By contrast, affirmative action was a relatively modest policy with fairly minimal effects on privilege...

What you are saying is that Affirmative Action was small compared to the other changes. However, Affirmative Action is the epitome of reverse racsim in the eyes of whites. It's not disguised, it's not hidden, it's a policy that tells whites that they have the wrong color skin. It's 'in your face'.

So, don't be so surprised by the reaction to Affirmative Action. It feels very unAmerican to many.

I wanted to add that there will always be resentment based upon race as long as you dole out the privileges based upon race.

Always

Sullivan has got to be brain-damaged. How he can have so little understanding of the black American experience after all he's written about gay civil writes, how he can just blithely attribute everything bad to affirmative action, he's either brain-damaged or a straight up racist. And he pulls this crap all the time. I'd guess he's feeling the old tug of lost privilege himself. And I say this as a liberal who's a skeptical of affirmative action.

Rick Perlstein needs to kick his ass.

I'm sure you lost Andrew at "privilege".

I thought one of the basics behind white resentment (and other similar things like anti-immigration) is that the "other" is always used as a scapegoat for shitty conditions. So not so much a history of white-black relationships in the south, but a history of politicians telling people that everything sucks because of those guys (who are never in the actual voting area). And eventually "those guys" gave way to code words like welfare, affirmative action, illegal immigrants, etc etc.

I'm always astonished at how adamantly people believe they deserve whatever they have, and how bitterly they resent any encroachment. Doesn't matter if they start from high or low, people get really pissed when any piece of what they're used to goes away. Pointing out that they got it at the expense of other people doesn't seem to sink in. It certainly doesn't match the fervor with which people believe whatever they have is rightfully theirs, granted by the god that chose them for their inner goodness.

"White resentment has been around a lot longer, and stems from people's desire to protect the fruits of a gross and grave injustice."

Nail. Head.

Megan, people don't just get pissed when they lose stuff. They get pissed when they, in their infallible judgment, decide that someone, somewhere, is getting something that he doesn't "deserve."

Politicians and demagogues make a career out of explaining how voters' problems all stem from whipping up resentment about other people getting stuff that they don't "deserve." You don't have to take anything away from those voters. You don't even have to have the "others" getting more or living better than those voters. You just have to convince the voters that those "other people" are getting something that they shouldn't be getting.

Great post.

Some white resentment stems from affirmative action, some stems from the end of legally enforced white privilege -- but the former is more likely the cause of white resentment by anybody under 50, who are young to really remember legally enforced white privilege.

Yeah, my great-grandmother really resented the end of Jim Crow. But I didn’t. I never even thought about it. To me, the end of Jim Crow was ancient history.

I did, however, resent not getting a scholarship to law school when wealthier black classmates were given financial aid. I resented it a lot.

The whites who Sullivan refers to aren’t ancient southerners pining for the days of yore. AA and school bussing really are the things that spark white resentment in anybody under the age of 80 or so.

Sully's not right here (indeed, isn't his Obama support that much weirder for dissing the affirmative action... which clearly got us Barak Obama); but neither is Ezra: part of the reason for "white resentment" has to do with class. Not every white person falls into this notion of resentment publius is talking about, and it's because of something Ezra misses in his description of slavery and how whites profited from it.

It's worth remembering that slavery benefited wealthy landowners; poorer whites did not have the ability to own blacks, and so their notions of superiority, naturally, had to be defined by a "not like them" notion that said someone else was inferior. Reconstruction - which was handled very poorly, by the way - helped fuel those notions of resentment as poor whites found themselves pushed aside to help blacks transition out of slavery... and partly as a result, you get segregation and Jim Crow. Civil Rights, then, feeds back into those notions of resentment, as does affirmative action, quotas, busing, and anything else meant to suggest to poor or working class whites that they have to share a small piece of the pie with others they have tried, forever, to see themselves as different from, and in some sense, better than. It's when you can define a common sense of purpose - i.e. that the economics that have them fighting one another, rather than leveraging their numbers together to force the wealthy to share more of the overall pie - that you can help to eliminate the prejudices and resentments. Wealthy southern whites feel superior to all of this. Wealthy northern whites - the liberals in this - don't share the resentment... but at the same time, they don't necessarily see the struggle of poor whites - especially poor southern whites - as also having value. That Sully conflates all of this as proof that affirmative action is wrong just amazes; that Ezra can't see the class issues... well, it's not surprising, just disappointing.

"White resentment" is racism. The absurd attempt to draw a line between them is a defense of racism, neither more nor less - denying that it exists by relabeling. We live in a culture where being labeled as a racist is offensive and intolerable: therefore, we package our racist feelings under a different label.

I knew a guy at work who used to spew all kinds of racist filth. One day a couple of us read him some material from www.stormfront.org (some kind of introductory statement - it's been a while). He agreed with most of it - but insisted that he wasn't a racist.

I have, quite literally, heard klansmen deny that they are racists.

Liberals, including Ezra, should resist this double speak. White resentment is racism. Call a spade a spade. If it offends a bigot or three, too bad.

As far as Sullivan goes, he's a member of that species which is liberal on those issues pertaining to him, and conservative on those pertaining to others -- my work friend from above was rock-solid conservative except on issues pertaining to weed, his one instance of heterodoxy. Where I come from, we call that "selfishness."

I have no strong feelings regarding affirmative action, incidentally. It's fully justified in theory, but in practice it serves as a rallying cry for "white resentment." I'm not sure whether it's worthwhile, in the balance.

I really like Uncle Tim.

Uncle Tim is a white person who is excessively deferential towards black people.

I agree with this analysis...but, I do think that white resentment is an important thing to grapple with. I'm 100% in favor of affirmative action policies, but I recognize that there is a backlash that (a) makes it difficult to sustain these policies and (b) creates pretty intense societal division.

Its probably not possible to avoid this backlash entirely, but I do think that progressives need to find some constructive ways of addressing and hopefully limiting the backlash. One thing I've always advocated is more hybridized affirmative action that takes into account both race and class. Thats difficult to implement in certain situations, but could easily be done with education. I don't really see why the playing field in applying for college should be even for a wealthy white child who has gone to elite prep schools his entire life vs a poor white child who has gone to public schools. The latter has clearly had to overcome more structural obstacles than the former and if the basic principle of affirmative action is to address structural inequality then thats something that needs to be considered.

