The New York Times Sunday Magazine this weekend carries an
article so intellectually abominable I need to demonstrate its idiocy. Entitled “White
Debt”, and studded with quotes from the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates, it
consists of a personal narrative, devoid of anything one might call “journalism”,
in which the author expounds upon the guilt she feels for being a white person
in America. Because slavery. Although largely written in the first person
singular, the author seems to deem herself, by virtue of her whiteness, a
spokesperson for all white people and thus shifts, as the essay nears the end,
into a first person singular as in “Collusion is written onto our way of life,
and nearly every interaction among white people is an invitation to collusion.”
And “What is the condition of white life?
We are moral debtors …. Our banks make bad loans. Our police act out
their power on black bodies.”
The article reminds me of the way a creationist might
express his or her moral certainty about the way in which the world as we know
it came into being. I would analogize the
article also to the “Big Lie” technique of misleading the public, because
pretty much every one of the generalities and abstractions the author invokes
is pretty much false or at best, omits massive amounts of contrary information
needed to make the picture she paints not misleading. But it is clear the author sincerely, almost
religiously, believes the nonsense she utters is true. So it’s not a lie, it’s more like creationism,
a religious assertion that is palpably contrary to fact.
The article reminds me of religion in another way. It
resembles the emphasis on sin and guilt that has captivated the attention of
various Christian denominations throughout Western history. With a few subtle changes, like replacing
Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nietzsche quotes with a passage from St Paul or the Old
Testament it could probably pass for an unpleasant sermon on a Sunday morning
in the not too distant past. Flagellate
yourselves, white people! Flagellate yourselves!
It’s a free country at least nominally, and if a person
wants to sit around and mope about being white and read Nietzche while doing so,
hey, feel free. But when that someone
starts advancing that perspective as the one to which others must subscribe,
and a major media outlet implicitly makes the same call in publishing that perspective,
those of us with brains need to speak out lest the Big Lie spread any further.
There is no “white debt”.
Not just because all the slave owners and slaves are dead, and their
children are dead, and their grandchildren are dead, but for a handful of
unusually long-lived descendants of long-lived ancestors. Not just because it was white soldiers (like
my ancestor who suffered for 13 years from wounds he sustained as a Union
soldier at the battle of White Oak until the pain drove him to kill himself in
1875) who freed the slaves, white judges who led the fight against Jim Crow, white
legislators and a white President who passed the Civil Rights laws of 1964,
white doctors and nurses who treat far more black bodies than white cops kill
or imprison, white professors who teach black students, predominantly white donors who fund financial aid for higher education that assists people of color, or predominantly white
taxpayers and bondholders who fund the welfare state that disproportionately pays out for the benefit of people of color. And it’s not
even because much of the white population today is descended mostly or entirely
from people who first entered the US after slavery was abolished and who
settled in ethnically homogenous enclaves outside of the South where they
rarely had occasion to compete with, let alone oppress, black people.
No, it’s because the status of virtually every white
American in the United States of America in 2015 is completely independent of
any meaningful tie to slavery or Jim Crow or any legacy thereof or any racism of any kind whatsoever.
First, until the current generation, the US population has
been almost entirely white. When I was
born it was almost 90% white. So, at any
point in the 20th century, when a white person got a job or made a
sale or took a seat in a school or bought a house, it was extremely, nearly 90%,
certain that the white person did not displace a black person; said white person
would have gotten that job, made that sale, gone to that school and lived in
that house in a perfectly racially distributed nation. Which in turn means that their children would
have been in the same neighborhood, gone to the same school, met and married
the same spouse, and had the same life outcomes, without impinging on any black
person at any point along the way. So hardly any white people got where they are
today at the expense of a black person or by "being white".
But it’s even more than that. Because white people have made up so much of
the nation, the good of the nation is primarily attributable to them as
well. There is this folk tale character of accounts of race in America where whites show up only as
oppressors or ignorant and blacks are savvy and persevering. But the technology and the infrastructure
and transportation alternatives and medical treatment and the national defense
and environmental protection and market regulation and the media and the sports
and the educational options that a black person can benefit from in America in
2015 have been developed and distributed and funded almost entirely by white
people. That's neither oppression nor ignorance.
Second, of the wealth that exists today, again, virtually all
of it has been created since slavery and Jim Crow ended and in places other
than the ones where those systems operated.
The principal sources of private wealth in the US are homes, commercial
real estate, farmland, loans secured by the same, equities and government bonds. In the case of the intangible asset classes –
stocks and bonds -- it is blindingly obvious that well over 95% of their aggregate
value has come into being in the past 50 years.
And what existed before was not 100% attributable to slavery and Jim
Crow. It came from an economy that was 85-90%
white. As for farmland, the most
valuable farmland is outside the Deep South, in the Plains States and
California, where slavery never penetrated.
