Godheval

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Adam Shepard: Poster Child for White Privilege

What proponents of the “American Dream” always forget – or perhaps never even consider – is that the “American Dream” is not equally accessible to all Americans.  Shepard’s experience of being able to get that job, to rent that apartment, has much to do with his privilege as an able-bodied white male.

Before I get into that, though, there is a bit that needs to be discussed about Shepard’s background. He entered the experiment with a college education, which although he did not use the credential to help him get the job, certainly played into his ability to navigate his experience with poverty.

That he was even able to secure a college education speaks to certain advantages he had that many do not.  That he was even inclined to go to college in the first place says more still, because for the genuinely poor, foregoing four years of income for the mere possibility of a better job is often not even a consideration.  The value of higher education is easy to take for granted once you have it.

There is also the small matter of Shepard’s major in college: business management. Might that have given him an advantage that many – if not most – people do not have, with regards to handling his finances? I would say so.

Furthermore, Shepard admitted that he had a credit card in his back pocket for emergencies.  While he didn’t use it for the experiment, just knowing that it was there for him to use certainly buffered him against the harsh reality faced by actual homeless people.  Knowing that he always had a way out if he needed it would prevent despair from setting in.  The psychological cost of homelessness is one that can only be taken for granted by someone who was never truly homeless.

Now, back to his privilege.  As an able-bodied male alone, he would be considered more qualified for work at a moving company, than say the man in the wheelchair he discusses during his interview, or even an able-bodied woman.  As a woman, current statistics would suggest that she’d be getting paid less for the same job, if she had gotten it at all.

Being a white male further enhanced his opportunities, because of certain things he did not have to face.  A person of color in his same situation – especially in South Carolina – would likely have to deal with discrimination, by police who might question his right to be anywhere, by employers who would not give him the time of day, and by rental property managers who would assume that he – for his ethnicity, nevermind his financial situation – may not be able to pay.

In a way, homelessness and poverty are associated with people of color, and indeed people of color are disproportionately poor.  White Adam may have been looked upon with sympathy, or with the assumption that he must genuinely be in a tough spot and that he’ll pull himself up if only he’s given the chance.  Black or brown or red Adam’s condition would’ve only affirmed what the property managers, employers, and police already expect of such people, that even if given a chance he probably wouldn’t do anything with it.

Perhaps here one would be inclined to criticize me for injecting race into an issue that has nothing to do with race.  Except that of course it does, for all the reasons I’ve mentioned, and because Adam Shepard himself indicates that it does – whether he intended to or not.  He says in the interview:

I’ve got child care. I’ve got a probation officer. I’ve got all these bills. Now what am I going to do? Am I going to continue to go out to eat and put rims on my Cadillac? Or am I going to make some things happen in my life…?

Who will most people picture when they imagine someone driving a Cadillac with rims on it?  Who, according to stereotypes, drives Cadillacs?  A black or brown person, undoubtedly.  And I am certain that it was a black or brown person that Adam himself envisioned when he made that statement.  Urban dictionary is hardly a scholarly or reputable source of information, but it is useful in providing some insight into the ways that racism can be packaged within subjects that ostensibly have nothing to do with race.  The first definition of Cadillac reads:

A car which is bought with crack money, that must have D’s thrown on it. Sometimes referred to as a bitch.

“Just bought a Cadillac, Throw some D’s on that bitch!”

“D’s”, in case you’re wondering, is short for “Dubs”, another term for rims.  A second definition rams the point home more explicitly:

Once classy brand which my doctor neighbor owned in the 80’s but has now transformed and became popular amongst gangster wannabees…

…Cadillac brand has now become a joke since the only people who like them now are gangstas, poor blacks from the hood…

About rims:

The chief expenditure of African Americans

And:

The subject of every “crunk” rap song, along with “twunny foes”, and prostitution and strippers.

So maybe – maybe – Adam Shepard wouldn’t have been thinking about black or brown people if he had only mentioned Cadillacs, but tack on the rims bit and it’s pretty clear that he was.

Considering all of this, how should I interpret the quote above?  That contrary specifically to what poor black and brown people are doing with their money, with only some “hard work” and “common sense”, anyone can achieve the American Dream.