I still don't think thats nearly enough of a solution for how progressives address white resentment so that at the very least, it doesn't undermine the sustainability of affirmative action. This is an important issue and I'd be interested to see what others think about it. Ezra? Others?

Weboy brings up an important point, one that I sort of addressed in my previous post - that class looms large here.

I don't think its the only factor, but there is a reality that poor whites have a right to feel slighted by society, not by affirmative action for sure, but by the broader society because they face enormous structural disadvantages. Class is not the only factor, a poor white has fewer advantages than a rich white, but it becomes more complicated comparing the advantages and disadvantages faced by, for example, a poor white vs a wealthy black. That scenario would be much more dependent upon what specific indicator you're looking at, what region, and a whole host of important variables.

But thats why affirmative action has to address race and class because if I had to guess, I would say the majority of "white resentment" comes from people who rightfully feel marginalized but are just misplacing that resentment.

Good discussion from Matt at 6:11.

When I was growing up in a profoundly racist area, I believed I was racially progressive because I conflated issues of race and class. There was a reason to do so, actually -- I was poor and white, and my experience with poverty made me feel like I had some kind of access to "the" black experience. Not bad for a kid.

But now I teach at the college level (where being white *can* actually be a disadvantage, incidentally), and I'm leery of conflating race and class too freely.

Example: I have a black student who grew up with somewhat more money than me -- probably lower middle class. Yet, she has had an array of ugly experiences relating to urban violence, etc., which are *far* outside my experience, and which have scarred and damaged her in ways which go beyond my genuine experience of poverty.

White poverty is, to a considerable extent, a rural experience very distinct from black poverty. Plus, when we (whites) rise out of poverty, we can pass pretty easily as being middle-class at the core -- not so for someone who is black and working class.

Maybe that all seemed like rambling. My point is that there are probably good political reasons (defusing racism, aka, "white resentment) for doing class-based affirmative action, and calling it something else entirely. But we shouldn't fuel ourselves into thinking that class-based affirmative action will do anything to address the unique challenges of being black in America. Maybe it's the best we can do, though.

"But to call white resentment the "poisoned fruit" of affirmative action is extremely strange."

Interesting juxta-positioning of words in this sentence. It recalls the Billy Holiday song "Strange Fruit", which was about southern blacks being lynched by resentful whites long before affirmative action.

I basically agree with Ezra, but an economically based affirmative action program would have accomplished the same thing without antagonizing racial resentments.

"""Or you can start the clock at slavery. Under this timeframe, whites enslaved blacks"""

WOW! Stunningly ignorant of history are you.....

Slavery existed in Africa between blacks long before any white guy showed up. The idea that white guys introduced slavery is just ignorant of African history.

By the way, what does slavery in America have to do with African Americans, most African Americans aren't even related to slaves, they emmigrated here after slavery. Obama himself is the son of a White American and a Black African, so I guess if we have reparations, he needs to pay himself, but he has no relationship to an ancestry that grew up as african americans or as slaves.

By the way, Muslims enslaved millions Africans long before the Europeans, and they were much crueler, to including castrating them to make them Eunuchs.

I know, that was the fault of Israeli occupation....

Politicians and demagogues make a career out of explaining how voters' problems all stem from whipping up resentment about other people getting stuff that they don't "deserve." You don't have to take anything away from those voters. You don't even have to have the "others" getting more or living better than those voters. You just have to convince the voters that those "other people" are getting something that they shouldn't be getting.

That's exactly what liberals do when discussing Big Oil, Big Pharma, etc. Just look at the recent conversations about ExxonMobil

an economically based affirmative action program would have accomplished the same thing without antagonizing racial resentments.

I disagree. There was an economically-based government program in the form of welfare which could be availed of all Americans based solely on income. Nevertheless, it became a focus of racial resentment against blacks.

Shouldn't whether racism and its affects exist, and how it exists be determined by actually examining through research the actual issues? I ask this because a lot people seem to confuse what they want to believe with what is the actual situation. I've already by the way multiple types along these types of threads provided such data. Only to read how racism doesn't exist as much anymore without the parties claiming the end of racism providig a single bit of data. Just critique of how they are unconvinced by data. this is why I find all such conversations a waste of time. If you are uninterested in including data in the discussion- you are only interested in reinforcing belief, not proven reality.

There was, of course, always going to be blowback from trying to right previous racial wrongs. All things come with a cost. As we see in Iraq, doing things without considering the costs out of a firm sense of moral rightness is not always the best course of action.

What we see is this. Some propose remedies. White resentment occurs in response. Liberals use this to label all who oppose affirmative action as racist and inherently unworthy of a place in the national discourse. Liberals create more steps in the direction of affirmative action. More white resentment pops up.

We can talk about how debaathification in Iraq created insurgency, but can we suggest that affirmative action has created a sort of cultural insurgency in the form of "white resentment"? This isn't an argument against affirmative action, but it is an argument that past remedies may have been ham-fisted and myopic about the costs due to a moral righteousness about race.

Consider that slavery did not end in much of the Deep South in 1865 -- it continued until World War II, or even the 1950s in a few cases, and then think about white resentments again from that perspective. (Read SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME by Douglas Blackmon.)

I don't think one can analyze civil rights, affirmative action, etc., properly without taking into account what Blackmon has to tell us.

White resentment is racism.

This cannot be stressed enough. "White resentment" is the place that racist whites were told that it was acceptable to channel their racial animosities. They can't hate Joe Smith anymore because he is black, but they can "resent" him because he is getting "special privileges" -- the fact that Joe Smith is probably poorer and less educated than them aside.

Andrew is basically wrong, though -- affirmative action is an excuse, not a reason, and if it didn't exist, racist whites would find another reason to hate/resent/whatever African-Americans. Heck, they'd probably focus on "cultural condemnation," whereby it would be acceptable to "condemn" of black people because of their immoral influence on American culture or somesuch.

by the way, all these claims of 'white resentment' would make sense if there were a time where the white ruling class as ever accepted that the grievances of blacks are in fact legitimate. Every step along the way there have been these exact same arguments morphed and said differently, but always the exact same thing- the majority is really the harmed party, and the minority is the one who is doing the harm. You can do this, of course, because you are the majority, not because anything you say on the matter is true. One fo the benefits of being a double minority in this society is that I get to see how the shellgame is played by the majority class.

