How America’s Thing With Racism Hurts You And People You Love
Once upon a time in 1705 in a far away place called Colonial Virginia, the elites observed that their Black slaves and their White 5-year indentured servants were getting a bit too friendly with each other. They realized that if those two blue-collar groups ever got together that they could pretty easily take over the plantations. So they got together over mint julips on a warm, humid day and hatched a simple and obvious plan: Give them free stuff. Not everybody. Just the White people. And then, make life legal and physical hell for the Black slaves. Codify that the White owners literally had complete dominion over the lives and deaths of Black slaves in a way that they did not with their White servants and bingo…just like that they’d established White supremacy as an actual, legal thing.
And by so doing and by giving the White guys free stuff – 50 acres of land, 30 shillings, 10 bushels of corn, and a gun - at the end of their indentured servitude that the Black guys were never going to have (some jaded people might call that affirmative action where one group gets extra consideration merely because of their race) and by making living and working conditions far more unpleasant and dangerous for the Black guys than the White guys and even controlling life and death, the elite were assured that the White blue collar workers – although they worked hard, demanding, unpleasant labor in the tobacco fields - would never join up with those a rung or more below them. “As a blue collar, indentured servant I may be pretty low on the totem pole, at least I ain’t a nigger.” Yeah, if you google that you’ll find plenty of hoodies, t-shirts, and coffee mugs emblazoned with that phrase that you can purchase. And thus was born the Virginia 1705 Slave Codes that protected the White elite…the Elon Musks, Mark Zuckerbergs, and Jeff Bezos of the day. You can read the codes in full here.
All that as a lead-in to something I often speak and write about, but seldom explain. That hit home last week when I was leading a High Country News Magazine webinar about America’s Thing With Race.
HCN Webinar: https://us06web.zoom.us/rec/share/HRg4Rad62SbuvoiLxFnWKbJRO_VFy3NbXnJp_CXd7-Wmt5qAVhFWRTSggVFvJY2i.UYKWkBiFgHQcAt0_ Pass code: vX&E&w6n
During the webinar I said, as I have often have, “America’s Thing With Race touches and harms everybody in the country, regardless of skin tone.” And then we ran out of time for me to elaborate.
That situation above, the Virginia 1705 Slave Codes, made life harder not only for Black slaves, but for White indentured servants as well. It took away both the ability and the incentive for those White blue collar workers to advocate for higher wages, better health care, day care, safer working conditions, better living conditions, better healthcare, and a better retirement.
In modern day times, as state governments have opted out of federal programs to feed hungry children, heal poor sick people, and provide more money for a longer period of time to low wage workers who lost their jobs because of the pandemic we all have wondered why…why would states not accept free assistance? And oftentimes with the support of the very people who would benefit.
Hungry children. Our national narrative, which falsely credits all that is good about America to White men while also falsely portraying the status of Brown Americans as being largely their fault is why Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt turned down $48 million from the feds to fund a new food program to end summer school break childhood hunger in his state. “All any American has to do is work hard and their kids won’t have to go hungry.” But because of that narrative thousands of Oklahoma’s children will go hungry. Oklahoma is one of the most food-insecure states in America, with more than 200,000 Oklahoma children go without food at some point during a year.
The governor’s refusal to accept food at no cost to the state for the exclusive use of hungry children was likely seen as a benefit mostly to Brown people who merely had to adopt American ideals and work harder. Why provide them with free stuff?
So far in 2025, 36 states have opted in to receive the money to feed their kids. 14 states – all run by Republican governors - have refused.
Last year Tennessee accepted 84 million dollars and fed 700,000 kids during the summer school break. During the school year the same children receive free lunches at school. This year Tennessee governor Lee refused. “Tennessee is far more capable than a bureaucracy in Washington of developing a strategy to ensure our children are fed in the summer months.” This seems to echo the views of Trump and Musk that the federal government is too big and consumes to much of the tax money of the rich and White to redistribute wealth to the poor and Brown.
Let those kids eat cake.
