Pessimistic Whiteness: It's your privilege catching up to you

Life is getting hard for white people in the United States, and they’re not happy about it. The government is to blame, right? Not so fast.

What happens when white people become class conscious? In other words, what happens when a white family wakes up from the dream of upward mobility to find that they, like all the non-white families around them, aren’t quickly moving up the social ladder?

Apparently, they give up hope for a better life while their nonwhite neighbors believe, with a little time, they’ll be better off than they are today. In my opinion, what we see in this story is a desire for whites to hang on to their whiteness. In order to cling to whiteness, they give up their optimistic looking forward to wealth and general, social upward-mobility. They say, At least I’m white. That statement embodies white pessimism.

The research is proving Lillian Smith’s claim about the bargain poor whites make with wealthy whites about wealth and whiteness. She published Killers of the Dream in 1949. Guess it takes the popular culture 63 years or so to wake up to the reality that when white people realize they aren’t “getting rich,” they become satisfied with their social and economic status and begin relying on whiteness itself to provide its unique and unearned privileges. Others must look forward to the potential for upward mobility in spite of its difficult achievement because they aren’t born privileged, and they know it. They’ve didn’t inherit access to privilege and they realize they must work hard if they’re to have any opportunity to achieve. They can remain, or be seen to remain, hopeful. White people feel it’s owed to them. When they don’t get success, they become (get) pessimistic.

Check out this article from The Atlantic, “Why Whites Are More Pessimistic About Their Future Than Minorities”. The Atlantic doesn’t put it like I did above, but that’s not surprising. I think it’s an operation of white power: we’re encouraged to look at non-white families to see what’s different about white families. Such narratives provide us, as a culture, with the notion that we are integrated. Of course, white people are pessimistic. We are taught to expect (to inherit) privilege. I’m not saying The Atlantic article is racist, so don’t get me wrong. I’m just pointing out that an article (that examines white pessimism) is mostly written about non-white people. White is always in contrast with others. It’s always non-essential to the narratives that describe it. Dig?

Why do white people blame the government? Because the bargain they make with white privilege is that they will never blame wealthy white Capitalists, the actual culprits. SEE ALSO, crass libertarianism, capitalist libertarians, Ron Paul dittoheads. These people have a radical certainty that they, too, have a natural right to achieve the wealth rich folks merely inherit.

dagNotes: On Whiteness, White Power, Capitalism & Anti-Capitalism

Bear with me fleshing out some language.

This is the mistake they* make: that whiteness is a quality we can sense, that it’s in some significant way material. That we can examine it and eradicate it without transforming society. It’s talked about like it’s a simple sin, a mistake, a form of revisionism, or an act, sometimes rising to a crime. We use words like transparent and opaque. We excuse its appearance as careless at best, mistaken at worse. We outline it as if it were a structure, like an organized cell.

Whiteness and White Power are now you see it now you don’t like part of a tacky magician’s act: white power is the reappearing thing itself, whiteness the object pulled out of a hat. Or, the result of birth. As in, I was born this way. What can I do about it.? A matter of rhetoric. Or worse, I’m not white. I’m free from guilt. I can do no wrong. Or, the not-white other who can actually claim he’s the hope himself for change simply for being not-that and nothing else.

White power isn’t material. It’s culture. It’s in the spirit of place: Great Britain, America, Europe. It hovers above the wreck of The Enlightenment. It infuses western religion with a sense of dominion over human being. It’s power is an idea that people have faith in but cannot utter. It’s a refusal as much as it is testimony or plan. It resists its own narrative but calls on the narrative of its individual constituents for proof of their allegiance to a man-made purpose. Seek self-help. Confess your sins. Do it alone.

Whiteness is powerful in the same manner Capital is self-valorizing. It’s the result of doing being. We let it happen because it’s how we tell the story of Nature organizing human action. It’s History itself. We shouldn’t romanticize it, manipulate it, look at it as a tragic formation of ideas. It’s not the debris in the rear-view mirror. It’s always already forgotten. It’s essential to character and habit.

Yet, it’s a wreck after all. A mess. On the other hand, it’s an order of being that instills within individuals a sense of duty to individualism that profits community regardless of location and direction. It’s purpose without purpose. It’s a dumb notion of Freedom based in the liberty to freely exploit. Dumb because it ignores the essential goal of its labor: to destroy everything first and then myself. It’s dumb because it ignores all science that it relies on in favor of the imaginary representations of reality in fanciful ideological formations. One wouldn’t be too mistaken to infer that individuals’ labor in white capitalist societies is to prove the value of its ideological assumptions about individual labor in white capitalist society.
 
White power is the will to expend everything first at the expense of Myself. (It’s always My Self in relation to others.) Forget the stupid medieval notions of the sin in the king’s hoard—the old king who takes everything for himself condemning his realm to rot and ruin and finally becoming the festering dragon protecting its useless treasure. The capitalist’s goal is nothing less than a barren landscape heaped with useless gold coin. (Ron Paul, I’m thinking of you.) The white power mad capitalist has nothing to protect. His goal is nothing less than the purposeful extinguishing of all natural resources for nobody but himself.

I often wonder how anyone would think it’s possible for me to do everything I want for myself and benefit others by so doing. The notion that such human action is possible must be based in the idea the Nature as it organizes us will infinitely provide resources to expend. It’s patently stupid thought.
This is the end of Ron Paul’s notion of Liberty, of Hayek’s Liberal Social Order. It’s the Republican reason for stalling government to promote corporatism. It’s the hope behind Obama’s neoliberalism. It’s not “Yes We Can” after all, it’s “Yes You Should Have Some, Too”.

Fleshing out the character and habit of whiteness is one manner to better understand white power. We can see it, in a way. White power, on the other hand, is a part of the practice of contemporary capitalism. No matter where you find it, what’s most conspicuous about it is its whiteness-for-itself. Capitalism uses white power as a kind of warrant for the free market (like I’m a free man,) as if its promotion were the point all along, and by simply doing things in the free market is to not be a slave.

I suppose this is why to be anti-white power, to be anti-fascist, to be an environmentalist, to be anti-racist, to be feminist, is necessarily to be anti-capitalist. To say otherwise is to accept white power, to embrace white ideology and its absurd ideological framing of societies.

*”They” are capitalists: liberals, progressives, activists. Of course, conservatives, corporatists and fascists.

Legend of the Persecuted White Guy

David Sirota's new essay in Salon is good reading.  Here's the article from Newsweek asking whether or not white masculinity can survive the recession.  With a straight face.

We all know the truth about white male privilege. Even now, white men are statistically the most insulated group in society.

The legend of the persecuted white guy (and his girlfriends) exists even in Korea, where white guys love to write I Hate Korea blogs because Koreans don't privilege white people by default. The white power structure is in full effect here and the privileges white skin with good English with good education affords translates into a standard of living that is, in fact, more comfortable stable than for the majority of Korean citizens. Koreans know it and some--not all mind you and nowhere near close to all--resent it. White people are massively privileged in Korea.

Imagine what would happen in the US if our government used tax revenue to bring native-speaking Spanish speakers from Mexico into public elementary, junior and high school classrooms--and paid those native speakers with graduate degrees more than many of the citizens who teach at those schools get paid, paid for their flights to and from the US each year, paid for much of their housing, paid for their medical care, paid for their pleasure, paid for their pensions, and when they left paid them nice bonuses. Imagine what would happen then.

White people, especially white men, hate unpackaging privilege and thinking about it. Talk to a libertarian about privilege and you'll see where I'm coming from. Bring up white power structure with many liberals and you'll get a fight.