Um, if white resentment is "racism" then what is resentment toward legacy admissions? Is there an "ism" for hating Thurston Howell-types?

White resentment is irrational, but calling it "racism" is just name calling -- good conversation stopper though.

White resentment, generally, doesn't make sense. Just like resentment toward Paris Hilton doesn't make sense. Resentment is an emotional reaction to people who get stuff you want - whether it's admission to Duke with not-great SAT's or an unearned fortune.

Paris Hilton's money doesn't make me poor. Ending affirmative action wouldn't create enough open spots in college admissions to make any difference to poor whites. But class envy and AA-envy both spawn resentment. Calling those who feel the resentment racist isn't going to help much, and it isn't particularly accurate.

when you show me a wide scale movement to roll back legacy admissions in federal and state laws and people writing extensive diaries, articles, and books on them rather than you just bringing it up-t hen you and only then will your comment matter. and resentment isn't the same as envy. As Chris Rock so aptly stated- for all the talk of equality, not one of you would trade place with him regarding race. However, class is another matter. Thus demonstrating how dishonest these discussions often are.

This may not have started with the civil rights movement but I’m in the middle of reading Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland and am reminded of how the GOP’s Southern Strategy fired up white resentment and how it has been stoked since then. The real question is, can we ever break this cycle?

Basically anything that helps or is perceived to help blacks (no matter the source or mechanism) will be resented by lower class whites in the south as a group (with a fair amount of individual welcome exceptions of course).

A big part of poor white identity in the south is based on the idea that however bad off they are, they're not on the bottom (a place reserved in their mind for blacks). Anything that helps blacks as a group or individual blacks is a threat to that self image and will be resented and fought when possible.

Middle class and upper class white southerners may or may not resent improved living standards and increased opportunities for blacks depending on lots of other factors (and sometimes independently of any particular racial attitudes they have).

Hey Akaison -- I think I see where you are coming from, but resentment and envy are not mutually exclusive. And the fact that being black is often a disadvantage and being rich is woo-hoo fabulous doesn't change the fact that some people resent black people and some resent rich people. Resentment is, as a rule, dumb. Dumb things often don’t make sense (see, Bush Administration)

I always thought Chris Rock’s joke missed a little nuance (it was a joke after all, not a thesis). There are many personal traits that may be either neutral or a disadvantage, but that we wouldn’t want to trade away. No, I wouldn’t want to suddenly turn black. But I’m gay, which is a pretty big disadvantage in a lot of legal ways, but I wouldn’t want to turn straight if somebody offered me a bottle of “Pastor Hagee’s Magic Gay-Away Formula.” Sure, most white people wouldn’t want to be black. But do most black people really sit around wishing they were white?

As for a widespread movement to get rid of legacy admissions -- it's a good point. Nobody has been effectively stoking that wellspring of resentment the way Republicans have picked at the scab of white resentment. Maybe somebody should (but the folks who do left wing policy generally went to elite schools themselves -- so I wouldn’t really expect them to start a “Make it harder for my kid to get into Yale!” movement).

Nevertheless, I think we would be better off going after the folks who are stoking white resentment rather than indignantly attacking white people who feel resentment (unless you wanna just write off those votes forever). “You resentful whites are just racist!” is a mite tone-deaf, and it really isn’t always generally accurate.

The point of Rock's joke is to capture the emotional reality for whites. It does so in the most effective way possible. I disagree in your claim it lacks nuiance. It's an elegant form of nuiance.

That despite all claims of how they resent someone like me, they don't want to have lived my life either. The joke does the job better than any long winded dissertation by me could ever do. It illustrates how race is not class and why. It illustrates to us what the white audience really feels about the place of race. In short, it cuts through (sorry the pun) the white noise about race to get at its emotional and social heart without regard to the rationalizations of the moment. That at its heart- the emotional dynamic of black is beneath my status (even black with money) tells us how much things have changed, and how much they have not.

My experience is that many people who fail at their objectives desperately need a scapegoat. Affirmative Action is a nice scapegoat... the reason I didn't get the job... the reason I didn't get into grad school... and blah, blah, blah.

Winners, of course, don't need such a thing.

PS

This line by you sums it up:

“You resentful whites are just racist!” is a mite tone-deaf, and it really isn’t always generally accurate.

In other words, it's about how it makes the listener feel rather than what harm actually exists in our society regarding race. Its more important to make the white listener feel good about race than address the racial issues that may or may not be occuring.

While agreeing with many of the sentiments here, I think a factor that hasn't been considered is that societies are continuous, but individual experiences are not.

As a left-liberal white South African I run into this in discussions with conservative whites all the time. There is either a complete ignorance of history not personally experienced, or a feeling that you shouldn't be "punished" for your parent's sins.

At the best of times people will distort the accounting when they feel their material comforts are threatened and the indirect nature of the benefits many of us received from our grandparents makes it especially easy to mentally dissipate the benefit we got because our parents or grandparents used someone else' grandparents like oxen.

Another form of self-absolution comes from people's ability to convince themselves that "my people would have achieved the same amount anyway, with or without cheap labour. Its just unfortunate that our forebears happened to exploit other people to do it". This tack allows people to acknowledge injustice but unlink it from present value. Very popular among reactionary white South Africans. I can't count the number of times I've heard statements along the lines of "we already paid for our sins. Look at all the infrastructure that the previously disadvantaged wouldn't have had absent colonisation" (the engineering knowledge is implicitly seen here as more valuable than the backbreaking labour performed by past generations of black people).

And the middle classes and the rich in many Western nations (in which I include SA for the purposes of this argument) are so inured in the idea of competition for value being a fundamental part of capitalist economies that even situations where AA doesn't have a material effect on someone's life is perceived as an affront, a "punishment", if you like.

What most analyses ignore is the element of genuine and realistic economic fear underlying not only white resentment but also anti-immigration sentiment and opposition to feminism. When the people on the bottom start to move up, they compete with the people on the rung just ahead of them, not with the people on the top five or ten rungs who make policy regarding hiring, college admissions, etc. Real justice would have meant creating enough decent blue-collar jobs and college scholarships for everyone capable. That, however, would have hit the deciding classes in their pocketbooks. Simply changing the rules put most of the economic burden on those white men who may have a bit of privilege but not much power.

Assessing how the listener feels is a pretty important thing, if you want to get listened to.

