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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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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As it turned out, I wouldn’t have to wait too long, and I may even have been overdue in giving proper credit. Bioware, a Canadian company that has risen to high acclaim in recent years for producing consecutive triple-A quality games, also deserves credit for being a trailblazer when it comes to inclusion. Back in 2005, Bioware released a game called Jade Empire, one that took place in a fictional world, but that borrowed extensively – and authentically – from Chinese culture, history, and mythology.  Unlike other Asian-inspired properties that feature white protagonists – the list here is endless, from Kung-Fu with David Carradine to M. Night Shymalan’s whitewashing of Avatar: The Last Airbender – Jade Empire featured an entire cast of Asianesque characters – “esque” only for the fact that the game does not take place on Earth.  It was evident in every detail of the game that Bioware had done their research.

2007 saw the release of Mass Effect, a space opera featuring an ethnically ambiguous main character – Commander Shepherd – who players had the option of customizing to resemble a variety of different ethnicities, and to be male or female.  The majority of the crew were aliens, with special mention to Tali’Zorah nar Rayya (pictured right), whose name, appearance (clearly inspired by Muslim hijab), and accent invoked the Middle East.

Mass Effect challenged norms of sex and sexuality as well, with the possibility for a “lesbian” sexual encounter, and a race of aliens – Asari – who invoked human femininity, but in actuality had no separate sexes or genders.  I quoted lesbian because the aforementioned encounter could happen between a female Commander Shepherd and Liara (pictured left) – an Asari who could be called “feminine”, but who explained that she was not female.  In this, the Asari might also be the closest we’ve come – or will come for a long time – to transgendered characters.

Finally, in 2009, Bioware released Dragon Age: Origins, a high fantasy game in a world populated by the usual suspects – humans, elves, and dwarves.  At a glance, DA:O would appear to be a step backwards for the company in terms of inclusion, because there is nary a dark-skinned or almond-eyed character to be found in the world.  Every character – with perhaps the exception of a random NPC or two – had European features.  It could possibly be argued that one character, Sten (pictured right), for his cornrows hairstyle, was intended to invoke an African-American, but that would be a stretch, due to his otherwise European features.

There was also the character creation system, which again – like Mass Effect – allowed players to create a character inspired by a variety of ethnicities (my character is pictured left).  The only trouble here is that regardless of the look of the character, the families of the character remain constant – and they invariably have a European countenance.  Different world, different rules of genes and inheritance – I was willing to accept some creative liberties, although they could’ve taken a hint from Fallout 3, which demonstrated well how a character’s family can be changed to match the player’s ethnicity choices during character creation.

Thankfully, Bioware did not even attempt – or need – to rely on the weak “hair connection” of Sten, nor the minor concessions of the character creation system.  They also didn’t simply rest on the laurels of creating two inclusive games for the mainstream years prior.  Above I talked about how a character’s ethnic inspiration could come through in ways other than appearance – namely by invoking real human experiences.  This is exactly what Bioware did in Dragon Age: Origins – and much like we saw with Jade Empire, there was clearly a fair amount of research done, or information drawn from a diverse or well-informed design team.

Without flinching from the possibility of controversy, Bioware boldly modeled the Elves of Dragon Age after the American “black experience” – the very thing I suggested back in February.  The Elves, thousands of years before the events of the game, possessed a rich and vibrant culture until they were conquered and enslaved by a human empire.  Fast forward to the present and slavery has ostensibly come to an end – although still practiced in some pockets of the world – but most Elves, living in cities, are confined, by a legacy of oppression, to what are called “alienages” or slums.  Their social status as second-class citizens follows even those that leave the alienages, as happens if you play an Elven main character, with humans marveling at an elf that actually made something of him or herself.

There are other elves, too, not confined to the city slums, who live nomadic lives and remain extremely wary of humans.  They also look down on their city brethren, referring to them as “flat-ears”, and thinking them weak for not casting off the yoke of human oppression.  The parallels between the elven experience and the black experience is not at all superficial, with the game asking some tough philosophical and moral questions around these issues of race and racism.