Medicaid Expansion. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) aka “Obamacare” permits states to expand Medicaid coverage to adults with incomes up to 138 percent of the federally determined poverty level of about $20,780 annually for an individual or $35,630 for a family of three. States that have adopted the expansion have dramatically lowered their uninsured rates. Extensive research finds that the people who gained coverage have grown healthier and more financially secure, while long-standing racial inequities in health outcomes, coverage, and access to care have shrunk.
And it’s free, or near free. From 2014 to 2016 the federal government paid 100 percent of the cost of expansion coverage, with the federal share then dropping gradually to 90 percent for 2020 and each year thereafter, leaving states to cover the small remaining share.
And Medicaid Expansion actually generates income for the state. As more people have gained coverage, hospitals’ uncompensated care costs — payments to hospitals to help cover those costs — have fallen. And states that tax managed care plans and health care providers serving Medicaid enrollees, enrollment increases due to Medicaid expansion generate revenue gains that further offset the cost of expansion. In other words, those states actually made money off Medicaid Expansion.
Seems to me like Medicaid Expansion would be a good thing.
Unemployment insurance expansion. When the coronavirus pandemic hit in the early spring of 2020, and as more and more of the country shut down and more and more people were out of work, one of the first actions the federal government took was to increase the time people were allowed to receive unemployment compensation, and increase the amount of the compensation by a substantial $300 a week. This allowed millions of people to stay in their homes, pay their bills, and eat. Unemployment compensation is administered by the states but comes from the feds.
Although the financial lifeline was supposed to last through Sept. 6, Republican governors in 25 states made the decision to end the extra benefits early, arguing that the economy was recovering at a promising pace, vaccines were widely available, and many businesses were in need of workers. And in fact, ending the extended benefits early did force lower wage workers back to work, where many promptly became sick and some died.
Why More White Americans Are Opposing Government Assistance Programs. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, research has found that White people are the biggest beneficiaries of government safety nets at 52%. Black Americans make up about 18%.
Yet a recent study shows that since 2008, more White people in the United States oppose assistance programs, in part because of increasing "racial resentment." Researchers — Robb Willer, a professor of sociology at Stanford University, and Rachel Wetts, a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley wanted to understand how the behavior of White Americans shifted when they perceived different things — even if untrue — about how certain racial groups were faring.
"We find evidence that so-called assistance backlash among White Americans is driven in part by feelings that the status of Whites in America is under threat," Wetts told NPR.
NPR interviewed the researchers in 2018. Below is a condensed version of the interview. Notice how thoroughly their findings jive with our false national “boot strap” narrative.
What was your most surprising finding? Honestly, to me, it was this last finding. ... We showed them graphs of Whites' and minorities' income trends — and these were made up. But in the racial threat condition, we showed them [also fabricated data] that Whites' incomes were declining.
So I would think, rationally, that you should want to support programs that benefit Whites in this condition, right? But we didn't find that. We didn't find that they wanted to support programs that benefit Whites when Whites' incomes are declining. Instead, we found they wanted to cut programs that they perceived as benefiting minorities.
That is sort of contradictory to me. Can you break that down? The way that we understood this is that those perceptions [that] Whites' income advantage was declining were perceived as a threat to White status and this status threat increased their feelings of resentment of minorities.
So, it was less a rational response to incomes declining, "How can we help people whose incomes are declining?" And more about, "This is a feeling that the status position that I've become accustomed to is slipping away." And that increases resentment of minorities, and so, it's a more emotional response that leads them to want to cut assistance programs that help the poor.
So is it just that their "racial resentment" overtakes the ability for them to see that people of their demographic or their racial group also benefit greatly? I guess I would say that previous research shows that in American society, there's this very strong idea of individualism ... believing that people should just ... work hard and that they can overcome all their circumstances [despite] our findings that this opposition to assistance was increasing even during the Great Recession. So even in those moments when it's very clear that there are large structural issues that are leading to people to be unemployed, there's still a sense that someone [should] just be able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and not rely on government aid.
Can you talk a little bit about that perception versus reality — who is perceived to be on assistance versus who really is? That's a very good point. Even though members of all racial and ethnic groups are using these programs, White Americans tend to perceive them as mostly benefiting African-Americans. So, there's a misperception of who the primary beneficiaries are of these programs.