The National Review crowd talks about "pathologies" among blacks. Ta-Nahisi Coates writes about how much that cranks him off. Nobody wants to hear about how "pathological" they are. Even if the NRO folks have a legitimate point or two (it does happen), nobody is going to listen to some jerk who is tossing around accusations of “pathologies.”

Similarly, racism has a pretty specific meaning for most people (and that meaning is pretty far removed from the academic "prejudice + power" definition). It brings up images of white hoods, Bund meetings, segregation, etc... Anybody is going to get angry and stop listening when associated with something so horrible.

I think any discussion of race that involves white people accusing black people of pathologies while black people accuse white people of racism is necessarily going to devolve into nothing more than a red-faced spitting match pretty quickly. It might be useful to choose less loaded terms.

Oh, and just so I can crank everybody off, as unfair as it may be, rare engineering knowledge is inherently more valuable than backbreaking labor. Value in economic terms is what something is worth on a market. Unskilled labor is cheap, cheap, cheap. Knowledge is expensive. Fair, maybe not. But it is what it is.

I just had to laugh at Anonymous above.

"WOW! Stunningly ignorant of history are you....."

he begins, then proceeds to write complete rubbish about history.

1. Vanishingly few black Africans practised slavery.

2. Most African-Americans do, in fact have slaves in their ancestry.

3. The Arab slave trade has no logical bearing at all on Ezra's opinion.

4. Anyone who actually has a CNS would recognise that the statement "under this timeline, whites enslaved blacks" does not imply "all whites, all blacks everywhere" or exclude other slavery arrangements elsewhere.

Sometimes people are so incredibly stupid and ignorant its not even comical, just pathetic or funny, depending on your perspective.

Forgot to put my name on the 9:19 post -- oops -- I hate posting anonymously.

I meant the Anonymous further up above of course

For Brian above: You can't retroactively apply contemporary labour market value on non-consensual arrangements. That makes no sense.

ironically your engineering knowledge isn't considered to be worth all that much these days. so its funny that you use that example.

if whites spent more time worrying about real threats they would be a lot better off. but its easier to try to find others below you on the imagined totem pole rather than realize what's actually happening. people like simple world views because a global economy is too complicated. there is a lot that goes into white pathos -- we haven't even touched on white entitlement issues.

oh, and no, it's not required that i have to spend my life trying to convince you of what you are. i am diagnosing the problem- but that doesn't mean i am going to spend my life trying to fix what ails my country on race. the assumption that one can get whites to listen if only one says it in the right way is a delusion that luckily I dont have.

I use trial and error to find people regardless of their racial identity who get how the majority views race in this country. there aer indeed white people who get it. who don't feel the need to deny the lingering issues of race and who aren't threatened by me. those are the people with whom I want to deal. the rest can go screw themselves or the race to the bottom thats occuring in our global economy will do it for them.

Farren -- touche'

Akaison, thanks for proving my point about the spitting match.

the funny thing is you are quite predictable here. my first thought process in reading your response to me - is what spitting match? I am being blunt and not wasting time trying to couch my words in what makes brian feel good about himself. that's not a spitting match. thats mean respecting my time enough to on the one hand have the conversation, but on the other not pussy foot around brian. if you can handle straight discussion then that's your deal. it, however, isn't mean spitting anything. which by the way sounds like code for chip. the only chip i got at this point in my life is how to get people out of my way to accomplish my goals. i come here for the mindless discussion.

ps - the one thing I apologize for is the typos. I write this fast in between doing other things.

Ezra, thanks for pointing his completely stupid comment out. I read the guy religiously, but on racial matters he is completely clueless, mostly because he's from the UK and doesn't really get how Americans outside of P-town live (don't mean to sound like a Republican, but it's true).

White resentment would exist regardless of affirmative action. The only reason we all know about affirmative action is because it's a rallying cry for racists everywhere, a respectable way to be racist. It basically allows demagogues to say, "well I'm not racist and some of my best friends are black, but affirmative action is wrong and reverse racism". Without AA, what else would these assholes have to focus on? Rap music? Say what you will about rappers, but they did not get to where they are through AA.

Similarly, racism has a pretty specific meaning for most people (and that meaning is pretty far removed from the academic "prejudice + power" definition). It brings up images of white hoods, Bund meetings, segregation, etc... Anybody is going to get angry and stop listening when associated with something so horrible.

Sorry if I'm picking on you, but this is really, really skewed. "Most people" here means "most white people who harbor racist feelings but don't want to face up to it." Seriously -- very few people who belong to racial minorities would define racism this way. Under your definition being sexually abused or exploited because of race, denied a job because of race, being pulled over by a cop because of race -- all of these cease to be racism.

Your definition of race is emptied of almost all *current* content and meaning - which is exactly what many [white, conservative] people want -- to be able to pretend that they are morally pure because they've never participated in a lynching.

To clarify, I'm know that you're saying that most people define racism that way - not necessarily that you do. What's missing is a recognition that people who define racism down do it as a way to *be* racist without facing up to it, even to themselves.

Rural whites, especially in the South, are poor. This society trashes poor folks, and they are indeed trashed. Never saw so many broken teeth as in my last trip to West Virgina.

I think they are resentful because they know they are deprived, and they are not getting any recompense.

Part of the resentment at affirmative action should be addressed by making some affirmative action based on income/class. It is indeed unfair for minorities from the upper middle class to get much in the way of advantage, given that they have ample class advantage.

sullivan is a racist--a man who KNOWS, who has staked his professional reputation on black intellectual inferiority. he also desires the exceptional Obama. he wants to eat & consume him. it's no more complex than that.

and there isn't a better blogger.

"White resentment" is pretty retarded...black people aren't taking anything away from white people.

But it does seem true that affirmative action has created a lot of white resentment of black people, justifiably or not. Seems like a very bad side effect of the policy.

White resentment would exist independent of affirmative action. But it doesn't mean that affirmative action hasn't resulted in more of it.

I think my initial point still stands. A whole lot of white resentment these days stems from AA, school bussing, and (forgot this one), crime. A whole lot of it also stems from racism. Each side wants to pretend that the cause of poorly defined “white resentment” is simple, when it really isn’t.

Sullivan is, of course, wrong to place all of the blame on AA. But Ezra is wrong to argue that Andrew is wrong because the resentment predated AA, because that doesn’t prove that AA didn’t create some new resenters.

