The Way You Make Me Feel - Discrimination and White Guilt

Almost 15 years ago, when I first started delivering training classes to corporate types, I was asked to put together some training around the subject of feedback, which is, almost inevitably, a messy business for everyone.  Predictably enough, people don't really love it when you tell them they've screwed up, and while training can help managers be less revolting and clumsy in the way that they approach the conversation, training cannot remove all of the emotional landmines from the field of battle.  Even if people are genuinely glad to know about their mistakes, most of them will still not appreciate the feelings that arise during the conversation - namely, stupidity and embarrassment, the latter of which easily transforms into resentment, because human beings tend to make this automatic leap:  We assume that we're having horrible feelings because that's what the other person wanted to happen.  I feel embarrassed; therefore, it was your goal to embarrass me.  Mission accomplished, you trite, mean-spirited jerk.   I am crying; therefore, you wanted to make me cry.  Good job, asshat.  I hope you're proud of yourself.

However understandable, this reaction is not born of logic, and this exact kind of leap gets people into trouble every single day, even when they aren't at the office.  Take the example of Tennessee State Representative Martin Daniel (R), who was "shocked" (his word) to find that his daughter had to read this passage about racial discrimination in her fourth-grade reading class.  

One day some time ago, a boy named Jack was doing homework. His mother began to examine Jack’s textbook. A puzzled look clouded her face. She noticed that the book was worn and missing a dozen pages.

The next day, she told the school’s principal that Jack deserved better materials. He agreed, but said that only schools in white districts got new texts. Schools in African American areas got old, damaged books.

So Jack’s mother met with a lawyer. They filed a legal case, claiming unequal and unfair treatment toward Jack. A judge decided that Jack’s mother was right. The board of education agreed to revise the system for providing materials to schools in the district.

According to Cari Wade Gervin of the Nashville Scene, "The passage is part of a cause and effect exercise, and students are asked to guess when the incident takes place, based on their class discussions."

So what's the problem?  During his interview with Cari Wade Gervin, Daniel explained:  "I don't have any objections to students learning about civil rights or whatever . . . But if we're going to learn about real facts, then move it to a history class."  He elaborated that in reading class, "There is no statement of fact, that, say, this happened in Chicago in 1966. It needs to be in a history class."

Why the obsession with history class?  Well, apparently any Black experience is like fight club: White people don't talk about it unless we're at fight club.  Put another way, white people will acknowledge "civil rights or whatever," but only when we absolutely, positively cannot avoid it - i.e. in history class.  If white people have to hear about Black things outside of history class, well, that's just unnecessary, and frankly, it smacks of a liberal attempt to indoctrinate the youth.  In his letter to the Superintendent, Daniel wrote:

I am concerned that this subject matter subtly, but unnecessarily, injects a dose of "social justice" into our impressionable youth. It teaches them, incidental to a Reading assignment, that America is a place of oppression, where certain classes of persons are commonly discriminated against, and that they have been a victim. (emphasis mine)      

Okay.  Um.  SIR.  If we're being at all real, America was born - and very much remains - a place of oppression, where "certain classes of persons are commonly discriminated against."  To illustrate the point without writing a book, let's isolate one issue and talk homes, which are the easiest way for families to build wealth over time.  Why?  As the US Commission on Civil Rights puts it in their 1973 publication entitled "Understanding Fair Housing": "Tax advantages, the accumulation of equity, and the increased value of real estate property enable homeowners to build economic assets. These assets can be used to educate one's children, to take advantage of business opportunities, to meet financial emergencies, and to provide for retirement." So let's talk race and housing before we come back to Mr. Daniel.

After the Civil War, Black men and women left the southernmost states to relocate to cities farther north, only to find their access to homes limited.  The publication continues: "many American communities enacted zoning ordinances requiring block-by-block racial segregation.  Between 1910 and 1917, these racial zoning ordinances were upheld in more than 15 State courts."  The City of Louisville happened to enact their crappy ordinance in the middle of a real estate transaction between a white seller named Charles Buchanan and a Black buyer named William Warley.  Once the ordinance went into effect, Warley could no longer inhabit the property, so he insisted on paying a lower price.  Buchanan sued, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that such ordinances violated the Constitution. Not sorry, Louisville.  Never sorry, Louisville.