What Shepard fails to consider is the presumption built into the ideal of the American Dream that one should be white, able-bodied, and male – as is Shepard himself.  It is a presumption that rings true as we see many people, unequipped with white male privilege but exerting the same amount of – or more – hard work and common sense, unable to shatter the various glass ceilings set above them for reasons of gender, race, class, and physical ability. Interestingly enough, Barbara Ehrenreich highlights some of these disparities as they relate to race in a recent article she co-wrote for the Huffington Post.  In it she writes:

The longstanding racial “wealth gap” makes African Americans particularly vulnerable to poverty when job loss strikes. In 1998, the net worth of white households on average was $100,700 higher than that of African Americans. By 2007, this gap had increased to $142,600. The Survey of Consumer Finances, which is supported by the Federal Reserve Board, collects this data every three years — and every time it has been collected, the racial wealth gap has widened. To put it another way: in 2004, for every dollar of wealth held by the typical white family, the African American family had only one 12 cents. In 2007, it had exactly a dime. So when an African American breadwinner loses a job, there are usually no savings to fall back on, no well-heeled parents to hit up, no retirement accounts to raid.

Do these statistics reflect an entire population foolishly choosing to put rims on their Cadillacs?  Or do they perhaps reflect a serious socioeconomic disparity based in the institutional racism of American society?  The last sentence in the above excerpt corresponds to Shepard’s ability at any time to fall back on his credit card and the wealth of his parents if and when he needed them – something he was able to take for granted because he did not, in fact, use them.  That is, until he decided the experiment was over and went back to his normal life – again, a luxury that a genuinely poor person does not have.

Shepard’s Scratch Beginnings is in part a criticism of Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, which was about her struggle (and failure) to work her way out of poverty as a Wal-Mart employee.  His criticism does not consider how Ehrenreich’s experience might have been different for the fact that she was a woman.  And while Ehrenreich is white, a disproportionate number of Wal-Mart employees are people of color, a fact that is related to the uneven distribution of wealth along racial lines.  Those employees likely have an even more difficult time than she did.

In that Shepard is able to criticize the poor Wal-Mart employee by proxy through Ehrenreich, for her inability to achieve the American Dream as he did, and invoke the image of the poor black or brown person choosing extravagance over fiscal responsibility, he makes his white male privilege very evident.  He also shows how from that position of entitlement it is easy to condemn those who do not have it – invariably women and people of color.

Finally it shows how white male privilege underpins the American Dream and how implicit within that ideal is the utterly racist, classist, and sexist assumption that it is for their own shortcomings – laziness, irresponsibility, stupidity – that anyone does not live the dream.

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This is not incidental. It is no secret that Sarah Palin – and by extension Bristol Palin – occupy that strange gray area where they are pro-celibacy but also pro-family, which more or less translates into “Wait until you’re married, then have a bunch of babies.” They are also part of the same social conservative platform which has put forth the mythical icon of the welfare mother, the poor woman who allegedly has a lot of babies so that she might receive extra financial benefits from the government.

That being the case, the pro-family position is not one that these ideologues hold with regards to the poor. And should a poor mother become pregnant on several occasions, because she – like the Palins – is pro-family, then she should not expect any sort of support, most certainly should never consider abortion, and therefore be left with the only “reasonable” choice – to send a host of new children into the foster system.

Better yet, maybe she should just abstain from sex altogether.  It is a confusing message, for sure.

What is the poor mother to do? Deny herself the right to have a family because she’s poor? It is blatantly obvious that this piece of propaganda – I don’t even think it deserves to be called a “Public Service Announcement” – is drawing a qualitative distinction between the poor family and the wealthy family. In the beginning we see Bristol, with all of her posh clothing and furniture. By the end, we see Bristol portrayed in the way that the wealthy view the poor – as having absolutely nothing, by virtue of their lack of material wealth.  It is impossible that a poor family could be just as happy as the wealthy and privileged Bristol Palin in their choice to have a child.

At the same time that this platform calls for sensitivity towards Bristol Palin and her pregnancy, it approaches the poor with moral judgment and paternalistic mandates for what decisions these women should make regarding their bodies and their families. It is not merely hypocritical, but is nothing less than class war. And when we consider that racism and classism are inexorable – indeed the “welfare mom” is portrayed as a black woman, and people of color are disproportionately poor – we come to realize just how much propaganda can be stuffed into a mere 30 seconds.

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A little while ago I intuited that the African-Americans in this state had mostly “assimilated”, for their lesser numbers (measured versus the national proportion and especially the east coast), and for the fact that the much larger Mexican minority serves as a greater threat to the white majority.