Its value comes from a variety of factors, but principally post-war
leaps in efficiency, not inherited from an earlier era. Plus, let’s face it: land is land. It’s there regardless of any legal
rules. It’s not as if there was a void
reaching down to the center of the Earth and the slaves filled it up with dirt. As for other real estate
values, the most valuable housing stock and the most valuable office and other
commercial properties are the most recent.
Buildings erected in the 19th and first half of the 20th
century, while still in existence, are a small part of the developed real
estate in the US and, given the distribution of population in the US - even in the Civil War era, the South was less
than 1/3 of the population -- most of those were erected outside the zones of
slavery and Jim Crow. Further, among
those that retain value today, much of that has to be attributed to maintenance and capital investments
made in recent decades. Any building
that was built in the South prior to the Civil Rights Act and hasn’t been
maintained since then isn’t worth a whole lot today. The value of residential real estate today is
the result of postwar demographics and home ownership subsidies the government
has extended over the past several decades, and events preceding the Civil Rights
laws of 1964 have very little to do with the value of residential real estate
owned by white people. This is not to
say that blacks weren’t excluded from many suburbs, etc., decades ago. The point is that very little value in the
hands of white people today resulted from those exclusions. Because most homebuyers back then were white,
many blacks weren’t looking in those neighborhoods, and because so much of
current housing stock value has arisen since that era.
There is a sophomoric retort to these facts that usually
involves emphasizing how important the slave economy was to the early United
States and then making the argument “but for” the slave economy carrying the
nation along, it never would have made it to where it was today, so everything
you see today owes a debt to that fact.
This is sophomoric because, like sophomores, it knows a little and
thinks that little is all it needs to know.
First, “but for” arguments are always insufficient as explanations of
any phenomenon. This is because every situation
in a complex society has millions, billions, trillions of “but for” causes. For any real world situation X, the number of
propositions “but for ___, X would not have happened” is limited only by one’s
patience. Yet the sum of causes of a phenomenon cannot
exceed 100%; you don’t make sense if you claim to have identified 237% of the
causes of a phenomenon. This is the
problem of “but for” thinking: it doesn’t add up. All of the causes of a phenomenon have to be
identified and their relative weight acknowledged to explain it, yet the sum of
all causes can’t go past 100% or the explanation turns into nonsense.
Secondly, the antebellum US economy was more
than the slave trade and the products of slave labor. There was a whole lot of white labor
too. So, third, once you start to take
into account all the factors that have contributed to the current status of
white Americans in the US, and not just myopically look at the ones that
support the preferred thesis, you have to recognize that more than millions and
billions and trillions of phenomena, but probably trillions of trillions of
phenomena have occurred in relation to the US economy since the slave trade
ended nearly 200 years ago. So there are
almost 200 years of intervening causes. Just mathematically, the number of subsequent
factors has to confine the “but for” causes from 200 years ago to an infinitesimally
small fraction of the overall roster of causes of 2015 America.
Last, what this kind of argument overlooks is
that value depreciates and gets destroyed, by the creative destruction of
capitalism over time, by financial crises that occurred regularly throughout
the Jim Crow era, and by real physical destruction like General Sherman’s march
through the Deep South. It’s awfully unlikely that the profits of a
slave trade or the export of products of slave labor in, say, 1845, survived
the Civil War, the various financial panics and recessions of the following 60
years, and the Great Depression, and the application of multiple generations of
estate taxes, and the high marginal tax rates that prevailed for decades of the
20th century, and somehow just kept accruing interest right up to
the present. More likely, some got
reinvested in buildings that are no longer standing, or businesses that ultimately
failed or closed down for one reason or another, or deposited in banks that
went bust, or taxed away, or dispersed among widows and other descendants who
spent them to survive, leaving nothing for the current generation. It’s all gone
What wealth you see today has
been created other than on the backs of black people.
The last resort of the progressive activist community in
debates like these is to play the “denial card” as the author herself does in
this ridiculous article, listing for example several “crazy” things that “white
people do when they feel guilty” and then letting us know that “I’m not sure
any of that is worse than what white people do in denial. Especially when that
denial depends on a constant erasure of both the past and the present.” This is of course, exactly what the author
herself is guilty of, myopically focusing on negative events in black-white
relations in America and never lifting her gaze to see the entire picture of
how the people who are alive today got where we are, most of which has nothing
to do with exploiting black people, nor does she see any of the good that white people have done in ways that benefit and enrich black lives in America. That is he most important thing intelligent people can do in this context, combat the arrogant claim of people like this author to control the truth when in fact their portrayal of truth is an ideologically myopic distortion of the world we have made.
