John Blake of CNN asks if whites are racially oppressed. Blake doesn’t present evidence or anecdotes of white oppression, however. He presents evidence and anecdotes that many whites perceive themselves to be racially oppressed.
And if you read even closer, you see that many whites are offended at being defined as a race. Whites are, after all, the default norm; it’s those non-whites that are races.
The face of America is changing, says Wise, author of “White Like Me.” American culture has become so multicultural that many of the nation’s icons — including celebrities, sports heroes, and other leaders — are people of color.
“The very definition of being an American is going through a profound change,” Wise says. “We can no longer take it for granted that we (whites) are the dictionary definition of an American.”
This was my favorite part:
For many decades, white people saw themselves as individuals, not as members of a race, says Matt Wray, a sociologist at Temple University in Pennsylvania, who writes books about white studies.
“We are often offended if someone calls attention to our race as shaping how we view the world,” says Wray, author of “Not Quite White.” “We don’t like to be pigeon-holed that way. Non-white Americans are seldom afforded this luxury of seeing themselves as individuals, disconnected from any race.”
Of course nobody likes to be pigeon-holed that way, and of course racial identity shapes our experiences, which also shapes our worldview. There is no one more pigheaded than somebody who doesn’t see that.
But what it all boils down to is this:
Many white Americans have lived under the assumption that if they worked hard, they would be rewarded. Now more white Americans are sharing unemployment lines with “those people” — black and brown, Wise says.
“For the first time since the Great Depression, white Americans have been confronted with a level of economic insecurity that we’re not used to,” he says. “It’s not so new for black and brown folks, but for white folks, this is something we haven’t seen since the Depression.”
Melissa McEwan reminds us —
The dispossession of poor whites is a legitimate class issue, which the GOP has endeavored to mendaciously reframe as a race issue, so that they might then summarily exploit white insecurity to support their classist agenda. This is the very crux of how the GOP has successfully convinced so many poor whites to vote against their own interests; exploiting this insecurity is the heart of the Southern Strategy.
I couldn’t explain it any more succinctly, except to add — yeah, karma’s a bitch.
One of the people in the article slipped up and identified white males as the genuinely oppressed group. I am old enough to remember when newspaper classified employment ads were grouped by race and gender, but for a long time after the ads stopped specifying “white men” the columns continued to be headed “Help Wanted Men” and “Help Wanted Women,” any any job that paid a living wage was listed under the “men” head.
And that didn’t stop until the early 1970s. Even then, for a long time if you called about a traditionally male-type job and had a woman’s voice, you were told the position was filled.
And this takes us to the next item, which is that the median real wage for men has dropped 28 percent since its peak in 1972, The article linked doesn’t say so, but I suspect the loss of union manufacturing jobs is the chief culprit. However, I remember reading years ago that downsizing companies often laid off more white collar men than white collar women, because they were paying women less for doing the same jobs.
This isn’t really news; lots of people have been saying that median real wages peaked in 1972 and have been dropping ever since. Of course, other people have been saying that real wages are merely stagnant, and other people — conservatives — swear up and down that wages have gone up, if only during Republican administrations.
I would really like to see the real wage reduction broken down by race and gender, but one suspects white men are taking the biggest hit, if only because they have farther to fall. Fifty years ago, any job that paid decently automatically went to a white man. You could even turn that around and say that traditionally “male” jobs paid better than “female” jobs because men were doing them. I don’t have a link, but I am willing to bet that fifty years ago, a female registered nurse with a bachelor’s degree made less than white male janitors working in the same hospital.
When I entered the workforce in the early 1970s, middle management was riddled with colossally incompetent men whose jobs mostly were done by their secretaries, who of course were women, and who of course were paid a tiny fraction of what their bosses were making. I saw this over and over. Women and minorities could pile up years of exemplary work and still be passed over for the good jobs.
I’m not saying all male managers were incompetent; I knew some who were excellent. And to be fair, I’ve worked for some women managers who were nightmares on steroids. But back then, white men were assumed to be competent and given one benefit of the doubt after another, and they were nearly immune from being fired.
(One clown I used to work for finally did lose his job when his incompetence led to an annual directory being printed, bound and shipped with entire pages of nothing but the letter Y. And no, it wasn’t sabotage. He made his deadline and stayed under budget by rushing the typesetting and eliminating the proofreading stage. The directory was the company’s single biggest money maker. But several hard-working, talented people — all women — left the company because of him before that happened.)
So what we’re seeing now is equal discrimination. There is, finally, a great evening out, but because the evening out is happening while the tide is going out, so to speak, we’re being rounded down instead of up.