So my speculation has been that African-Americans in the West, much like Latinos and Asians in the east, for their non-threatening numbers and significantly improved socioeconomic distribution, have been afforded a sort of “hostility waiver”. In other words, they are acceptable so long as they do not grow too large, act too radically, or cost the average taxpayer too much in social programs. A controlled minority is a tolerable minority. Those Hispanics on the other hand…

In plain speech, because there are so many Mexicans in the state, they are the group that white people fear, hate, and resent, rather than African-Americans.  So African-Americans out here decided to throw in their lot with the white people.  And why not?  Because as long as the Mexicans are the focus of white fear and rage, they can slip in under the radar and point the finger, too.  It’s just good politics, right?

What this situation highlighted for me was the overall misconception about so-called “welfare” in the United States.  As this young lady and many others around the country seem to think, people of color gorge from the national bosom, having excessive amounts of children while refusing to work, so that they might benefit from so many “hand outs”.  The contention, especially for white Americans, is that their hard-earned tax money is being spent disproportionately on undeserving minorities.

This reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of welfare, in terms of the allocations by ethnicity, and just how much welfare takes away from the overall federal budget.  From 1935 to 1996, that which we call welfare fell under the federal assistance program known as Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC).  From 1996 onward, after welfare reform by President Clinton, the program was renamed Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), reflecting a new policy of limiting assistance to a maximum of five years.  The statistics of AFDC recipients by race varied from year to year throughout the life of the program, but a brief from the census bureau provides a snapshot:

About 1 in 4 Black mothers of childbearing ages (1.5 million) were AFDC recipients, higher than the 7 percent of corresponding White mothers (2.1 million). Despite these differences in recipiency rates, Black AFDC mothers did not have significantly more children than their White counterparts.¹

I selected African-American families for my comparison for two reasons – first, because the “welfare queen” was portrayed as a black woman, and because the statistics for “Hispanics” are troublesome, in that linguistic classification may apply to families who are also categorized as white for the purposes of the census.  These numbers show that, contrary to popular misconceptions, there were a larger number of white welfare recipients than African-American families.  This goes against any idea that welfare is a particularly “black” problem, or even that African-Americans form the majority of people on welfare.  Now here someone might point out that a higher proportion of African-American families received welfare, which is true, but it is a fact taken without consideration for historical inequality – from hiring to housing, part of the greater socioeconomic legacy of racism throughout this country’s history.

The demographics of AFDC or TANF are hardly the main thrust of my argument, however.  That comes with how we even define “welfare”.  If the issue is the federal government providing funding to people who have not earned it, then our definition of welfare must be expanded to include all of the corporations who received subsidies through the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (otherwise known as the “bailout”).  These corporations together – and lest we forget, corporations are recognized as “people” – were allocated tens of billions of dollars.  So here I ask you, who is more “deserving” of assistance – a poor family, irrespective of ethnicity, or a corporation whose executives directly facilitated our current economic meltdown?

The primary opposition to welfare comes from conservatives.  And at least we can say that they are consistent in their stance, critical of both social welfare provided to families, and the bailout.  Until we consider another major recipient of welfare, who they almost unanimously support: the state of Israel.

According to the Jewish Virtual Library, a site amicable to Israeli interests and continued U.S.-Israeli cooperation, “Israel has received more direct aid from the United States since World War II than any other country…”, nearly $100 billion since 1974.² The point of mentioning this is not to make a political statement against U.S. Aid to Israel, although in the interests of full disclosure I must admit that I am opposed to this financial assistance. The point is to put things in perspective, as it concerns just how much money the U.S. spends on “welfare” as a whole.

Projections for U.S. financial assistance to Israel were $2.55 billion for fiscal year 2009, and $2.7 billion for 2010, totaling $5.25 billion across the two years. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the payout for TANF is capped at $5 billion for the same two years.³ So, it is nothing short of hypocritical for politicians, pundits, and ignorant citizens to condemn poor families – particularly the disenfranchised poor – while directly or implicitly sanctioning U.S. aid to Israel, all of which is used by their military, not for any financial hardship.  Average citizens may be excused for not knowing about these allocations to Israel, but in these cases their hypocrisy revolves around the rigor with which they condemn poor minorities while not investigating the full scope of U.S. “welfare”.

