these past few days have been very revealing as discussions i’ve had with friends and family, reading comments on shaquanda cotton’s issue, and articles i’ve stumbled across have thrust a common issue back into my mental space: race.
being in london for the past 6 months has also given me an ‘out-of-body’ experience with reference to how americans are obsessed with race. if you’ve been following the comments on our post and shaquanda’s blog, you’ll see that visitors are coming from all over. a few perplexing comments have been around how ‘others’ do not like america because of their racial obsession. while i no doubt believe race has weight in all parts of the world (read: apartheid and aborigine), the history of america, coupled with images like katrina, amadou diallo, and strom thurmond flow into a concept i was introduced to (and spoke about) in high school: affirmative action for whites.
in certain markets, pbs and california newsreel are running an acclaimed series in the study of race and its illusion. one of the attached articles is an analysis of affirmative action for whites. here a few notes that i wanted to pull out of the article:
- affirmative action, despite its unpopularity among many privileged white americans, actually originated in the 17th century when european immigrant indentured servants (read: italian, polish, irish) demanded ‘rights’ after enslaved africans replaced them. the outcome was 270 million acres of american indian land ‘handed over’ in the homestead act of 1862.
- although it still takes money out of my paycheck in 2007 (and everyone else’s for that matter), the social security act of 1932 was written with provisions to exclude agricultural workes and domestic servants. let’s see, who predominantly had those jobs in the 1930′s (and even today): blacks, mexicans, and asians.
- many know that home ownership is the path to financial independence and wealth. when the federal housing authority (fha) poured $120 billion into the economy between 1932 and 1962 to allow the working class to own homes, 98% went to white families with provisions to allow ‘racially diverse’ neighborhoods as a financial risk.
let’s break that last part down to the numbers so that we can wrap our brains around what that means.
120 billion * .98 = 117.6 billion, or 117.6 for simplicity. as of july 2006, there were 300 million people in the united states, with 82% of those being white. 300 million * .82 = 246 million white people. if you take the 117.6 billion given to them and divide by 30 years, it comes to about $16,000 a year to start owning a home. would anyone here like $16 grand for their first house?
coupled with the entire pbs video series, the idea of race becomes simply an excuse for one set of people to psychologically feel superior to another. the result of this ‘im better than you’ attitude is a mosh pit of insecure adults vying for most superficial advantage that they can get. these same adults run the businesses that make-up our world economy, legislate government that create laws, and police our citizens to enforce these laws. the ‘ten things everyone should know about race‘ reiterate this sentiment.
as a young black professional, the simple answer is to understand this reality and lead a purposeful-driven life to enact change. while the world may not reach the utopia of equality and fundamental logic in our lifetime, the exposure of this reality in 2007 should allow us to see the path still being plotted from ghana to obama.
Blair
Homestead Act
President Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, which gave freehold title to 160 acres of land in the American west to anyone, regardless of race, who was willing to build a house and live on it for five years in May 1862. He signed the bill over the objection of Southern plantation owners who feared competition from free farmers. It had nothing to do with indentured servants. The Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 ended homesteading, except in Alaska, where the last claim was made in 1986. Free blacks were allowed to file homestead claims, as were slaves freed after the Civil War.
The era of indentured servitude was over by the time the Homestead Act went into effect. Indentured servants are often compared to slaves, but the comparison has no basis in reality. Indentured servitude was actually a pretty good deal. Some people were sentence to indentured serviture as the result of crimes or unpaid debts, but most indentured servants freely contracted their service for a set number of years, usually two to five, in echange for transportation across the Atlantic (the price of the voyage was roughly equal to two or three years of wages). At the end of their years of servitude, the indentured servants were due a lump sum payment that enabled them to buy their own land. By that time, they knew which crops worked best and where the best land lay. Many quickly grew more propersous than their former masters.
Thousands of white slaves, who were slaves in the same sense African American slaves were slaves, was transported from Europe to the Americas, but most went to the Carribean. Only several hundred came to the colonies that later became the United States. Most quickly perished because they had no immunity to diseases, such as malaria, they encountered in the Americas. One of the reasons slave owners perferred African slaves was their partial immunity to malaria.
GI Bill
All veterans, regardless of race, were covered by the GI Bill, which paid college costs and guaranteed mortgage loans for veterans returning from World War II. The mortgage guarantee enabled vets to buy homes with small downpayments. While African Americans vets of World War II did use the GI bill, fewer of them met college entrance requirements due to the poor education they received in elementary and high school, particularly in the South. Fewer black vets could manage even the minimal downpayment required under the GI Bill. However, the GI Bill extended through the Vietnam Era. I took college courses under the GI Bill in the mid 1970s. A black or Hispanic soldiers who served in Vietnam can still buy houses using the GI Bill provided they haven’t already used the bill to buy a house.
Today, the New GI Bill helps vets of all races pay college costs while they are in the service or after they leave the service.
Your data on FHA home loans is nearly half a century out of date.