Lobster -- My apologies, I was being imprecise. Of course something like being denied a job due to race is racism. The point I was trying to make is that racism is a pretty nasty accusation that should be reserved for people who actually do nasty things to others due to their race and shouldn’t be tossed around every time somebody feels a bit of resentment (even if the resentment is irrational).

Some people define racism down to exclude themselves. Some others (including many in academic circles) define racism up in order to accuse anybody who disagrees with them of racism.

At this point, only Avenue Q can settle the discussion

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBzv6JSm-No&feature=related

Brian,

Maybe the hour has made me dim, but here's my problem with your posts. At this point, I honestly have no idea what racism means to you.

Here's my definition: "engaging in judgement or actions on the basis of perceived race."

The whole point of academia defining racism in more-or-less this way is to get people to acknowledge that they think and act based on racial categories, instead of denying it.

None of us can avoid *ever* doing or saying racist things (which is also true of minorities - the important distinction is that their racist thoughts & actions very rarely have the sort of impact that the collective racism of the white community can have). What we *can* do is to try to avoid racism and its consequences. The first thing you need in order to do that is to recognize it.

So I stand by my original statement, by my . White resentment *is* racism. It isn't, of course, lynching or sexual abuse.

p.s. The definitions of dictionary.com (of racism) vary somewhat; several of them come rather close to my definition. I'll happily endorse this one: "Discrimination or prejudice based on race." That's a mildly weaker formulation than my definition, but based on it, I'd still feel perfectly secure saying "White resentment is racism."

not quite sure what I think, but one link that seemed very relevant: Tim Burke's great post, "Competency as a Cultural Value"

http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=483

also be sure to read the comment by hestal on the ideas of Lawrence E. Harrison. I'd also put in a plug for Big Jim Folsom's take on this. (He was elected governor of Alabama on a racially inclusive platform, in the fifties). "People have an angel and a devil in them. The trick in politics is to win by appealing to their angel, and not their devil."

Incidentally, Folsom's son, "Little Jim", has had some success in Alabama politics, with a pretty progressive record (He endorsed Dean in 2004).

A last point: I think these feelings of grievance and resentment are universal among all ethnic groups, not something to do a specific policy or a specific history. The way some US whites talk about black crime/affirmative action is very similar to me to how some upper-class Hindus talk about muslim terrorism/school quotas for SC/ST's ("Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes"), and doubtless how some UK whites talk about Indians.

The underlying dynamic seems to me similar to Homer's taunting of Marge, "Well, youuuu have a gambling problem".

Not that racial quotas/preferences are such great policies, but they're better than nothing, and should not be ended until there's something better to take their place.

also relevant, Paul Krugman's essay about Glenn Loury

http://www.slate.com/id/1934/

thanks for bringing outside info and concept so this roublen. the american approach to discrimination depends on pretending as if the situation between blacks and whites isn't seen anywhere else where there are majorities and minorities or dominanting classes and subordinate classes. the trait of discrimanation may differ, but the psychology involved often does not.

When a lower class or poor white male is in his senior year of high school and applying for student loans and grants notices that because of his sex and race he is not eligible for half the financial assistance he is now sexist and racist?

After he takes 6 years working his way through college and gets a degree and now wants to start a business but can’t get an SBA loan because, again, he is white and male, he is once again just affirming he is a racist sexist.

And your answer to this individual is he doesn’t deserve EQUAL opportunity because OTHER white males are rich now or 100 years ago did something.

And you’re the same idiots that cry about losing all of our constitutional freedoms. There is not a more clear and precise violation of equal protection today then Affirmative Action.

If not being ok being singled out by your race and sex makes you a sexist racist then I’m gladly a sexist racist.

de Tocqueville (1848):

"The influence of slavery goes even further, penetrating the master's soul and giving a particular turn to his ideas and tastes... [The slave state has]...spiritualized despotism and violence... [The slave state] turns its melancholy gaze inward and back to the past, perpetually fancying that it may be suffering oppression. Noticing that a law of the Union is not obviously favorable to itself, it cries out against this abuse of power, and when no one listens to its ardent remonstrations, it grows indignant and threatens to leave an association whose burdens it bears without share of the profits."

Some things never change.

ironically your engineering knowledge isn't considered to be worth all that much these days

OT digression, but WTF does this mean? Recent engineering graduates make more than any other bachelor's degree. (and this has been true for decades, and shows no sign of changing) And who the heck do you think is going to build the post-oil (alternate reading: non-oil) infrastructure? Lawyers like you*?

*IIRC

emmanuel todd (after the empire) demonstrates that de tocqueville's analysis of america--divided into whites, blacks, indians (and now mexicans)--still holds. the unvarying low intermarriage rate, for example. blacks are not integrated. they may now have a middle class but it's separate. whites do not perceive blacks as equally human.

another link that seems relevant: Paul Gagnon's old Atlantic article "What Should Children Learn?"

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/95dec/chilearn/chilearn.htm

"All peoples have taken part in the struggle to civilize. An honest look at the past reveals a common human mixture of altruism, malevolence, and indifference, and reasons for all of us to feel both pride and shame. Starting from any other point of view is historically false, and blind to human nature. Historians -- and standard setters -- have a special obligation to be candid. But many popular textbooks are unfailingly pious about other cultures and ultra-critical of our own, preaching a new-style ignorance in reaction against, but just as pernicious as, our older textbook pieties about ourselves and disdain for others. Both are pernicious because both sap the will to civilize. People who are taught to feel specially guilty, or specially victimized, or naturally superior, will not reach out to others as equals; they will not pay the costs in toil, tears, and taxes always imposed by that struggle.

This is not a "conservative" or "liberal" issue but one of trusting children, adolescents, and adults to work with historical truth, however inconvenient or impolite it may seem. History reinforces the rough notion of equality that we learn on the playground and in the street: there are like proportions of admirable and avoidable people in every imaginable human grouping -- by age, class, race, sex, religion, or cultural taste. Individuals are not equal in talent or virtue, and certainly not equally deserving of respect. To teach otherwise is to invite ridicule and resentment. Instead what must repeatedly be taught, because it is not quickly learned -- but is quickly forgotten in hard times -- is that in civilized society it is every person's rights that are equally deserving of respect: rights to free expression, equal protection under law, fair judgment, rigorous education, honest work and pay, an equal chance to pursue the good. . ."

nate, you have a point, but what doesn't make sense is the anger and resentment. I mean, there's so many programs to benefit people from disadvantaged rural areas, and they get so much more in federal aid & dollars, yet I doubt you feel so resentful towards rural Americans. The small-state advantage for admission to West Point is pretty big, for example. And if the average striving black person has a 20% advantage in getting capital than the average striving white person (highly debatable), then a legacy/preppie like George W. Bush has a 200% advantage. So why are you hopping mad at the hypothetical minority with an SBA loan, and not mad at George W Bush?

