Dear White America (4 page)

Indeed, much of the imagery of irresponsible black women (especially teenagers) having babies they can't afford is itself irresponsible, in that it so wildly misleads those who are exposed to that imagery. The fact is, birth rates for black women under the age of eighteen (almost all of them unmarried) have fallen by more than a third since the early 1990s,
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and fertility rates among all unmarried black women have plummeted since the 1970s.
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The reason the share of black babies being born out of wedlock has increased, despite these two statistical trends, is that two-parent black couples are having far fewer children than similar couples in previous generations. If “intact” black families have far fewer children, those children who
are
born in the black community will show an increased ratio born “out of wedlock,” but this will have little to do with irresponsible behavior on the part of single black folks, whose behavioral norms have only “improved” (using our apparent definition of that concept) in recent decades.
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As for public assistance, the majority of people of color don't receive any; hence it is hardly legitimate to blame so-called “welfare” for the larger community's condition. Although people of color are more likely than whites to receive some form of income or health care assistance (which only makes sense, considering such groups are two to four times more likely to be poor) in any given month, fewer than four in one hundred blacks and fewer than three in one hundred Latinos receive cash welfare, between 6 and 12 percent receive some kind of housing assistance, and only 11 to 19 percent receive nutritional assistance (so-called “food stamps”).
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Considering that these recipients often overlap (particularly for cash and food assistance), the overall numbers of persons of color receiving benefits of these types is at no point greater than perhaps one in seven. Even then, benefits are paltry and hardly sufficient to encourage laziness or to serve as a serious disincentive to productive labor. Indeed, the median
monthly
value of cash and food assistance combined comes to only $255 per person—far lower in some states.
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Are we really to believe that any substantial number of persons would forgo a job so they could sit back and collect a few hundred dollars per month in benefits, leaving them still desperately impoverished?

Significantly, and contrary to common belief, most adults who receive cash assistance (the most vilified of all public assistance programs) are not able-bodied scam artists gaming the system and unwilling to work; rather, nearly eight in ten are either already working, looking regularly for work but unable to find a job, in school, or unable to work because of a persistent health condition.
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With jobs so hard to come by
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—even McDonald's recently held a massive national employee search, in which they were only able to hire six out of every hundred applicants
45
—it is hardly fair to blame poor folks for their unemployment or occasional need to rely on public assistance. And the emphasis should indeed be on the word
occasional
here, as most persons who turn to one or another form of government help do not remain on the programs for long periods. For cash assistance, the typical recipient receives benefits for only five months; for food stamps, the typical duration for benefits is a little less than eight months; for housing assistance, the typical duration is only four months.
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Yet despite all this we continue to believe, at least most of us, that people of color are taking advantage of “welfare” and that this is what explains everything from their own economic condition to the nation's current budgetary woes.

As for the widespread notion that people of color—especially blacks—place too little emphasis on educational accomplishment, once again, stereotypes and racial prejudices buttress this belief far more than the facts do. To begin with, is it really logical to ascribe an insufficient drive for education to people who cared so much for learning that under enslavement they risked serious punishment just to learn how to read English? Are we really to believe that a people who created their own schools, including colleges and universities, when whites were shutting them out of educational opportunities, need to be lectured about the value of learning? It seems more likely that we are merely looking at differential outcomes for African Americans in schools—differentials that are quite real—and, after the fact, blaming those differences on presumed gaps in values, rather than deeper structural conditions. Some of these were mentioned earlier: significant funding differentials between mostly white and mostly of-color schools; high concentrations of poverty in the latter as opposed to the former; different levels of teacher quality in mostly white as opposed to mostly of-color schools; and racial disparities in access to advanced curriculum.

In fact, research on the ways people from different races view schooling indicates that there is very little difference between racial and ethnic groups when it comes to how much their members value the importance of learning and doing well in school. Black youth are just as likely as white youth—sometimes even more likely—to say that doing well in school is important to them, their families and their friends. One study that looked at 40,000 students in grades seven through eleven actually found that it was white males—in other words, many of us and our children—who were the least likely of any group to say that good grades were “very important” to them.
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Another study, which examined measures of academic honesty and integrity among students in different racial and ethnic groups, found that it was we and our children who were more likely than kids of color to believe it was acceptable to cheat, cut class or talk back to teachers. In fact, the group that had the lowest measures of academic integrity were affluent whites—this was the most likely subgroup of all to endorse cheating and various corner-cutting techniques to get ahead without hard work.
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If anything, it is students of color who manifest better values when it comes to learning, but the opportunity structure continues to favor white students, resulting in unequal outcomes and the perpetuation of racial inequity. In short, we cannot blame different value systems, rooted in racial identity, for different educational outcomes between white students and students of color. Their values are largely the same. Their opportunities are anything but.

Looking at our second deflection of responsibility—the notion that all people of color need to do is deploy greater work effort and willpower in order to succeed—it is hard to imagine a more unjust and ultimately racist argument. To begin with, listen to that position, stated perhaps a bit more colloquially, but ultimately with the same underlying logic:

“Blacks aren't behind because of racism. They're behind because they're lazy.”