March 23, 2007 at 10:51 pm
Fredric
blair, thank you for comment. while i do not disagree with the stats posted, you have missed one key piece: instituting a policy on paper does not necessarily dictate that it will be executed in that fashion.
what makes this series so poignant is the results of the acts that were put in place. it’s great that the government instituted acts to help those of the war or those who were slaves, but the outcome, the numbers of such acts are so disproportionate, it’s not even funny. 98%?
coupled with the scientific dna data of ‘race’ in general, it makes even less sense how white people in this country made decisions on an aspect of human culture that has no genetic distinguishing value with the exception of ‘what you see’. in fact, a korean and african-american can be just as genetically different as a korean and another korean. the u.s. is the first IN HISTORY to enslave another people because of ‘visual difference’. for any other people, it was because of religious beliefs, opposition to governmental policy, or different culture (greeks and romans).
the fact that many people, black and white, somehow contribute ‘resiliency’ and ‘fortitude’ to race or ‘what i did myself’ is completely asinine.
the fact remains that white government officials set up policy to benefit them and those that look like them.
March 24, 2007 at 10:22 am
YBP Guide — weekly roundup: 3/24
[...] affirmative action for whites [...]
March 24, 2007 at 11:31 am
Blair
No nation has ever enslave people simply because of their race. For example, in 700 African armies crossed the Mediterrean and conquered the Iberian peninsula. During their four hundred years of occupation, the Moors routinely transported white slaves from Spain to Africa, but it wasn’t because the slaves were white; it was because the slaves were Christians and religous laws permitted Muslims to enslave Christains.
The first slaves transported to the American colonies were white slaves. These slaves should not be confused with indentured servants; they were slaves in the same sense black slaves were slaves. The American colonists replaced white slaves with black slaves for two reasons. African slaves possessed a partial genetic immunity to malaria. Since the slave trade had been thriving in Africa for centuries, black slaves were more abundant. Therefore, they were cheaper. (The slave traders did not raid African villages to capture slaves; they purchased slaves from African tribes.) The notion that it’s okay to enslave blacks because they are inferior to whites did not cause slavery; it arose in the 1800s when rising abolitionist sentiment forced slave owners to justify the continuation slavery. In previous centurys, slavery was just accepted and no one felt pressed to justify it. In the United States, about 6 to 8 percent of whites and 1.6 percent of free blacks owned slaves. Persumedly, the black slave owners did not consider themselves genetically superior to blacks.
Citing 98 percent as the porportion of benefits distributed to whites certainly sounds makes it sound bad. But if the benefits had been equally distributed among blacks and whites, about 90 percent would still have gone to whites. Still sounds bad, doesn’t it? The largest percentage of any benefits resulting from social legislation will go to the most populous segment of society, unless its specifically targeted, as in the case of affirmative action, at a specific segment of the society.
Today the New GI Bill disporportionately benefits African America soldiers, who are over represented in the military services, especially the Army. Parodixically, this is the result of racial prejudices. African Americans has long been attracted to military service, particulary the Army, because they see equal opportunity. This is beginning to change. The Army noncomission officer corps has long been dominated by African Americans. So, a statistical argument could be advanced to say the New GI Bill was enacted to benefit black Americans over white, even though it would be obviously false.
Things are beginnign to change in the military, by the way. Now that military pay has increased, as part of the shift from a draftee force to an all-volunteer force, the NCO corps has become solidly middle class. Today, black NCOs are sending their children to college instead of boot camp. (Strange how things work out.)
Military service can be a tricky way to work you way up the economic ladder–there are those occassional combat deployments to worry about. We need to somehow structure the econcomy to replace rungs on the economic ladder that have been taken away by globlization and ensure all racial groups have equal acess.
March 24, 2007 at 4:02 pm
Fredric
interesting arguments. i certainly understand how citing those circumstances would lead you to the conclusions you’ve stated.
a few questions though. if something is ‘evenly distributed’ amongst a population of a majority and minority, why is that minorities have not seen the same benefit as whites who ‘benefited the same’?
it is a fact that white wealth on average is ~$88k while black wealth averages ~$8k. it would take blacks more than 550 years to catch up to whites, and only if they do not eat, sleep, or buy basic amenities.
i also think it would be poignant to ask why there are so many blacks in the army? i can speculate that the government targets poor black neighborhoods since most feel that these class of people are expendable. even more crucial, why do white upper-class families, including our senators, not have their sons and daughters in the army?
the question that your statements do not address is why do these realities disproportionately exist with blacks.
as i stated in the article, this is what the series by pbs addresses. what is this connection to the illusion of color? when you analyze the numbers, no explanation on the intent of a piece of legislature will deny the fact that whites have manipulated the system to benefit them. from labor unions to the social security act to fha.
in fact, the most wealthy part of the united states, the stretch of south between virginia and south carolina, was built on and through the backs of who?
yeah, us.
all i can do is run fast and try to catch up.