This imbalance in focus undoubtedly stems from racism, with the idea of minorities disproportionately leeching from the national coffers just another affirmation of already negative preconceptions.  Such ignorance is common enough amongst white Americans, especially in a conservative state, and bears relatively little impact.  But where a young African-American student can buy into the stereotypes levied against girls much like her -  even the girl herself under slightly different circumstances – the situation becomes grave.  It provides a sobering insight into just how institutionalized and deeply entrenched racism has become.

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Being pro-choice is not the same as being pro-abortion, because I certainly wish that no abortions had to take place, that every pregnancy could come to term and birth a child into a safe, healthy, equitable environment.  The reality, however, is that the world we live in does not often provide such an environment.  The most common argument by pro-lifers it that adoption is always a viable alternative.

Except that it’s not.  At least not for everyone.  For instance, it is practically a given that a Euro-American child of no physical or mental disability has a good chance for adoption – certainly much better than her disabled counterpart of the same ethnicity, or those of other ethnicities.  While there has been a strange almost fetish-like trend of Euro-American families adopting Asian children, no such trend has emerged for African-American children or disabled children.  I do not mean to begrudge those children who were adopted into loving families; I mean to point out all is not equal when it comes to the viability of adoption as an alternative to abortion.

It troubles me when aggressive pro-life propagandists spread messages like “African American children are an endangered species” or suggest that the higher rate of abortions amongst African-American women is reflective of some eugenics agenda by Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger.  What this does is sensationalize what, for being a very sensitive and complex issue, needs to be analyzed and discussed with discretion and compassion.  Such propaganda glosses over the issue of adoption equity, and attempts to manipulate the emotions of the disenfranchised to serve a political agenda.

Let us make no mistake.  Abortion has become, for many, more a political issue than a personal one.  If you wish to see RVW overturned even when presented with evidence that it will not prevent the “murder of babies” that concerns you so greatly, then arguing for the overturn has less to do with saving children than it does with taking an ideological position.

And for that, you should be ashamed.

It is my opinion that the pro-life and pro-choice positions are not mutually exclusive.  In fact, I would wager that most pro-choice advocates would wish for a world in which all children are able to come into the world safe, secure, and healthy.  None of us rally for more abortions.  All of us want less of them.  But for that, we are not willing to deny a woman her right to choose what is best for her and/or her family, without pressure from pundits and ideologues more concerned with being right, than with doing what’s right.

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Did you catch that?  This man – a teacher responsible for the education of a diverse range of students – plainly equated troublesome behavior with ethnicity.  As if somehow “95% Hispanic” serves as some sort of qualifier for for bad behavior.  What was stranger to me than this blatant racism, was the fact that this white man felt comfortable enough around me – an African-American – to lay his prejudice out in the open.  Had it been an isolated incident, maybe I could attribute it to misspeech on his part, or my own misinterpretation.  Alas, it was not.

The second instance came today as he and a colleague discussed several students, and then the seventh grade student body as a whole.  This time he let slip that he expected that in a matter of years his tax dollars would be paying for their – his students’ – food stamps.  The colleague quickly interjected that sometimes the worst kids turn out to be decent members of society, that you “never know”.  Even removing the racial implications of a mostly political statement, this is a teacher – who by profession needs to be an optimist – projecting how his seventh grade students (12 year olds) will be costing him money in the future.  And his colleague, under the guise of a more open-mind, implied a necessary distinction between people who use food stamps and “decent members of society”.  This same fellow, upon giving me a ride after school, in talking briefly about the city’s public transportation, mourned how it seemed that only “derelicts” with “holes in their pants” ride the buses.  “Why can’t the buses be for everyone?”, he lamented.

I ride the bus – more so when I was back east – and invariably the majority of riders have been of lower socioeconomic status, and are predominantly non-white.  I tend to equate categorical condemnations of lower social classes with sweeping judgments of people of color, being as though people of color are disproportionately poor.  This requires no stretch of the imagination on my part.  Where affluent or “successful” members of color are held aloft as evidence to the contrary – that in fact it is about class, not race (still a morally defunct point of view) – those people of color, for their attitudes, for their “non-threatening” demeanor, represent the opposite of general perceptions of people of color as a whole.  So yes, it is about class, but in the minds of people like these – like the teacher who equated Hispanic with deviant behavior – race and class might as well be the same.

