Read White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son Online
Authors: Tim Wise
Tags: #History, #Politics, #Sociology, #Memoir, #Race
White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son (32 page)
BOOK: White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son
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THEY WOULDN’T BE,
at least not right away. For the next month I had no money for anything, including food. Rent was paid through the end of January, but I had to buy groceries using a gas station credit card, meaning that for several weeks I subsisted on bean burritos, frozen meals, and assorted junk food from the Citgo market. But mostly, I bought beer, hoping that if I drank a six-pack every night, I might be able to forget how bad things looked. Worst of all, the brakes on my car were totally shot and the Citgo was five miles away in Metairie. To get there, I had to drive on the interstate and hope that I wouldn’t need to stop too often. If I did, I would have to use the hand brake and time the stop just right so as to avoid running into another car.
at least not right away. For the next month I had no money for anything, including food. Rent was paid through the end of January, but I had to buy groceries using a gas station credit card, meaning that for several weeks I subsisted on bean burritos, frozen meals, and assorted junk food from the Citgo market. But mostly, I bought beer, hoping that if I drank a six-pack every night, I might be able to forget how bad things looked. Worst of all, the brakes on my car were totally shot and the Citgo was five miles away in Metairie. To get there, I had to drive on the interstate and hope that I wouldn’t need to stop too often. If I did, I would have to use the hand brake and time the stop just right so as to avoid running into another car.
In February, things started to look up. I got hired by Agenda for Children, a child advocacy group with an explicitly antiracist philosophy, to work as a researcher and community organizer. Back in the fall of the previous year I had penned an essay for Agenda’s newsletter in response to the persistent attacks on income support programs (so-called “welfare”) that were bubbling up again in Congress. Knowing that the attempt to roll back various social safety net programs would accelerate now that the GOP was in charge of the legislative agenda, Judy Watts, the group’s director, felt it might be good to bring me on to do some research and writing on the subject, and also to work with residents in the city’s poor communities to organize against the pending assaults.
The cornerstone of the Republican plan for welfare was to turn cash assistance into a state-level block grant, with a fixed amount of funds each year, regardless of the strength or weakness of the economy, the poverty level, or the volume of need. Knowing what that could mean in a place like Louisiana, we focused special attention on educating state lawmakers and crafting an alternative welfare reform proposal that would encourage employment for those on assistance, but which would have been less punitive.
I had only done limited community organizing before, but being brought around and introduced to the leaders in the city’s public housing developments by Donna Johnigan (herself a resident of the Guste Homes) made the learning curve far less steep than it otherwise would have been. Rather than just turn the white Tulane grad loose on the community, which would have been a disaster, Agenda had me serve essentially as an apprentice to Donna, whose full-time job was as the office manager for the organization.
That Donna had any confidence in me was an honor, as her nose for bullshit was pretty fine-tuned. Despite my naiveté, she took me around, showed me the ropes, and taught me the fine art of listening, as the residents in the communities told me their stories, described their hopes and fears, and discussed—in a way far more instructive than any college professor had—the topics of racism and economic oppression.
Seeing the depth of poverty that characterized New Orleans’ public housing was breathtaking. It’s one thing to understand such matters in the abstract, from reading books or discussing destitution in a classroom; it is quite another, however, to see it up close. And the contrast between economic immiseration on the one hand, and the abundant
wealth
of knowledge and wisdom possessed by the people there, on the other, was even more difficult to fully take in. In short, people in this kind of economic condition were not supposed to be this
smart
. That they are lacking in fundamental intelligence and ability is what we are told, daily, by politicians and most everyone with an opinion. Although I was ashamed to admit it, I guess I had come to believe some of that too. Though I was paternalistically prepared to acknowledge that the system had produced whatever personal dysfunctions the poor in public housing might manifest, I was not at all prepared for the competence, insight, and utter
normalcy
of the residents there.
wealth
of knowledge and wisdom possessed by the people there, on the other, was even more difficult to fully take in. In short, people in this kind of economic condition were not supposed to be this
smart
. That they are lacking in fundamental intelligence and ability is what we are told, daily, by politicians and most everyone with an opinion. Although I was ashamed to admit it, I guess I had come to believe some of that too. Though I was paternalistically prepared to acknowledge that the system had produced whatever personal dysfunctions the poor in public housing might manifest, I was not at all prepared for the competence, insight, and utter
normalcy
of the residents there.
Once I realized the wisdom of the folks in public housing, I became downright belligerent when talking to others about the folks with whom I was working. Invariably they would start talking badly about public housing residents, having never met a single one of the folks about whom they felt entitled to rant, and they would start handing out unsolicited advice about what “those people” should do to improve their lives.
Sitting at a bar one night having a drink, I found myself in a conversation with a guy who thought he had the perfect solution to the problems of the poor; namely, they all needed to be required to take a class on “money management,” which could be taught by local C.E.O.s, who would be paid for their insights by the state. If they could learn how to be responsible with money, the cycle of poverty could be broken, he insisted.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I exploded. “Have millionaires go into the projects and tell
poor people
how to manage money? Jesus, they don’t even manage money on their own. They pay investment experts to do that shit for them! If anything, we should be sending these poor women I meet every day out to the suburbs, or to Tulane, so they can teach spoiled motherfuckers like the ones I went to school with how to get by on three hundred motherfucking dollars a month: Now
that
takes fucking skill!”
poor people
how to manage money? Jesus, they don’t even manage money on their own. They pay investment experts to do that shit for them! If anything, we should be sending these poor women I meet every day out to the suburbs, or to Tulane, so they can teach spoiled motherfuckers like the ones I went to school with how to get by on three hundred motherfucking dollars a month: Now
that
takes fucking skill!”
I was asked to leave the bar, and was all too happy to go.