I'm hesitant to join in again, partly because akaison is right (!) that there's little usefulness to it (among other salient points he makes).. but I would add that "white resentment" in the context of this discussion comes from Publius and Ezra, not from the commenters, as more than a few have batted back and forth. If one has a problem with the term, then the issue is bigger than the discussion, I think.

But it does bring up a valuable point: we argue these issues amongst poorly defined terms; "racism" in particular is bandied about, and I think overused, without a definition agreed to by all, then used as a label to define some group as "bad" so others can be seen as good and right (Harvey, for instance, points out that people pick a definition of racism they like that usually doesn't include themselves... then goes on to sweeping conclusions of just the same sort). I think that kind of labeling, too, feeds the overall problem here. Our racial conflicts in this country are complex, and few are all right, and few (though clearly some) are all wrong.

More to the point, I think what liberal guilt has produced lately is a sense that the only "authentic" definition of racism can come from the "victims" - i.e. that black people have the final say on what can be seen as "racist." That, too, it seems to me, is dangerous: while the list of racial grievances is long for African Americans, and much of it quite reasonable and fair, some of it is not. As a society, we give away our ability to encourage change overall when we tell one group that they have no reason to move or change, because clearly their suffering allows for any and every grievance to have validity and that we should, rightly, always feel that the fault lies in the rest of us.

I think we need room in this and other conversations for the notion that there's more to our racial tensions than "racism." There are prejudices, and stereotypes, and yes... "resentments." Not every white person is racist; not every "resentment" proves racial hatred. And perhaps, it's not that "everyone is a little bit racist" but that we all carry notions of stereotypes and prejudices that make seeing one another for who we are, and celebrating difference rather than fearing it, a little bit harder. In order to move past resentments, and the rest, we first need to understand, and define them... and until we can reach a shared understanding on these definitions of terms, I think we're really not going to get past them.

Nate says:

When a lower class or poor white male is in his senior year of high school and applying for student loans and grants notices that because of his sex and race he is not eligible for half the financial assistance he is now sexist and racist?

How does this mythical white male notice this when it is simply not true?

After he takes 6 years working his way through college and gets a degree and now wants to start a business but can’t get an SBA loan because, again, he is white and male, he is once again just affirming he is a racist sexist.

Again, mythical white male has reached another mistaken conclusion.

It does matter that MWM has twice now made mistaken judgements that inure to his own sense of victimhood. Why did he do this? Because we humans are good at this, we can observe it among quite young children even when racism or sexism are not part of the equation.

As adults, we should not excuse it, nor be proud of it as Nate appears to be. Got it, Nate? Half of all financial assistance is not reserved for affirmative action. SBA loans are not, to any significant degree, much less half, based on affirmative action. Facts.

Any program to aid others in a way that is purely class-based is going to disproportionately help African-Americans, leading us back to exactly where we started from, in terms of fomenting resentment. Racist whites will find some excuse, somewhere, to turn feel some sort of resentment or grievance against African-Americans that they are convinced is valid.

I'm not even convinced that it's poor whites who are the ones bearing the brunt of the consequences of AA. If anything, the flaws of AA end up giving preferences in elite university admissions to middle- or upper-middle-class African-Americans who don't necessarily need it. However, who are the people that they're competing against directly? Middle- and upper-middle-class whites. I don't think the resentment at such a perceived unfairness is going to come from poor whites in that situation.

Harvey, for instance, points out that people pick a definition of racism they like that usually doesn't include themselves... then goes on to sweeping conclusions of just the same sort

You misunderstand me: I argue that most *white* people pick a definition of racism designed to exclude themselves, often while permitting them to practice racism as I define it (which, as I pointed out, actually coincides with a dictionary definition -- has anyone on the other side bothered to advance a coherent definition at all?).

Weak definitions of racism, in other works, are a mask behind which racism operates. Note that we have one group of (presumably white) commentators working hard to argue that affirmative action is racism and another group (again, presumably white) who argue that racism should be weakly defined (that is, to only include, e.g., lynching, etc.).

There's no conspiracy, but the two operate together, as if by accident, to create a high threshold of racism for white people, and a low one for everybody else: the government is racist if it tries to change the status quo, but white people are *not* racist if they do anything short of mob violence.

That, my friends, is why a strong definition of racism, *designed* to cause critique and especially self-critique, is necessary.

And to everyone who keeps bringing up examples of how poor white men are the victims of affirmative action. I'm white, I'm rural, and I grew up (partially) on welfare. Poverty is a very real disadvantage in our culture, as I can attest, but it is different in *kind*, not just in degree, from the disadvantages faced by many black Americans, native Americans, etc. An overachieving redneck (e.g., me) can in fact walk away from being a redneck, albeit with difficulty. You can't walk away from being black. We *don't* do right by poor whites, by any means, in our culture, but despite AA, minorities are still far worse off. Affirmative action may or may not be a smart policy, at the end of the day, but the challenges faced by poor people of color are *not* the same as those faced by poor whites.

Racism is a symptom of the larger personality type, Right Wing Authoritarian (RWA). Anyone high on the RWA scale is easily manipulated into hating, fearing, loathing any variety of "others", e.g. feminazi's, towelheads, Islamofascists, etc.

It is this group that the Republican party has been targeting for 40 years now with highly researched propaganda.

It is reprehensible that the Republican party has taken what shoud be marginalized in any decent society and aggrandized it into a voting bloc.

The trouble is that the RWA's get so much positive reinforcement from the society at large (just watch BillO or Rush or Hannity or Hagee) that to counteract this, you would need a massive deprogramming.

We need to find a way of holding the "good" republicans accountable for the horror Nixon unleashed on us 40 years ago.

There's just not enough resources to go around for everybody. That's the problem. Not enough jobs, not enough grants, not enough programs. And it's done that way on purpose, for a variety of reasons.