After a teacher meeting with the parent of a troubled student, there were two more interesting bits.  Immediately afterwards, my mentor teacher felt it necessary to point out how unlike her mother the student was – the mother by my best guess Hispanic, while the girl could’ve simply passed for “white”.  This made it clear to me that the issue of race hovers right there at the forefront of his consciousness, as it does it for me because I noticed too, but probably for use in completely different trains of thought.  During lunch, a third colleague – a smarmy science teacher – suggested that there was something “off” about the mother, but didn’t elaborate.  The mother, from what I saw, was incredibly anxious, speaking quickly and sometimes unintelligibly – and I assumed that it was because she had been called into a meeting and surrounded by teachers and administrators for a jury-style reprobation of her daughter.  I have no doubt that she internalized any criticism of her daughter as a personal rebuke, and to her credit, she remained humble throughout the entire affair.  I suspect that the science teacher, who classified the mother’s behavior as some permanent aspect of her personality, assumed that something else was to blame. Perhaps she too was keenly aware of the difference between mother and daughter.

When I first arrived out West, my intuition signaled something unusual, something “off” (at least compared to what was I used to back East) in terms of the social dynamics.  In the east there is an unspoken bond between people of color, perhaps a mutual understanding of a shared plight.  It is nothing so overt as a guaranteed pledge of support in anything, or even the promise of a conversation, but rather a nod or a prolonged eye contact that suggests a connection.  This phenomenon is particularly prominent where people of color are the extremely visible minority in any given situation – eyes will scan the room anxiously for another pair like their own, and reflect an obvious relief upon finding one.  The nod again, this time with more conviction.

What my intuition signaled,  and it took me awhile to rationalize – was that this phenomenon – this unspoken bond – was completely absent here.  The conditions were right, at least for African-Americans, because we are the extreme demographic minority – something like five percent – so the comfort nod, the conciliatory eye contact, should have been givens.  But as I scanned the parking lots, the supermarkets, the barbershop, the malls, the connection was conspicuously absent.  My yearning gaze was met with blank stares and awkward glance-aways.

As I rationalized the possible reasons for the stark difference between eastern and western social dynamics, I thought about the demographic differences.  In Philadelphia, my home town, African-Americans make up at least half of the population.  Reflecting the national distribution, most are in the lower socioeconomic class.  For white people in Philadelphia – the majority of which are middle-class, “poor” and “black” are perhaps the two most threatening categories of people, if for no other reason than the sheer size of their memberships.  Philadelphia has a long history of racial tension between black and white, most of which today bubbles beneath the surface and manifests primarily in the political arena.  On the other hand, there is virtually no derisive buzz – at least not in the local media, in the local bars, or in the political forum about Latinos – under the pretext of “immigration” or any other.

Even before I arrived here in the West, it was well-known to me that immigration was a hot button issue here.  It was also well-known to me that Latinos of any background – particularly Mexicans – were the significant population of color, analogous to African-Americans on the east coast.  So it came as no surprise to me that “poor” and “Hispanic” would constitute the largest threat to middle and upper class white people out here.

So my speculation has been that African-Americans in the West, much like Latinos and Asians in the east, for their non-threatening numbers and significantly improved socioeconomic distribution, have been afforded a sort of “hostility waiver”.  In other words, they are acceptable so long as they do not grow too large, act too radically, or cost the average taxpayer too much in social programs.  A controlled minority is a tolerable minority.  Those Hispanics on the other hand…

This demographic and social dynamic shift offers an explanation for the teachers’ comfort in expressing subtle and blatant racism in my presence.  Perhaps in their experience, to whatever extent African-Americans are not a problem, they are welcome “into the fold”, that precarious place where they may comfortably share in – or at least quietly acquiesce to – white people’s disdain for those troublesome Hispanics – or, rather, those indecent food stamp users, bus riders, and struggling twelve year olds.

Perhaps I am projecting here, but could those blank stares and awkward glance-aways I mentioned earlier – the severing of the “color-connection” – reflect the quiet shame of complicity? For my part, the decision to remain silent in the face of such bigotry and classism is a calculated one. My mentor teacher’s assessment of my performance – and the grade that comes from it – will be little more than a gauge of his personal opinion of me. While I have had thoughts of unleashing “Godheval”, I realize that even switching mentors wouldn’t guarantee me a different situation in another school. I suspect, even, that his attitude, and those of his colleagues, are entrenched in the political views of the state as a whole. So for now this post will have to suffice in terms of any public display of indignation.  And more importantly, I will reach out to the students personally, in every attempt to counteract the endemic prejudice and pessimism of the faculty.

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