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.”
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.
I couldn’t guarantee it, and I’d have no idea where to look to find out if it’s true, but I’d bet part of the reason white men were paid more years ago, was that they were supposed to be the breadwinners in the family. Single parent income families were the norm in white suburbs. Yes, even after WWII, when women entered into the work force – but that was usually to replace a male who’d gone into the military.
So, even by the late ’60’s – early ’70’s, my family was the weird one in the Upstate NY neighborhood where I grew up, in that my Father didn’t work at IBM like most of the men did. So, he didn’t make quite as much, even though he was a foreman at a machine shop. And my Mother not only worked part-time in retail, but also had a successful, though not lucrative, singing career – and had two solo concerts in Carnegie Hall.
So my family was an early 2 income, or 1 1/2, income one.
When women became more prevalent in the work force, companies could slowly erode the wages of the white men since their wives were now working part-time, if not full-time. That was a self-perpetuating problem in that, the more mens wages went down, or disappeared due to outsourcing, the more the women had to work. Now, it’s to the point where even with two incomes, familes haven’t been able to keep up with a single wage earner from 50 -60 years ago – as far as real income is concerned. Of course, we have a hell of a lot more toys than they did back then, but we have to keep up with the Jones’s don’t we? At least that’s what commercials keep telling us.
In black familes, since the men earned less back then (and still do now), a lot of the women also used to work, doing domestic, or whatever other work they could find. And in black households where there was no father, mothers frequently worked two jobs, and so did one of the children as soon as they could.
After the Civil Rights movement, too many stupid, ignorant, and, yes, racist white people voted for Republicans because of their Southern Strategy, and sided with capital over labor.
And by doing that, rather than fighting for an economic tide that would lift all boats, decided it would be better to to sink all of them out of spite and jealousy – black, white, brown, red, and yellow.
So here we sit, or stand, or swim, holding our heads as high as possible to stay above the water, drowning together, instead of floating along on a calm and level sea.
Before we called it “Voting against your own best interest,” our Grandparents called it “Cutting off your nose to spite your face.”
Maybe Wisconsin will be some sort of a wake-up call for working people in this country!
But with all of the power that corporations now have, and a complacent, if not compliant, MSM, I wouldn’t bet on it. They don’t care about a rising tide. They’re all swimming in money, while we’re drowning in unemployment and underemployment – and that’s for those of us who are actually still working.
And now, we’re all going under, together:
1 finger – Glub.
2 fingers – Glub, glub.
3 fingers – Glub, glub, glub…
Working America – DOA.
CSI verdict: Drowned.
They’ll probably bury our remains on land.
They won’t want any bodies in the water. They need the sea clear for their yachts.
White American Males in the postwar period, particularly the late 50s through the 60s really benefited from being at the top not just of the US, but of a global heap. The US was the only strong economic power coming out of WWII, and dictated the rules for the rest of the world to its benefit, and there was enormous economic benefits from Cold War (government funded) research and technological progress.
The status and quality of life that many of these “Whites are being oppressed” types think of as ‘normal’ was a brief historical phenomenon created by a combination of active governmental policy and colossal indifference to the fates of foreigners, the ecosystem, or much else besides a small fraction of the world’s population that happened to be white and on the right side of the system.
It’s ridiculous to me that some people who would have, 50 years ago, been among that privileged few are now complaining that they are being oppressed because there have been relatively minor readjustments in the exclusivity and extent of their privilege, and they now have to notice there are other people in the world. Poor babies.
As Biggerbox pointed out, the boom times of the 50s and 60s was largely due to the US emerging from WWII with its manufacturing base fully intact. World demand for US goods was so high, manufactures could even increase profits via planned obsolescence of those goods to ensure repeat sales. And then, alas, other countries emerged from the rubble of war to compete–very effectively–with US manufacturers by producing quality products that didn’t wear out, fall apart or fail on schedule. We had enjoyed our day in the sun, but a major eclipse was just on the horizon.
Oppressed white male here!
Well, at least I think I am. Actually I’m of Cuban descent so whether or not I’m really white is up for question. Maybe I’m just a dumb spic who thinks he’s a real American..But then again, my mother was Scottish ( clan Ferguson, hoot mon hoot) so at a minimum I’m half white.
Hey Maha.. I bet that clown who blew the catalog job didn’t have to ask Y when he got the boot.
muldoon,
I’m old enough to remember when “Made in Japan” was considered to be a bad thing.
The initial products shipped here were neither durable nor well made. Yet people bought the products because they were cheap. I remember being a kid, and I wanted a transister radio. My neighbor, a nice old Italian lady, gave me one for my birthday (Mrs. Bambino, who’s long gone, but I still love dearly), and I remember someone saying it was too bad it wasn’t one made in America. I didn’t give a crap, I could now listen to my Yankees and news radio 88 – WCBS and 1010 – WINS. Yes, even as a kid I was a geek. The radio, as I remember, lasted a good long time.
I think some of our genious’s picked up on the cheap and not durable idea, and ran with it. Planned obsolesence. And though I know that the quality of merchandise from Japan improved dramatically, I also think ours got worse, so that it made theirs look better.
Now, we don’t make anything. All we do is move money around and speculate on it. And that’s still a white man’s game. Just a rich one’s, so no trailer trash crackers need apply. And I think that’s something else that pisses off the white men – why aren’t they being included? Or at least given a few crumbs. In the past, being a white man meant being worth at least a few crumbs. Sure, the owner was a rich white dude, but he made other white men his managers, supervisors and foremen.
Not anymore!
So, white imbeciles,
you can either keep cutting off your noses
to spite your faces,
or get with the other races.
It ain’t now,
it never was,
and it never will be,
about race.
It’s about class.
Always was, is, and evermore shall be.
And until you imbeciles get some real class, and a brain, you’ll always be helping the wealthier class.
There’s a word for that, I believe it’s “FOOL!”
Well said, gulag.
My mom, who probably retired sometime in the late seventies worked during the 1930s until I was born and then went back to work when my youngest sibling started school (1st grade). Eventually she retired after working 20 years as a bank teller at the Rockland Savings Bank, Rockland, MA. What really pissed her off was that the bank would hire a male employee, Mom would show him everything that she did as a teller and then the man would have a desk job and earn a lot more than she did.
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Here’s a laugh!
http://www.hulu.com/watch/10356/saturday-night-live-white-like-me
Harry Reems…. 🙂
“whites are offended at being defined as a race” I know the feeling. I am a Pinko myself and am constantly offended when my category is not included in the census (except under ‘other’.)
I am opposed to immigration and immigration “reform” (amnesty). This country is overpopulated, and 21 million Americans are out of work.
What in the world does that have to do with the post? Stay on topic, please.
The GOP made themselves out to be a shiny fairy tale princes and princesses, far too many swallowed the fairy tale and got stuck with abusive drunk type leeching con artists. Not the most respectable era in American history.
Anybody remember the Peter Principle – people are promoted in the work force according to their competence. Eventually they will reach a level where they are not competent enough to move up to the next level (of management.) Therefore, most levels of management are chaired by incompetent people? (And, by the way, sex is not a criterion of competence.)