WHAT I LEARNED
about poor folks from my time as an organizer was how little I understood them and what their lives were like. Contrary to popular perceptions, many if not most of the poor folks I met worked hard every day, whether in the paid labor force, where their wages were still too low to allow them to afford rent in the private market, or at home, trying to raise children into productive citizens. Interestingly, when cash welfare had first been created back in the 1930s (and when access had been restricted to white women), allowing mothers to stay home and raise kids, and not have to work in the labor force, had been articulated as the
very purpose
of the program. Only when women of color began to gain access to the same benefits did the nation suddenly decide that welfare was bad for you, made you lazy, and needed to be replaced with compulsory employment.
about poor folks from my time as an organizer was how little I understood them and what their lives were like. Contrary to popular perceptions, many if not most of the poor folks I met worked hard every day, whether in the paid labor force, where their wages were still too low to allow them to afford rent in the private market, or at home, trying to raise children into productive citizens. Interestingly, when cash welfare had first been created back in the 1930s (and when access had been restricted to white women), allowing mothers to stay home and raise kids, and not have to work in the labor force, had been articulated as the
very purpose
of the program. Only when women of color began to gain access to the same benefits did the nation suddenly decide that welfare was bad for you, made you lazy, and needed to be replaced with compulsory employment.
In a few of the projects where I was organizing, residents averaged twenty to thirty hours of work each week, but still couldn’t afford private market rent. Instead, they paid one-third of their pay (whatever it was) to the Housing Authority of New Orleans, so as to remain in subsidized housing. They were not living for free, as most to whom I spoke about my job assumed. And as for the work ethic of such folks, Donna herself provided perhaps the best example in this regard. A few months after I started working with her, her son was murdered, becoming one of about three hundred and fifty black folks killed that year in the city. While it would have been understandable for her to have taken a few days off, she was at work the next day, insisting that she had a job to do and intended to do it. I had called out of work plenty of times because of a headache, or because I just hadn’t felt like going in; yet here was Donna, whose son had just been killed, keeping it together and working through the pain. But in America, we are to believe that
she
is the one with the bad values. Go figure.
she
is the one with the bad values. Go figure.
People with whom I’d discuss my job also wondered, constantly, if I was scared working in the communities where the projects were located. Although I was quick to tell them that I’d felt out of place when first arriving in a new location—and especially being the only white person around—I also would point out that, if anything, I was probably the
safest
person in the community on the days I was there. Indeed, precisely because I was white, most residents would view me as one of two things: either a cop or a social worker, neither of which they were too likely to want to mess with. If I were the former, I might arrest them, and if I were the latter, I might have the power to take their children away. So unlike other black folks, who might be mistaken for rival gang members (since the gangs in New Orleans were pretty much all black at that time), I was relatively protected in that space, despite the generally higher crime rates that existed in the communities where public housing was to be found.
safest
person in the community on the days I was there. Indeed, precisely because I was white, most residents would view me as one of two things: either a cop or a social worker, neither of which they were too likely to want to mess with. If I were the former, I might arrest them, and if I were the latter, I might have the power to take their children away. So unlike other black folks, who might be mistaken for rival gang members (since the gangs in New Orleans were pretty much all black at that time), I was relatively protected in that space, despite the generally higher crime rates that existed in the communities where public housing was to be found.
Over the fifteen months that I worked as an organizer, I learned more about race and class subordination than I had ever learned in a classroom up to that point, and far more than I have learned since from having read hundreds of books on the subjects. What I also came to understand was how critical it is to
follow
the lead of the community where you’re working, and its leadership, rather than assume you know the agenda around which to organize.
follow
the lead of the community where you’re working, and its leadership, rather than assume you know the agenda around which to organize.
This last point came into view for me one day while sitting around talking with a community leader about some of the things they were working on in the neighborhood. I was there to build support for blocking punitive welfare cutbacks and the ill-advised Balanced Budget Amendment, which invariably would result in the slashing of any number of vital safety net programs as well as education spending. But what the local leader explained to me was that as important as those things were, they were not and could never be the first order of business. Yes, fighting racism and classism, which we agreed were inherent to these legislative items, was important. But to be an effective organizer, you had to start small.
I asked him to explain, and was surprised by just how small he’d meant.
“Well, for instance,” he said. “See that corner right there?” He was gesturing to an intersection about fifty feet from where we stood.
“Yeah, sure, what about it?” I replied.
“Well, we’ve been trying to get a stop light there,” he noted, causing me to realize for the first time that, indeed, despite it being a natural place for a light, there was none. The lack of the light intrigued me, but I didn’t really get the importance of it all.
“Why a stop light?” I asked, puzzled, and wondering how such an item fit in with the larger struggle against institutional injustice.
“Well,” he continued, “for a couple of reasons. First, three kids have been hit there on their bikes because folks just barrel on through without looking. And second, because we can get the stop light. It’s a winnable fight. See, people who’ve been getting their asses kicked for years need to know they can make a difference. They need to know that they can fight and occasionally
win
.”
win
.”
He went on to explain the strategic value of small victories. Yes, the goal was social justice, the eradication of poverty and racism, and all the rest that went with it. But good organizers couldn’t make those things the front-burner agenda items. Even a slightly smaller goal, like blocking federal legislation you didn’t like, was too big for starters. The odds were against winning those battles in the short run. So if you started there, you’d accomplish little, except helping folks to burn out when, as so often happened, defeat was in the cards. But if you could “help the community gain a sense of it’s own potential,” he would say, “
now
you were on to something.”
now
you were on to something.”
It wasn’t the way I’d been taught how history was made. But then again, the folks who had taught most of us history hadn’t exactly been committed to radical change, so little details like this were easily overlooked.
BOOK: White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son
9.51Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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