March 24, 2007 at 8:03 pm
Blair
White households may be worth an average of $80,000, but most of it in home equity. The assumption is that people will be able to sell their homes for more than they owe, but the imminent collapse of the housing market might make this impossible for a large percentage of homeowners. Without their housing equity, most whites Americans would probably have a negative net worth, the result of 750 million overly optimistic Baby Boomers spending more than they earn. (Warren Buffet and Bill Gates are rumored to have some money set aside.) Baby Boomers expected to reap a financial windfall by selling their parents’ homes when their parents died, but this windfall is turning out to be largely illusionary. Baby Boomers are selling their parent’s homes and maxing out their credit cards to pay for their parent’s medical bills, nursing homes and assisted living centers at the same time that they are trying to put their kids to put through college.
The first Baby Boomers will hit 60 this year, and a large percentage them are heading into retirement with little or no savings and without the pension plans that gave their parents a comfortable retirement. Over the next couple of decades, 750 million, mostly white, Americans, who are now at the height of their earnings potential, are going to see their incomes reduced about 60 percent by retirement. This is going to have a big impact on the income and property gap. African Americans and, especially, Hispanic Americans are much younger than non-Hispanic white Americans. They need to position themselves so corporate America will want to hire them rather than immigrants, legal or otherwise.
Recent DNA analysis reveals that people fall into five clusters corresponding to continents of origin: Africa, East Asia, Oceania, the Americas and western Eurasia, which includes Europe, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent (those dark-skinned Hindus are the Aryans of Nazi mythology). It supports the theory that human beings developed difference genetic differences and characteristics that we call race in partial or almost complete continental isolations. The mapping of the human genome strongly supports the archaeological and historical record of human development. It also reveals that people are generally right when they rely on physical characteristics when they categorize people by race (There seems to be a lot of confusion about Middle Easterners, which is why many Americans of Middle Eastern descent think they should qualify for affirmative action; but then we would have to grant affirmative action preference to Jews, and everybody knows IQ tests and college entrance exams are culturally biased in favor of Jews and Asians.)
Mexicans are typically about 58 percent Caucasian, 39 percent Native American and 3 percent African. Mexicans emphasize their European ancestry, with many (improbably) claiming to be 100-percent Spanish, but Mexican-Americans tend to emphasize their Native American roots, which qualifies them for affirmative action preferences.
I live in a border city of 750,000 people that is more than 80-percent Hispanics. Intermarriage between Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites is common, and the offspring of these unions (think Cameron Diaz) also qualify for affirmative action. Once the city’s African Americans, Native Americans, Asians, and non-Hispanic white females are counted, about 95 percent of the population is eligible for affirmative action. (As you might expect about 95 percent of the city’s resident support affirmative action programs.) The city’s suburbs are even more predominately Hispanic than the city itself, so there is no white flight. The city’s non-Hispanic white population is shrinking, not only a percentage of population but in actual numbers, because it is aging and is beginning to die off. So, much younger Hispanics dominate the city’s social and economic life. All neighborhoods from the richest to the poorest are predominantly Hispanic America. (Oddly, the city prides itself on its diversity, as if it will become 100-perecent diverse once it becomes 100-percent Hispanic.) Still, the city is developing in the same fashion as metro areas in which minorities occupy the decaying inner city while whites occupy the affluent suburbs. Hispanics occupy the big houses on the high mesas as well as the tiny adobe houses in the barrios pressed up against the Rio Grande. We have “rich-kids†schools and “poor-kids†schools, but all schools are overwhelmingly Hispanic American. This seems to indicate that inequities in income and property, the separation between rich and poor, are not a racial construct. Hispanics have already overtaken African Americans as the nation’s largest minority group and will soon be an absolute majority in the nation’s two most populous state. In these states, about 70 percent of the benefits of any social program will soon go to Hispanics and African Americans while about 30 percent will go to non-Hispanic whites. If present immigration and reproduction trends continue, with Anglos decreasing in number as well as a percentage of population, Hispanics will become the majority in America. Once this happens, any social programs will appear to be engineered to primarily benefit Hispanics.
Skin color will become less important as interracial marriages grow in number. The default color of the human race, by the way, is probably white. This is thought to be true because humans and chimps have common ancestry, and chimps, beneath their thick body hair, have white skins. (Not much here for white supremacists to brag about.) As humans evolved in Africa, they lost most of their body hairâ€â€a breeding ground for lice and parasitesâ€â€and developed melanin-receptors that turned their skin dark to protect them from the sun. The first modern human beings who migrated out of Africa about 50,000 years ago to populate the rest of the world were probably black. In Northern Europe, dark skin may have become a disadvantage rather than an advantage because it prevented people from absorbing Vitamin D directly from sunlight, so people developed lighter skins.
March 29, 2007 at 11:20 pm
YBP Guide — find new things. stumble.
[...] her experience regarding white privilege. interestingly, it was right on the heels of my post about affirmative action for whites. for those that are not sure, check out the ’suggested [...]
April 5, 2007 at 7:32 pm
White Privilege | Young Black Professional Guide
[...] been more than a year since I last brought up the factual evidence of the institutional affirmative action for White Americans. The numbers don’t lie, and now, in the beast that is this political climate, we’re [...]
September 18, 2008 at 1:03 am