May 30, 2008

Am I The Only One Who Missed Out on the White People Trust Fund?

Barack Obama's buddy Michael Phleger tells whites that they should all be held personally responsible for slavery and Jim Crow unless they give up the "benefits" of those practices.

I'm not even sure what the hell that means. For starters, whites who lived in slave states and Jim Crow states were always a minority of whites overall. If a white person's wealth and privilege supposedly derives from his ancestors' position under slavery or Jim Crow, doesn't it kinda matter whether his ancestors actually lived in those states? What if a white person moved to the U.S. in 1990. Does that white person get tagged, as well?

In any event, most of segregation was economic stupidity. If my grandfather owned a restaurant or motel in the 1950s that excluded black customers, how much MORE profit did my grandfather make by excluding an entire class of paying customers? I'm not an economist, but I'm thinking gramps would have made LESS profit, not more, by turning away paying customers. How much in taxes did whites in southern states save by wrongly accusing, wrongly convicting and imprisoning innocent black citizens? Seems to me they likely paid MORE in taxes, not less. Racism is an irrational motivation. A prevalence of irrational motivations tends to REDUCE, not increase, the overall wealth in an economy. Thus, while southern white racism in the 20th century imposed an economic COST on southern blacks, there was no corresponding economic BENEFIT to southern whites as a whole.

I'm not even sure that slavery was an overall benefit to southern whites as a group. It likely benefited certain southern whites who held slaves, but did it really benefit the majority of southern whites who weren't slaveholders? It may have, but it's by no means a foregone conclusion that it did.

I don't know about any of the rest of y'all white folks, but I sure didn't get any "trust fund" by virtue of being white. I have a couple friends who have "trust funds," but they're definitely the exception to the rule. I worked as a roofer for my Dad and he hooked me up with a couple of neighborhood lawnmowing gigs as a kid, but I certainly didn't get any sweet cushy career thanks to "white family connections." More often than not, the people I worked for during college weren't white males, and certainly had no reason to be biased toward me based on skin color.

If black folks think that regular, middle-class whites all have trust funds and the inside track to wealth and power, they live in a fantasy world. That's not to say that there aren't upper-class elites (of all ethnic groups) who benefit from family wealth and family connections. It's just to say that the very nature of being "elite" means it's a small group.

That said, if you happen to be the descendent of a slaveholder and you're living the rock star life off some ginormous pile of cash he built up on the backs of black slaves, ya might want to consider maybe sending some love to the United Negro College Fund or something. I'm just sayin'.