That there's going to be "resentment" in such an environment, is frankly a given. Just to limit it to one aspect...jobs...modern economies limit their maximum employment in order to avoid a situation where employers need to compete for workers, as it's thought that the only way they can compete is through more money, and that will automatically lead to massive inflation.

This, of course ignores both the effects that competition has in the market for goods and services which lowers prices (prices theoretically should be set by the consumer via their choices and not by the seller via their projected profits), and as well that there are ways for employers to compete for employees in valid ways with little to no economic impact. (Good management, avoiding micro-management, flexible scheduling where applicable, tele-commuting, and so on)

White poverty is, to a considerable extent, a rural experience very distinct from black poverty. Plus, when we (whites) rise out of poverty, we can pass pretty easily as being middle-class at the core -- not so for someone who is black and working class. - Harvey Lobster

I don't buy this 100%. Heck, we even had a few white Presidents born of the working classes who really couldn't pass as even being middle-class, and indeed one was constantly harrassed, essentially for being an "uppity scalawag". Was he our "first black President" as some have suggested or is our society really quite classist and we just won't admit it because it undermines the vital lie of "America"?

Meanwhile, I have African-American inlaws who were raised in poverty who have "made it" and fit pretty well into the middle classes.

OTOH, I do believe there is still a lot of racism. And I echo all those who brought up Chris Rock's (and others') trenchant remarks about "if you think Blacks have it so good, would you be Black?". I see what kind of slack my wife gets -- even from supposedly "liberal", "open-minded" people. There is still a lot of racism in this country ... no doubt about it.

Moreover, there is also a lot of displaced racism, which is still dangerous. They might hate other people now (because they "know better than to be racist") but when ya got people using the exact same code words against, e.g., Arabs, as they used to use against Black (or for that matter against gays and Moslems, that they used to use against Jews), how long before they lapse back into hating their old targets?

That's exactly what liberals do when discussing Big Oil, Big Pharma, etc. Just look at the recent conversations about ExxonMobil

Yes, I agree that immense corporate entities with close ties to all three branches of US government, and that benefit greatly from US foreign and domestic policies designed to protect and subsidize either the availability or access to the very product or commodity that they profit mightily from is exactly the same as sending some black kid to college.

Nice find, el Viajero. I wish it had been you on the hunt for Saddam's WMD...

@milo
This mythical white man has made mistaken observations you say. When was the last time you looked at financial aid information? Fact is if you are an african american, single mother, you have vastly more scholarships and grants available to you then a similar white male. Same goes for SBA loans to a lesser degree, they do give race non-white race a preferential status.

Chris Rock joke comment:
Funny, but only true if you artificially limit the audience to those you want to single out for this conversation. Fact is there are many native americans, hispanics, and asians (some that would even pass as white) that would trade him both his race and class.

In fact if we stepped back from having time as a context many whites would fit that as well. Irish Americans and germans from the 1800's, Italians from somewhat later may well take that trade as well since their immigration wasn't exactly a cake walk.

Fact is 'white resentment' really is just individual resentment from not having achieved what others have. Whites have traditionially resented those from other 'white' groups as well, like the Irish and germans. Its a lashing out against others that are eating from the same pie, and therefore 'must' be taking something that he could have.

Its not rational, its emotional, its frustration and confusion and ignorance aggregated into a description for the ease of liberals' discussion.

Of course, at a very fundamental level, it's all about class. Because racism is all about class ... and the maintainance of class hierarchies.

Many people remember Martin Luther King's speech Our God is Marching On for its amazing (eat your heart out Bill Shatner) spoken word version of the Battle Hymn of the Republic at the end. But much of the speech was actually an explication of the argument put forth in C. Vann Woodward's book The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Essentially the thesis is that, in order to maintain a brutal class hierarchy, the Southern gentry made sure that the poor southern whites who were starving got to at least eat Jim Crow (c.f. similar things done in, e.g., Czarist Russia were the peasants were kept docile by making sure their anger was directed against Jews).

So in a very real sense, when the Jim Crow laws were ended, it really did destroy the one thing poor Southern whites had -- their sense of superiority over Blacks. And, unfortunately (in part because of the political backlash unleashed by this sense of resentment, which was carefully nurtured by certain powers that be -- and talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face), the period of maximum, post-civil rights upward mobility for Blacks coincided with a general period of real economic decline (albeit hidden by playing with economic statistics) brought on by the dismantling of the New Deal that kept our economy on course.

So, and very conveniently for the powers that be, we have a fixed-sum game going on which, as Karmakin points out, breeds resentment. And the resenters thus are happy to cut off their nose to spite their faces and vote for the people fixing the game (just to express their anger at, e.g. the bourgeoisie -- the "hippies" -- who have managed to do slightly better than they ... as well as out of hatred of the other).

MLK was a very smart and perceptive person. That's why people hated him at the time. But now they've managed to beatify him so they can conveniently ignore what he's actually said. It's kind of a trope, actually -- look at how some so-called Christians are so busy worshiping Jesus they ignore everything that he was supposed to have said.

I don't buy this 100%. Heck, we even had a few white Presidents born of the working classes who really couldn't pass as even being middle-class, and indeed one was constantly harrassed, essentially for being an "uppity scalawag".

Well, in all fairness, I don't buy it 100% either. Moreover, it's true that an observant person would have no trouble picking up on my background of rural poverty, and it's even true that this background still occasionally causes me problems. And it's not a coincidence that the person I get along with at work has a similar background to myself -- our roots persist.

Still, those problems are subtle. It sounds like your wife's ongoing encounters with racism are anything but subtle, which makes my point, or at least a less exaggerated version of it. It's a lot easier (without being *easy*) moving outside of one's class than it is moving outside of one's race or gender, even if my formulation was a little exaggerated.

The trivial example is that, in my experience (though it sounds like you'd know better than I would) most people in the black middle class *need* to be able to be around mostly white people, most of the time, and to be able to ignore a light sprinking of racism -- you *need* a permanently thick skin (I'm reminded of one black coworker who needed to listen *continually* to white coworkers complaining, to her, about another black coworker "playing the race card" -- which she did, I suppose, if suing the company for tolerating ongoing sexual harassment is "the race card.")

I don't need to deal with crap like that, even if I did grow up on welfare and in a shack.