For example, during a dialogue between my city-elf main character and one of the nomadic elves, she asked me whether or not I thought that humans were generally sorry for their history of enslaving the elves – a question that invokes the idea of “white guilt”.  The potential answers to these questions were even more telling of the care that Bioware put into building this narrative.  I had the option of saying “It depends, all humans are different.” – the enlightened response, for sure – or “I don’t think most of them (humans) think about it.” – invoking the all too common attitude of Americans today of dismissing slavery and its legacy to history, as something not necessary to consider in present day.

The moral question comes when you encounter an elf who long ago was wronged by humans – they killed his son and raped his daughter, who upon realizing she was pregnant, committed suicide.  This fellow – through means I’ll leave for you to discover – continues to punish the humans for what they did way back in the past.  As an intervening party, you need to decide whether or not he is justified in his actions, or whether it is time for him to let go of his hatred.  In this we see the other side of the black experience – how should African-Americans respond to today’s Euro-Americans – with hatred or resentment for crimes of the past, or with the possibility of forgiveness?  This is a question left for every African-American to answer, not just once, but sometimes on a daily basis – and in Dragon Age, the player is left with a number of different ways to address the vengeful elf.

The Elven analogy is only one of many ways that Dragon Age demonstrates inclusion, albeit probably the richest example.  There are also the Dwarves, who use a caste system clearly inspired by India – including the so-called “Castleless”, corresponding to India’s “untouchables”.  There are also possibilities for gay and lesbian sexual encounters, depending upon the gender of your main character and the choices you make in relationships with your teammates.  This marks the first time ever in a video game that we see an illustrated sexual encounter between two male characters, as two women had at least been done before in Mass Effect and in Fear Effect: Retro Helix back in 2000.

Hana and Rain from Fear Effect: Retro Helix

Going further than that, the male companion in question – Zevran (pictured right) – was not a stereotype of the gay male, but a very complex character with a rather Ancient Greek sensibilities about sexuality – partnering with whoever he finds beautiful, regardless of gender.  And unlike many depictions of “gay” male characters in media, Zevran was not defined by his sexuality, but more by his life as an assassin.

In spite of the near unanimously Euro-inspired cast of characters, Dragon Age:Origins demonstrates inclusion of diverse experiences in ways that no game has ever done before.  Bioware has again established themselves as a trailblazer in an industry that so far has shied away from challenging the status quo or tackling tough issues.

One can only hope that in addition to blazing a trail, Bioware has also set a trend, with other developers soon to be nipping at their heels in trying to be more inclusive.

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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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But when we look at needs as they apply to groups, they do correspond to a qualitative hierarchy – the socioeconomic stratum. Generally speaking, those at the bottom of the stratum are struggling to fulfill the basic needs. This is not universal, and I do not mean to suggest that self-actualization is not possible for those in poverty. Afterall, how we define poverty varies from place to place. The people of Bhutan – in South Asia – have a per capita income of around $1300, which places them in abject poverty by U.S. standards. Yet the people of Bhutan, who hold a measurement of “national happiness” higher than economic wealth, are mostly happy. Happiness, where it is a regular characteristic of a person rather than circumstantial, is closely correlated to self-actualization.

In the United States, the hierarchy of needs is superimposed by a second hierarchy – of want. The difference between wants and needs is that needs are dictated by the bodies and minds of people and mostly on a subconscious level. Maslow’s model does not state that people knowingly act on their needs, but that needs function on a more subversive level. Wants and needs can and do align where a person becomes conscious of what they need and how to acquire it. However, all too often, wants displace needs – filler instead of fulfillment. Wants are like empty calories – food that fills your stomach and satisfies the immediate hunger need, but not the underlying nutrition need. A child may want candy, but needs vegetables.

Wants, unlike needs, are dictated not by individuals themselves, but by the external environment, from peers to the greater society. The United States economy is under-girded by people’s willingness to spend money. It is not enough to spend only on those things we need, but also on the things we want. In fact, the economy would be starved if we only purchased according to our needs. What we have is a culture of consumerism, where value is ascribed not only to goods, but to people according to their ability to purchase goods – material wealth.

The pursuit of wealth is not only a sidetrack from climbing the hierarchy of needs, but displaces it with the hierarchy of want. The hierarchy of needs leads to self-actualization – where a person is no longer acting on subconscious needs, but making regular conscious movements towards limitless personal growth. The hierarchy of wants does not ever lead to fulfillment of any sort, and in fact only leads to more and increasingly difficult to attain wants.

