of the best ways to shut down any discussion about inequity. That silencing isolates the most marginalized communities, and demobilizes white communities. Resegregation grows not from white ignorance, but from white refusal and denial. And so a half century after the peak of the civil rights movement, the nation has moved again into crisis.

One need not be a pessimist to see the bad loop of history we are caught within—crisis, reaction, backlash, complacency, crisis. There are fires. There are calls for action. There is then a bullying politics of fear. If most Americans recoil from the kind of excessive, gleeful, cynical bigotry someone like the billionaire Donald Trump proffers, they are yet demobilized to the point of denial (“there is no problem”) or justification (“there is a problem but I can’t solve it”). And then we find ourselves in another crisis.

In
We Gon’ Be Alright
, I look at some of the ways in which we have slid back toward segregation. To be sure, there has never been a time when we did not live separately. In 2014, more than 300 school districts across the country were still involved in active desegregation orders dating to the civil rights era.
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At the same time, even as we have come to mostly celebrate “diversity,” resegregation is happening all around us: in our neighborhoods and schools, our colleges and universities, even in the culture. The culture wars have obscured and exacerbated these facts. Worse, they have left us without a common understanding or language that might help us to end them.

What I hope to show in this book is how inequality and segregation impact us all. Our destinies are interconnected, but not all of us have the best vantage point to see our way out of the fog of the culture wars. Some of us still can’t even see each other fully. But those who suffer the most have the most to teach the entire nation about how to move away from it all, if we choose to listen and act.

What today’s activists, organizers, and artists are giving us are new ways to see our past and our present. Even more, they are giving us the directive to address inequality and inequity now—to make it clear that if we do not do so, we will continue to be drawn back into the bad cycle, just as we were after 1965, and after 1992. Right now we have the opportunity to get it right. Our shared future depends upon it.

IS DIVERSITY FOR WHITE PEOPLE?

ON FEARMONGERING, PICTURE TAKING, AND AVOIDANCE

In December 2015, Donald Trump held a noon rally at an airport hangar in Mesa, Arizona, a largely white suburb in the Phoenix sprawl that had been the spawning ground for the viciously anti-immigrant law S.B. 1070.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, taking a break from defending himself from Department of Justice charges that he had violated a federal court order against racial profiling, kept the stage warm. “You’re the patriots,” he told the audience. They were the ones worth protecting—with Arpaio’s men and guns and jails, and with Trump’s grand border wall. The sheriff continued, “One thing about him, I think he’ll really do what he says. I really do.” The placards that had been distributed read, “The Silent Majority Stands with Trump.” In the state of Barry Goldwater, Trump was putting on a display of firepower and nostalgia.

Trump made his grand entrance. His Boeing 757, emblazoned with his name in bold on the side, rolled to a stop in front of the hangar and a crowd of several thousand. From the top of the gangway he waved, then descended the stairs to Twisted Sister’s mid-eighties hair-metal hit “We’re Not Gonna Take It.”

First, he did a live interview with Bill O’Reilly. Large American and Arizonan flags and the enormous crowd served as his backdrop. O’Reilly began questioning Trump almost apologetically, as if recognizing that he had wandered onto hostile turf. When Trump dissed Fox News for “saying untrue things about me” and blustered that he would do “pretty severe stuff” to stop terrorism, the crowd roared.

O’Reilly asked, “Are you gonna tell me tonight on this program that you don’t say stuff just to get at the emotion of the voter? I know you do.”

“I’m telling you right now that I don’t. I do the right thing. I bring up subjects that are important. I bring up illegal immigration,” Trump said. “And if I didn’t bring it up you wouldn’t even be talking about illegal immigration.” The crowd started chanting his name.

O’Reilly persisted. “You don’t do this to whip up the base, whip up your crowd?”

“I don’t, I don’t,” Trump said. “I say what’s right, I say what’s on my mind, and that’s what’s happening.”

After the interview he stepped up to the podium to deliver a long speech in his churlish, digressive style, dispensing ample insults to his many enemies. “Somebody said, ‘Oh, Trump’s a great entertainer.’ That’s a lot of bullshit, I’ll tell you,” he said. “We have a message, we have a message, and the message is we don’t want to let other people take advantage of us.”
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In his best seller
The Art of the Deal
, Trump’s advice was to “know your market” and “use your leverage.” Trump knew his market. He understood the inchoate white anger cohering in the country well ahead of Republican party leaders and media elites. “Leverage,” Trump wrote, “is having something the other guy wants. Or better yet, needs. Or best of all, simply can’t do without.”
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In 2011, Obama, who had become for disaffected whites the image of all fears, provided Trump with leverage. Trump made himself the public face of the bizarre Birther movement, which held that Barack Obama had not been born in the United States. In naming Obama an “illegal alien,” conspiracists could attach fantastical narratives to Obama: Chicago criminal corruption, Muslim takeovers, Mexican drug-dealer invasions.

Despite the fact that Obama had already released a short-form certification of live birth, Trump sent investigators to Hawai’i to uncover what he called “one of the greatest cons in the history of politics and beyond.” Obama responded by releasing a long-form version of his birth certificate. Outplayed, Trump still declared victory, saying, “I am so proud of myself because I’ve accomplished something that nobody else was able to accomplish.” He had forced the first Black president to become the first standing president in history forced to defend the legitimacy of his birthright. And he had captured the attention and the affection of frustrated white voters. But at that moment Trump retreated, quietly walking away from a presidential bid. The time had not yet come.

By 2015, though, it had. Whites undone by skyrocketing economic inequality, distrustful of big business and media, ignored by elites—the middle and working class, whose fears of falling were being realized—needed someone to vocalize their anger and anxiety. Trump found ready scapegoats. He called Mexican immigrants “criminals” and “rapists,” warned that “Islam hates us,” and accused China of “waging economic war against us.” He pandered to whites’ fragility, played on their glory-days nostalgia. His ham-fisted “Make America Great Again” slogan—so prosaic and dull next to Reagan’s “Morning in America”—seemed designed for bro-style fist-pumping, not gauzy restorationist dreaming. As one supporter put it: “Trump is a winner and I’m sick of losing.”
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