Here's my definition: "engaging in judgement or actions on the basis of perceived race."

The whole point of academia defining racism in more-or-less this way is to get people to acknowledge that they think and act based on racial categories, instead of denying it.

None of us can avoid *ever* doing or saying racist things (which is also true of minorities - the important distinction is that their racist thoughts & actions very rarely have the sort of impact that the collective racism of the white community can have). What we *can* do is to try to avoid racism and its consequences. The first thing you need in order to do that is to recognize it.

So I stand by my original statement, by my . White resentment *is* racism. It isn't, of course, lynching or sexual abuse.

p.s. The definitions of dictionary.com (of racism) vary somewhat; several of them come rather close to my definition. I'll happily endorse this one: "Discrimination or prejudice based on race." That's a mildly weaker formulation than my definition, but based on it, I'd still feel perfectly secure saying "White resentment is racism."

Harvey, if you want to use "the dictionary definition of racism", then by all means, let's; but the definitions you provide are bigger and broader than the way you're interpreting them to narrow in on "white resentment." That's the point - there's a lot of prejudice, a lot of discrimination, a lot of racism, in our society, and it's not just that "white people do it." And I think it underlines your point that all of us, really, like a definition of racism that we can use to make the decisions about who (else) is racist, other than us.

Second, I think DAS goes back to the key here - that class distinctions matter in this, as well as race, and that focusing on economic justice for working class people of all races brings people together; as long as we're playing "who suffers more/worse" we're missing that larger point.

Harvey, if you want to use "the dictionary definition of racism", then by all means, let's; but the definitions you provide are bigger and broader than the way you're interpreting them to narrow in on "white resentment." That's the point - there's a lot of prejudice, a lot of discrimination, a lot of racism, in our society, and it's not just that "white people do it." And I think it underlines your point that all of us, really, like a definition of racism that we can use to make the decisions about who (else) is racist, other than us.

Maybe it will provide some clarity if I admit that my definition of racism emphatically includes me at assorted moments in my life. I'm not trying to exclude myself and, for what it's worth, I was drawn to this definition because I know black academics who use this definition (more or less - my wording is my own, and they aren't responsible for it), and who admit that *they* are far from "pure" where racism is concerned.

My fundamental point is that we live in a racist society, and that anyone who denies ever engaging in racism is either a saint or lying, probably to themselves. My definition isn't just for attacking others, but is for *self* critique. And, coming from rural poverty, I submit that I know something about the structure of white resentment, which is continuous with various other forms of racism, both more and less noxious. I certainly consider various opinions I held 15 years ago to be racist; very likely, I'll think the same thing about my current attitudes at some point.

A definition of racism -- as with all ethical issues -- should be designed to look inward, not just outward.

I've been focusing on white resentment rather than other instances of racism because that is, after all, the topic at hand.

One more thing - of course white people aren't the only ones who engage in racist thoughts or actions. But because white people hold most power in our culture, at all levels, white racism is the source of most problems in a pragmatic political sense.

I'm one of those rare people that doesn't really believe the proper role of government is to be used by anyone for explicit social change.
Most of the changes we have had in the past were not initiated by government. Those what were would have happened later anyway.

I want national security, criminal and civil law enforcement to keep others from killing, stealing or cheating me in business deals and I also want other services that are inconvenient for me to provide for myself such as a highway system and a communication system.

I think you get the idea. After that, I want government to get the hell out of my life. That is the reason I am self employed. It seems to negate much of the social stuff such as Affirmative Action requirements, Political Correctness pressure, etc. I can say and do pretty much as I please. Even those social laws that tell me who and who not to rent to are unenforceable when you work for yourself. The freedom is truly intoxicating. I understand that someone that strives for as much freedom as possible pisses off the socialist left.
Tough Noogie

DAS said:

"And the resenters thus are happy to cut off their nose to spite their faces and vote for the people fixing the game"

I agree completely, and thus my issue with these discussions. To me 'white resentment" is the same as "gay marriage will destroy families" in that it's a distraction from what really harms low income whites, and, indeed, all economic actors in general in this country. Hint: it's not the fact that some blacks obtain affirmative action. If affirmative action were completely eliminate today- it wouldn't change a thing.

I'm one of those rare people that doesn't really believe the proper role of government is to be used by anyone for explicit social change.
Most of the changes we have had in the past were not initiated by government. Those what were would have happened later anyway.

I want national security, criminal and civil law enforcement to keep others from killing, stealing or cheating me in business deals and I also want other services that are inconvenient for me to provide for myself such as a highway system and a communication system.

In other words, you want the government to protect your interests and not the interests of others. That's understandable but hardly commendable.

Here's the libertarian fantasy: that capitalism came first and then the state. The historical reality is that capitalism is a development rooted in and guided by strong states: non-state (or weak-state) capitalism is a contradiction in terms.

To have a functioning market, you need to have peace. To have peace, you need people to believe that they are dealt into the system, not out of it. That's why in the real world, as opposed to Aynrandland, the government (even when aligned with the interests of capital) sometimes needs to intervene on the behalf of some groups: to keep the whole system from going up in flames.

The libertarian notion of a weak state could not endure in the real world -- factionalism and tribalism (with racism as one form) would inevitably tear it apart. Capitalism is only possible under the regime of a strong state, for better or worse.

Short version: while libertarians can be, and often are, right on scattered individual issues (I have voted for libertarians, and expect to again), libertarianism as an ideology is naive and without empirical foundation.

"Some white resentment stems from affirmative action, some stems from the end of legally enforced white privilege -- but the former is more likely the cause of white resentment by anybody under 50, who are young to really remember legally enforced white privilege."

Racial animus passed along, just like other family traditions, is just as likely to be the source of white resentment in those under, say, 50. As far as white resentment over affirmative action goes, I think Ta-Nehisi Coates put it best: "...to resent black people--as a group--because of Affirmative Action is, really, the essence of racial prejudice. It's a judgment passed on a whole group(blacks), based on a minority of that group(blacks who've benefitted from Affirmative action)."

Did Obama benefit from Affirmative Action?

Sorry, but this Texan's got to intervene and call bull. Most white people I know who suffer "resentment" also suffer what we like to call "uses racist slurs all the time" syndrome. How is that not racism?

Well, there's Marcotte...what a surprise! *And* she didn't even mention the 'patriarchy' this time!

Truly progress...