Individuals at the helms of the government and industries of the United States and other capitalist economies understand this dynamic well – and in fact, their positions in the socioeconomic stratum depend on it. That is not to say that people in high government positions and at the tops of corporate ladders are removed from the hierarchy of wants. They may actually be the most entrenched. As they fulfill higher and higher wants (meaning rarer or more expensive), they eventually come to a point where the goal is to attain greater ability to fulfill wants. Material wealth becomes the end in itself rather than any means to an end. This stage of the hierarchy of wants leaves people stuck within the hierarchy of needs, most often the esteem needs. The phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” invokes the need for the esteem of one’s peers, or self-esteem based upon one’s status in relation to one’s peers. People stuck in the hierarchy of wants fail to recognize that wants are endless and that satisfaction can only come through fulfilling one’s needs.

With that background laid out, we can get to the real meat of the essay. I have little interest in the vices of of the materially wealthy, only in how they affect everyone else. Just like the people on the top of the socioeconomic stratum, those at the middle and bottom are also mired in a hierarchy of wants. In creating and sustaining an economy based on consumerism, we have created a veritable culture of want. This ailment of society is particularly chronic and systemic within the lower class, much to their detriment. The idea of competing with the Joneses is patently absurd when one has yet to fulfill the most basic needs.

Our era of mass communication has only compounded the problem. Whereas it should be – and at its best is – a system for educating more people and faster, it is also a medium for spreading the memes of want. Before television and the internet, the economic classes were vastly divided by both material wealth and wealth of information. The poor could not even conceive of the pleasures of the wealthy and in a way it was to their benefit. Climbing the hierarchy of needs is possible even in poverty – as the example of Bhutan indicates. Once exposed to the prospect of wealth, but without any sustainable means of acquiring it, the poor can become mired in the hierarchy of wants as well. An interesting side note is that the people of Bhutan were amongst the last to have television, as it was banned from the country until 1999. This is probably not unrelated to their ability to achieve happiness in conditions that we in the “first world” would consider poverty.

Through television and the internet (radio to a lesser extent since it lacks the crucial visual component), the middle and lower classes were delivered images of seeming wealth and prosperity that are based on the hierarchy of wants. False associations were made between material possessions, social status, and happiness – again a displacement of needs by wants.

In rare instances, a member of the lower class may see a near instant teleportation to the top of the socioeconomic stratum, foregoing the natural and healthy progression of climbing the hiearchy of needs, and taking a shortcut through the hierarchy of wants. As a result, many of the needs remain, and like the already wealthy, they remain trapped in the esteem needs. The hierarchy of wants continuously changes the status quo for esteem needs – bigger and more expensive houses, faster and fancier cars, ever gaudier jewelry.

Worse yet, these individuals become an exemplar for other members of the lower class, who identify with them on the basis of their once-shared socioeconomic status. As mentioned before, the sudden leap from the bottom to top is exceedingly rare, but as the mass media constantly inundates our society with accounts of the materially wealthy, their stories seem more prevalent than they actually are. In fact, the prospect of skyrocketing from bottom to top overnight is mostly a delusion, and it is in pursuit of this impossible goal that leads many individuals and groups towards self-destruction.

Although the terms “culture of want” and “hierarchy of want” have so far been used interchangeably, but it should be understood that the hierarchy is merely the foundation for the culture. The culture of want is a memetic cancer that has extended into every sector of human life. The best way to understand it is to examine the different instances where wants displace needs and continue to inhibit personal growth. As mentioned earlier, at the base of the hierarchy of needs are the physiological needs such as nourishment. The body needs certain substances – like proteins, vitamins, minerals – which can be fulfilled by eating the right kinds of foods. Originally human beings collected their food directly from the surrounding environment, but today we rely on a food industry.

The trouble, however, is that the food industry, in seeking to increase its wealth by expanding and speeding up production, has taken numerous shortcuts. If you recall the distinction I made earlier between wants and needs, it was that wants are dictated by the external environment. That is the case here, as the food industry – through massive advertising campaigns – tell people what they want. Fast food in particular satisfies our immediate hunger – a want impulse – but falls short in providing nutrition – a need. Worse than that, these products are often detrimental to our health. Those at the helm of the food industry decided that it was more important to fulfill their want for more wealth than to continue to supply us with what we need. This wants-over-needs initiative is amplified in poor communities, where fast food outlets are disproportionately allocated.