Don't get excited, though.  In the wake of our highest court's decision, there was a shift toward the private use of "restrictive covenants," which restricted any use or occupation of property by people who weren't white, kind of like this:

 hereafter no part of said property or any portion thereof shall be…occupied by ay person not of the Caucasian race, it being intended hereby to restrict the use of said property…against occupancy as owners or tenants of any portion of said property for resident or other purposes by people of the Negro or Mongolian race  

The US Commission on Civil Rights found that "by 1940, 80% of property in Chicago and Los Angeles carried restrictive covenants barring black families."  Sit with that for a second.  80.  Per.  Cent.  In case you're wondering why the practice of covenants went on so long - i.e. from 1917 to 1940 and beyond - that's because in 1926, in the case of Corrigan v. Buckley, the Supreme Court shrugged harder than Atlas ever could and said, "We don't have jurisdiction because y'all are private people doing private things. Carry on."  Although the Supreme Court later ruled in Shelley v. Kraemer that such covenants could not be enforced, restrictive racial covenants didn't disappear.  As mentioned in the 1961 US Commission on Civil Rights report on housing, 

while buying a home in the Nation's capital in February of 1961, Secretary of State Dean Rusk encountered and refused to sign a restrictive covenant barring occupancy of Spring Valley homes 'by Negroes or "any person of the Semitic race, blood or origin,"  including "Jews, Hebrews, Persians, and Syrians." 

Covenants may have become popular as a means of dodging the government, but that doesn't mean the government didn't like them and wouldn't use them.  One piece of the New Deal involved the creation, in 1934, of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), which provided insurance for mortgages.  The FHA blatantly engaged in state-sponsored discrimination.  To quote a memo authored by Richard Sterns entitled "Racial Content of FHA Underwriting Practices, 1934-1962," 

The 1934 [FHA underwriting] manual even exhorted the use of a model covenant, providing that 'no persons of any race other than (race to be inserted) shall use or occupy any building or any lot, except that this covenant shall not prevent occupancy by domestic servants of a different race domiciled with an owner or tenant.' 

The FHA also engaged in a practice known as "redlining," where it literally drew red lines on maps to indicate those neighborhoods where loans would be extended rarely or not at all.   In the words of The Atlantic, "Otherwise celebrated for making homeownership accessible to white people by guaranteeing their loans, the FHA explicitly refused to back loans to black people or even other people who lived near black people."  As an official practice, redlining ended in 1968; however, data analysis illustrates that the areas redlined between 1934 and 1968 are still mired in poverty now.  The way our cities and suburbs look today, in 2016, is a direct result of all of this history.

I could go on (and on, and on), but I suspect Mr. Daniel would have interrupted me three paragraphs back, not because I'm wrong, but because, really, what exactly is my point?  What am I trying to accomplish?  Where am I going with all of this?  From his letter to the Superintendent:

Are our children being taught to assume that everyone who has difficulties in life is a victim of oppression? Should those children who simply attend good schools feel guilty? Should those children who otherwise enjoy the benefits of their parents' hard work and resulting success be made to feel guilty?

Ah, now we're getting to the heart of Mr. Daniel's problem - and the problem that a lot of white people have.  Should white people feel guilty?  Daniel evidently does, since he mentioned the word twice.  And making that same (il)logical leap that I described at the start of this piece, he assumes that because he feels guilty, it was clearly the goal of that fourth-grade reading lesson to stir up those feelings in him.  And is that right?  Is that just?  "Should those children," he asks, "be made to feel guilty?" No!  We cannot be saddling innocent white fourth graders with big emotions; therefore, we don't talk about fight club!  We cannot make good, kind, decent white people feel guilty; therefore, fight club does not exist!

Evidently, Daniel cannot imagine a conversation in which white people are not at the center.  Neither can he seem to think his way past his individual guilt.  Well, get over it, Daniel.  You're not to blame, but you have benefited from white supremacy, and you are sure as hell complicit in it.  As a country, we're not going to make the right kind of progress until white men like you, in positions of power, stop pretending that success is either all or simply about hard work and boot straps. We need to have honest conversations about institutional racism, and we need to address it head on.  Your success was facilitated by generations of institutional support that not extended to everyone, and indeed, that was explicitly denied to many.  You didn't build that.  And your daughter should know.