So this study pulls from data from 2008, which is when Barack Obama was elected. Can you walk me through the correlation between politics and these findings? In our first study, when we analyzed the nationally representative survey data, we show that White racial resentment rose beginning in 2008, and we argue that this was likely due to, again, this perceived threat to Whites' racial status caused by a sort of confluence of Barack Obama being elected the first non-White president, and also the beginning of the Great Recession. So, you know, Obama's election was an event with huge symbolic significance for racial relations, like people were talking at the time that we'd entered this [so-called] post-racial era.
So for many people, we believe that they perceived this as a sign of ... relative political power decline for Whites at a moment of economic recession. [It] created this sense of racial threat that led to heightened racial resentment and heightened opposition to assistance among Whites, even during this time of economic crisis.
Do you think that the opposition to assistance by some White Americans is only going to get larger?It's hard to speculate on that, because there's a lot that could happen. We only look at what we think is an important source of opposition to assistance. But only one. So there are other factors [besides] impact opposition to assistance.
With Barack Obama gone and a new figure in the White House, it's unclear what sort of impact that political development might have on Whites' sense of their status in society. So I think that's an interesting venue for future research.
Why use the phrasing "racial resentment" in the survey? Why not "racism"? That's an interesting question. There are two parts to this answer. The first is that sociologists, political scientists and other scholars distinguish between older, more explicit forms of racial prejudice — founded on assertions of biologically-based differences between racial groups — and more "modern" forms of prejudice.
Since the civil rights movement, White Americans increasingly reject old-fashioned or "Jim Crow-style" racism (statements like "White people are more intelligent than Black people"). However, they continue to hold a number of negative attitudes toward African-Americans, including a tendency to attribute racial inequality to individual failings of Black Americans and the belief that Black people are responsible for the racial tension in this country.
So, the use of "racial resentment" distinguishes that it's the latter type of attitude that is triggered by threats to Whites' standing.
The second is that Americans generally tend to think of "racism" as a stable characteristic of individuals, not something that can be prompted or change in response to changing circumstances or social trends. Since we're highlighting the way that changing perceptions of the social world influence Whites' racial attitudes, we wanted to use a term that emphasized that these attitudes could change over time, which feelings of resentment more clearly communicates.
So there you have it. “Things might be kind of rough right now, but at least I ain’t a nigger. My hatred and resentment of those people outweighs my love for my family.”
An after note: Precisely as I’ve been sitting here writing this, the Trump administration has been trying to figure out how to cut Medicaid. To be clear, Medicare is what we are all entitled to after a certain age. Medicaid is strictly for low income people. Most rich people receive Medicare. No rich people whatsoever are on Medicaid.
Overwhelming applicants with paperwork has often been used to thwart people applying for various types of assistance. In this case, work requirements will set up a thicket of paperwork that leads eligible Medicaid recipients to lose their insurance. And that’s the point. Read about it here in The Atlantic.
Sources
https://www.cbpp.org/research/health/medicaid-expansion-frequently-asked-questions-0
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/why-some-states-refuse-federal-cash-to-feed-poor-kids-28cc98c1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/07/12/federal-funding-children-food-program-rejected/
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2022/demo/p60-276.pdf
AI
In 2021, the average income by race in the United States was approximately $71,125 for White non-Hispanic, $48,761 for Black, $79,119 for Asian, and $53,718 for American Indian. The average income for Hispanic or Latino individuals was around $60,768.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/17/politics/affordable-care-act-obamacare-scotus-ruling/index.html
Thanks for this well researched post that documents that racism is a construct cynically fabricated by white elites starting in the late 1600's and early 1700's to control and exploit working people by pitting black, white and indigenous people against one another and also to create a political constituency for white elite oligarchy through giving white working people special status which is denied to other racial and ethnic groups. Perpetuation of the power of oligarchs is dependent on the support of white working people. Upending the power of oligarchs depends on the opposition's ability to create solidarity among all working people and to redirect the anger and resentment of white working people to focus on the elites who exploit them rather than on working people belonging to other racial and ethnic groups.