Dear White America (8 page)

Facts aside though, I can understand why so many of us might be afraid. As we become anxious, uncertain as to our future and where the nation is headed, that anxiety is being fed around every corner by right-wing commentators bent on using that uncertainty to fuel a political movement. The sad truth is, racial resentments are potent motivators in a nation such as ours, and there is no shortage of mouthpieces prepared to use them to their own ends, a subject to which I now turn.

Consider the perverse logic of Rush Limbaugh's suggestion that President Obama was deliberately trying to destroy the American economy as some form of “payback” for slavery and racism, or Glenn Beck's charge that health care reform is really just Barack Obama's way to obtain reparations for slavery. Both allegations seem the stuff of absurdist and paranoid fantasy, and yet, in an era of white racial anxiety and resentment, they
couldn't be more rational
. They serve, almost perfectly, as triggers for our racial angers and insecurities. That black guy is trying to harm us, to take our money and give it to
them,
to make us hurt the way his people were hurt. Obama “hates white people,” as Glenn Beck infamously said in 2009, which means, white America, he hates
us.
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As an indication of how he intends to exact his racially motivated revenge, one need look no further, according to Rush Limbaugh, than Zimbabwe, where dictator Robert Mugabe has confiscated white farmers' land. Mugabe, according to Limbaugh, is Obama's “new role model,” and “the next thing to look out for is for Obama to take the farms.”
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Because Obama hates white people. Which is no doubt why he put that infamous militant Tim Geithner (a white guy) in charge of the economy and bailed out Wall Street. That'll show us.

From the very beginning of the Obama presidency, famous and influential white people have been trying to scare us. First it was Rush, suggesting that the only reason Colin Powell supported Obama was out of racial loyalty; in other words, they're ganging up on us, and we can't trust
any of them
, even the ones we might have thought were OK.
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Then there was the steady stream of allegations coming from Fox and talk radio to the effect that organizations like ACORN that are community based (and led mostly by people of color) had tried to steal the election for Obama—it had perhaps even succeeded in doing so—by submitting phony voter registrations in urban precincts. Never mind that there was no evidence of actual fraudulent votes being cast because of ACORN. Never mind that the fraudulent registrations turned in by a handful of ACORN canvassers were caught and reported by the organization itself, as required by law. Never mind that the phony registrations were in the names of cartoon and Disney characters, rendering rather unlikely the possibility that any actual fraud could have transpired—unless, that is, ACORN had some secret plan to get Donald Duck to the polls on Obama's behalf. Regardless of how ridiculous the charges against ACORN were, they were politically brilliant—a way of saying that
those people
are trying to steal the election; they're trying to undermine democracy; they must be stopped.
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Then there was the venal attempt on the part of those same voices to blame the nation's economic collapse on progressive lending reforms like the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which seeks to encourage lending in traditionally undercapitalized communities. As the housing bubble began to burst in 2007, conservative commentators pointed a finger at the CRA, blaming it for forcing banks to make loans to “minorities and other risky folks” (as claimed by Fox News commentator Neil Cavuto) despite their inability to pay the notes on their new homes. In other words, it was financial “affirmative action” for the undeserving that was to blame.

Of course, there was no truth to the charge.
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First, there are no provisions in the CRA that require lending to anyone who can't afford the loan for which they are being approved. Indeed, the law expressly discourages such a thing. Second, the law says nothing about race-based lending whatsoever. There are neither requirements nor even encouragements to direct loans to individuals simply because they happen to be people of color. Third, it was independent mortgage brokers (not even covered by the CRA), who made most of the risky loans that went bad during this period.
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In fact, only one of the top twenty-five subprime lenders in the nation was required to follow the CRA's strictures,
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and only 6 percent of all subprime loan dollars were loaned by CRA-covered banks to low-income people whom the law was intended to help.
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Indeed, loans made under the aegis of the CRA have tended to perform better and have
lower
rates of default and foreclosure than more traditional loans.
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No, the problem was not lending to poor folks, let alone the poor of color; rather, it was the desire on the part of unscrupulous lenders to make mega-profits off the backs of everyone, by offering risky loans at rates of interest far higher than they should have been. And as one recent study in Louisville discovered, a disproportionate number of the houses that went into foreclosure in largely black urban areas were actually owned by whites in the suburbs who were engaging in real estate speculation, buying up properties in hopes of “flipping” them or deriving rental income. It was the white absentee landlords who failed to pay their notes on time. That people of color (largely renters) were living in the homes did not make the foreclosures their fault; the responsibility for that resided exclusively with those white owners.
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Perhaps the biggest issue, unremarked upon by those who would prefer that we blame the darker-hued among our nation's people, was the
deregulation
of mortgage markets, which allowed adjustable-rate mortgages, despite their higher risk; permitted the mixing of commercial and investment banks, despite their much different missions and purposes; and even encouraged devious lenders to price-gouge borrowers with sub-prime, high-interest loans, knowing full well that the repayment terms would prove onerous for millions.
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Additionally, the rise of independent mortgage brokers relied heavily on what is known as an “originate-to-distribute” model of loan underwriting. Under this process, the broker who originates the loan does not keep the loan on their own books (thereby creating an incentive to carefully evaluate the borrower's ability to pay), but rather, sells the loan to others, often larger lending institutions, thereby passing the risk along. During the expanding housing bubble, when people got loans with such an entity, by the time they found themselves unable to pay, the lender would have long since sold the loans to another institution, which was bundling many similar loans into what were called “mortgage-backed securities” intended for re-sale to rich investors. Long before default, the original lending institutions would have been paid its percentage of the initial sale price, and thus had no reason to care whether or not borrowers—again, mostly not poor and not of color—could afford the instruments they were pushing.
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But the right won't tell us that, because to put the blame where it belongs, on
deregulation
rather than regulation, on greedy companies and individuals who are of means, rather than poor black and brown people, would hardly serve the right's goal; namely, the manipulation of our racial anxiety and resentments into a potent political weapon.