Another example of the culture of want phenomenon can be observed amongst lower class African-Americans. The causes behind the chronic poverty amongst African-Americans are numerous and beyond the scope of this essay, but I would like to highlight an important shift in how many perceive their plight and envision the way out of it. During the so-called Reconstruction era, in the aftermath of slavery, African-Americans – both newly emancipated, and the freemen of the north, conspired to elevate the status of what then was an African-American community of mutual plight and aspiration. Education was the cornerstone of a movement towards personal and community growth. One product of this movement was the foundation of institutions today known as “historically black colleges and universities” or HBCUs.

However, due to the prevailing blight of racism, which maintained a distinct separation between the races in terms of access to resources and influence, a glass ceiling was set that placed severe limitations on just how high most African-Americans could aspire. This barrier was not only physical and social, but emotional. It was not only that African-Americans observed and lived within very real limitations, but that they also internalized those limitations. These emotional limitations remained even after the physical and social limitations were no longer imposed by law.

Compounding upon this emotional limitation is the ideal of the “American Dream”, where anyone can achieve anything if they work hard enough. Except that the American Dream was not inclusive of African-Americans, and completely ignores any concept of inequality. An added consequence to the rosy American Dream “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” ideology is that when one does work hard, but due to the very real social inequalities does NOT make it, it results in a psychological backlash in which the person blames him/herself for their inability. After all, they are told that it’s all a matter of “personal responsibility”. The idea becomes that if you didn’t make it, you just didn’t work hard enough, or to hear some tell it, you just weren’t “smart enough”.

Many African Americans, who as a group are disproportionately lower class, subscribe to the overall American standard of high-materialism and excess – the culture of want – in spite of the fact that they do not have the means to sustain such a lifestyle. Because education – once recognized by forward-thinking African-Americans as essential to personal growth – is so inadequate in many poor areas where African-Americans are the majority, it does not appear to offer a viable path towards success.

This is particularly relevant to young people in the lower class, regardless of ethnicity. Students who stay in school all the way through – and this is a particularly daunting challenge in poor communities – are not seeing opportunities that are much better than those of the people around them who didn’t finish. They see drug dealers, athletes, musicians, or even people who quit school and work hard at an honest job making money, more of it, and much sooner. And in a culture of want, money is the ultimate prize,  the ultimate measure of self worth. Why toil through school when there is no apparent guarantee that it will give you any greater advantage, and while the local drug dealers and big name rappers are getting what they want right now? Ideals such as self-actualization are not only obscured, but inconceivable.

Due to the quality of education in poor areas, students are not even given an idea of the possibilities outside the culture of want. They are given the standard subjects of reading, math, and science, but there are slim pickings when it comes to art, technology, and higher liberal arts. By contrast, public schools in high-income areas feature state of the art technology, up-to-date educational materials, and a greater spectrum of classes.

The result is always another generation of kids who are not only under-educated and unmotivated, but also disinterested in the school’s meager offerings. They see no way to connect the dots between an inadequate school and a successful life.

The fairytale lifestyles seen on the television and internet, especially when compared to the reality in their own neighborhoods, are simply more appealing than what school has to offer. Compound upon all of that a lack of mentorship, such as teachers working for a paycheck without any mental or emotional investment in the success of the children. At best they’ll fail to motivate and inspire, and at worse, they’ll add to the problem. They may even be the most recent products of the same system.

In poor communities, you often have a bunch of under-educated people with the wrong values and bad priorities, disillusioned with life, hopeless, and perhaps even angry. Material comforts – from clothing to technology to drugs – and status comfort appears to be a solution to one’s grievances.

The result is a culture where people spend beyond their means to compensate for feelings of inadequacy and hopelessness, and because they were never shown a viable alternative. But these same people, in spite of their financial, educational, and even spiritual poverty, still manage to contribute to the economy in a big way. Therefore it is not in the interests of those at the head of government or industry to promote the personal growth of those at the bottom of the stratum. Worse yet, they see it as being in their best interests to keep the poor spending beyond their means, as we witnessed during the subprime mortgage crisis. Poor and uneducated people continue to stimulate the economy without ever elevating their station. They remain trapped within the culture of want, at the expense of making any progress in climbing the hierarchy of needs.

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