I want everyone to really mull that one over—read it again, two or three times if need be, until the fundamental contradiction and racist irony of the statement itself are crystal clear. It's like one of those “magic eye” books our kids have, the ones where you blur your vision and suddenly hidden images appear that you hadn't seen before. Do you see it yet? In our denial of racism we are insisting that blacks as a group are defective. Yet that notion of group defect is the textbook definition of a racist belief, and if large numbers of us believe that argument to be true, how realistic is it to then presume we would be capable of responding in an unbiased and equitable manner when faced with a black job applicant, loan applicant or student in a classroom?

Beyond that, do we really believe that black folks need to be lectured about hard work, in a nation where, for generations, they were forced to do the
hardest
and most exacting labor in the entire country? In a nation where they provided as much as
$1 trillion
in unpaid labor under the system of enslavement?
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Do such a people as this truly need to be shown the value of work by those who benefited most from that unpaid labor: a group that includes millions of persons whose parents have, for generations, handed down opportunities, jobs and substantial fortunes to us, regardless of work effort?

Are we to believe that blacks would
choose
to remain three times as likely as whites to be poor, rather than work harder?
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That they
enjoy
the excess mortality that derives from their current status at the bottom of the nation's racial and class structure—currently 100,000 black folks die each year who wouldn't if their mortality rates were level with those of whites
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—and opt to continue down that road, rather than work harder to survive? Can differential work efforts and values really explain why African American households today have median incomes that are one-third lower, adjusted for inflation, than what white households were bringing in
forty years ago
?
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Are gaps such as these realistically the outgrowth of differential
willpower
alone? Along the same lines, do Latinos—so many of whom work in hot fields picking fruit, or clean up after us in hotels, and who generally work long hours at some of the most demanding jobs in the nation—need to be taught how to work hard by white people? Surely we can't be serious when we say these kinds of things.

Of course, there is no evidence that people of color have different work ethics than whites. On any measure of such work ethic—such as the number of hours put in on the job, amount of time spent looking for work when unemployed, willingness to work at a relatively low wage, and willingness to upgrade one's skills and retrain for a new job—there is either no racial difference between whites and persons of color, or the differences that exist
favor
those who are black and brown, suggesting an even
greater
desire on their parts to work and work hard.
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Currently, of persons who are twenty to sixty-four years old and not working, whites are three times as likely as similar African Americans to say that the reason they aren't working is because they are “not interested” in having a job; blacks who are not working are 2.5 times as likely to be out of work because they can't find work, despite looking consistently.
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And really, now—using the history of the Irish, Italians or Jews as evidence that anyone can make it? To begin with, black folks, indigenous peoples and most Latinos—especially Mexican Americans—have always been constructed as outside the orbit of white civilization. Even though European ethnic groups faced discrimination, they were never the objects of caste-like oppression. They may have started out “provisional” members of the white club, but within a very short time were given permanent passes.
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In large part, white ethnic advance came as the direct
flip side
of black and brown marginalization. Indeed, working-class Europeans had rights and opportunities (like voting and land ownership) extended to them at the very moment free blacks were being stripped of those same rights (during the Jacksonian period); and later, large-scale immigration of Irish, Italians and Eastern European Jews swelled just when immigration from non-European nations was all but shut down. In many ways, these white ethnic groups were used as a buffer between the WASP elite and persons of color, often played off against them in an attempt to divide the loyalties of folks who were in similar class groupings.

Most European immigrants came to the North at a time when industry was the key to growth thus, they were well positioned to benefit from the opportunities afforded by the modern economy. Blacks, on the other hand, were relegated mostly to the agricultural South, which offered fewer opportunities for advancement. Upon migrating north in search of a better life for their families, African Americans encountered massive violence and race riots (often led by those white ethnics who wished to remain one step ahead of people of color),
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as well as labor union discrimination and residential segregation, in ways that even the most despised European ethnic did not.

Of course, there is that seemingly sticky matter of Asian success, some of us might reply. They aren't white, after all, and haven't been able to “become white” over time, yet they've done well. And looked at a certain way, it's true; the data seem to indicate widespread Asian American success and economic accomplishment. Indeed, as many of us are quick to point out, household income among Asian Americans is higher than that for whites, as are the rates at which Asian Americans have college or advanced degrees. But before we get carried away with this seeming proof of racism's demise, let's step back a bit and consider a few things.

To begin, let's remember that a disproportionate percentage of Asian Americans came to the United States already having educational and occupational status that would place them in the middle class or above: large numbers, in fact, either already had a college degree or were working on their degree at the time of arrival here.
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This makes Asian Americans a highly self-selected immigrant group—quite different from, and hardly comparable to, either native-born African Americans, indigenous peoples or most Latinos, who came over a contiguous border with the United States.

Second, let us recall that Asian Americans are far from monolithic: some are doing pretty well, while others are struggling. Poverty rates, for instance, among Chinese Americans and Vietnamese Americans are 50 percent higher than the poverty rates for whites; Korean American poverty rates are two-thirds higher than the rates for whites; and poverty rates for Cambodian, Hmong and Lao Americans are
2.5 times
higher than white poverty rates.
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