And in furtherance of that goal the right will say
anything
, including quite a few things even more absurd than the calumnies placed upon the Community Reinvestment Act. Witness the constant drumbeat of rhetoric to the effect that the Obama administration is engaged in a “Nazi-like” takeover of America and perhaps even seeks to “enslave” the people of the nation.
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Rush Limbaugh, for his part has compared the Obama health care logo to the Nazi swastika and claims that Hitler “ruled by dictate,” just “like Barack Obama,”
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and Beck has suggested the administration, by advocating an expansion of community service and volunteer efforts, is really planning on imposing the equivalent of the Nazi SS or Nazi Youth corps.
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While such charges may strike the reasonable among us as the very definition of lunacy, there is a
reason
they were made, a logic to them that went unchallenged within the echo chamber that is the American conservative right. Simply put, within a politics of white resentment and victimology, Hitler-laced rants work. After all, Hitler was not just a fascist, but is understood to have been a racial fascist: one whose dictatorial and murderous schemes were directed at a distinctly racialized “other.” So to make the black man atop the U.S. political system into Hitler is to plant the idea in white minds that he too will be a
racial
fascist. And if that is the case, the question quite obviously arises,
which race will he be coming for
? Should we be scared? They certainly hope so, and are counting on it.

In addition to those who warn that extermination camps are just around the corner, commentators who are only slightly more reasonable play upon our fears and racial anxieties, too. And so we have Bill O'Reilly—who appears reasonable only in relation to the much more delusional Glenn Beck—claiming, with a straight face, that the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court was evidence that the Obama administration believes “white men are the problem in America” and need to be replaced in positions of power by women and folks of color.
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Indeed, the Sotomayor nomination brought out the full complement of reactionary bombast, aimed directly at our collective amygdala in an attempt to provoke a new round of racial fears, with Pat Buchanan insisting she was barely literate (although she had graduated from law school,
cum laude
) and was only picked as an affirmative action appointment.
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Meanwhile, Limbaugh suggested that her support for affirmative action—a position she shares, still, with the slim majority on the Supreme Court—makes her as racist as neo-Nazi David Duke.
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This, close on the heels of his prior claim that the nomination of the widely respected Eric Holder as Attorney General proved that the only way to get a job in the Obama administration was by “hating white people.”
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And what was the evidence that Holder hated white people? Simple: he dared suggest that Americans—all Americans, not just whites—had long been cowards when it came to discussing race honestly. So if you criticize Americans you hate white people, because Americans and white people are synonymous to the Rush Limbaughs of the world.

No claim is too wild, no allegation of anti-white racial animosity too extreme for the likes of those who would seek to gather us under their right-wing political umbrella, and who have, sadly, already drawn in a large enough percentage of us to be worrisome. Even the passage of a new tax on tanning salon customers was blasted by some in our talk show set as evidence of anti-white animus, since after all, it is mostly white people who use such facilities.
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The notion that perhaps the Obama administration was actually trying to make tanning more expensive so as to reduce its commonality—and thereby save tens of thousands of us from
deadly skin cancer
—apparently never crossed their minds.

But nothing works better, nor reeks more strongly of racist and crass political opportunism, than the attacks leveled against immigrants of color, mostly from Mexico and other points in the global South, and the way so many within the chattering class (and even the ranks of elected officials) hope to whip us into hysteria about their presence within our shores.

So we have Lou Dobbs, formerly of CNN, insisting that undocumented Mexican migrants are seeking to “reconquer” the American Southwest and, prior to that territorial reclamation, are spreading leprosy throughout the United States.
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When confronted with the actual data from the Centers for Disease Control utterly eviscerating his fevered claims about disease-spreading Mexicans, Dobbs merely repeated the charge, insisted that he didn't make up the numbers, and went back to
making up the numbers
.
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Upping the ante further, there were assurances by conservative talking heads like Michael Savage, Neal Boortz and Michelle Malkin to the effect that Mexicans were to blame for the spread of H1N1 “swine flu” in the United States in 2009. Savage even suggested the whole thing was an “al Qaeda plot” to undermine America with crippling viruses brought over the border from Mexico.
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Forget that the flu didn't actually originate there. In fact, its origins have been traced to hog farms in North Carolina, and date back to 1998. According to the CDC, the viruses were exported from the United States to Asia and then mutated into new forms, which found their way back via an export-import chain linked to the pork industry. Mexico, apparently, had very little to do with anything in the larger international drama.
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But facts don't matter to those who would whip us into a rabid, immigrant-bashing lather.