For members in good standing of the Tribe of White, the consequences of White racism can be even worse than they are for those of us trying to escape it, starting with getting shnookered on a regular basis and going downhill from there: once the fundamental lie of inherent White superiority is bought into, any other utterly false thing may become believable. As our 36th president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, said, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” Whenever a politician sounds a racial dog whistle, we may be sure of one thing: that politician has just about as much respect for White people’s intelligence as they have for the intellectual capacity of their average pooch. They’re sure White people will come when called, put up with any amount of abuse, and keep coming back every time they whistle. Lately there’s been as much bullhorn as dog whistle, and the contempt for White people’s intelligence is more pronounced than ever, which has not been good for anyone’s health on any level—physical, mental, political, economic, environmental, climatic. Jonathan Metzl’s book Dying of Whiteness lays out in some detail how White racism hurts us all on the most fundamental levels. There are people clinging to Whiteness as if it were a life raft when in reality it’s a death trap.
White racism is why we can’t have nice things. Not universal health care, not universal access to good, nourishing food, not commonsense gun laws, not safe, reliable infrastructure, not environments free of toxic pollution, not topnotch public education, not decent, affordable housing, not water fit to drink or air fit to breathe, not a public-health system sufficient to see us through a deadly pandemic turbocharged by what Steven Thrasher has called “the myth of white immunity,” and certainly not a functional democracy—the list goes on and on. Brand-new public swimming pools have been filled in with concrete because White people didn’t want to share. As Tressie McMillan Cottom has said, “Whiteness defends itself. Against change, against progress, against hope, against black dignity, against black lives, against reason, against truth, against facts, against native claims, and against its own laws and customs.”
The steady erosion of all our public goods and services feeds directly into the long-term project of some of the richest White people under the guise of fighting “socialism,” which aims to eliminate every good thing that government does, skewing budgets as far away as possible from the common good. The end goal is for those same rich White people to no longer be bothered by any pesky democracy, however feeble, and also to not have to pay any taxes. They don’t mind the rest of us paying enough taxes to maintain robust military and police forces that can bash our heads in if we don’t like it.
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