Why we cannot have nice things in America

Spoiler: it’s because of racism.

Lyra, Esq on Twitter:

JD Vance and that Hillbilly Elegy bullshit always remind me of when I had an internship at a rural food bank and I constantly had to deal with impoverished white people complaining to staff anytime they perceived a non-white food bank client as undeserving.

It was bizarre, really pretty sad, because all our clients were in dire straits, the white clients relied on us just as much. Also 90+ percent of our donations were grocery store foods a day or two away from expiring so there was never any shortage. So we were usually like begging people to take more because our we had so many of most of our items and only a day or two to give them out, but we’d still have white clients coming up to us complaining about how much a non-white person was taking.

And they’d like keep track of how long non-white people had been coming, even when they’d been using the food bank just as long. I had the following conversation like three times a week:

White client: “that guy over there has been coming here or two months now.”

Me: “Okay, well you’ve been coming for six months.”

White client: “Yes but I have a disability.”

Me: “how do you know he doesn’t have one?”

White client: “well he doesn’t look like he has one.”

Me: “Neither do you, man.”

Or I had to explain all that shit was just not our problem. “We have more food than we can give out, we wouldn’t turn a millionaire away, why do you even care?”

They literally couldn’t imagine just unconditionally helping people, it was so exhausting. A whole lot of people would rather food go in the garbage than go to a “lazy” person, and by lazy they always mean non-white. And these white people were otherwise very sweet and kind, which made it all the more taxing, I am certain none of them thought of themselves as racist, the math to them was “white person who needs help equals unfortunate victim, non-white person who needs help equals lazy”.

Digby has an incisive long post about resistance to a social insurance state. It’s one of those it’s even worse than I thought kinds of things. It’s also one of those white people need to get with the program kinds of things.

This ancient attachment to racism in this country is going to finally bring us down if we do not force it out of the body politic once and for all. The need is urgent, not just on a moral basis — the moral case is always urgent — but on a pragmatic, survival basis as well. The American frontier is closed, our total dominance of the world economy is rapidly diminishing and globalization and technology are pressuring the middle and working classes of this country in ways that we are only now beginning to see. This path of ever lower taxes and higher deficits in service of a nonsensical insistence on the ruination of public schools, a refusal to endow universal health care, a systematic destruction of social security and the combined devastation of rolling back workplace regulations while destroying unions is based on a theological belief in unfettered capitalism and American “individualism”. This romantic notion manifests itself as modern Republicanism but, in fact, it is nothing more than the same phony excuse for opportunism and racism that has existed since the founding.

It’s why we dismantled our public swimming pools:

Meanwhile, the mass pool closures continued. The state of Mississippi closed over half of their public pools by 1972. And as white flight occurred away from the country’s public pools, a wave of privatization began. “Millions of white Americans who once swam in public for free began to pay rather than swim for free with Black people,” wrote McGhee. That led to the rise of members-only private swim clubs. In the District of Columbia alone, 125 swim clubs sprang up in the decade following integration.

In 1959, there were over 10,550 private swim clubs nation-wide. That number grew to 23,000 in 1962. Today, there are over 10 million private pools in the U.S. and only 300,000 public pools, according to New York Times editorial board member, Mara Gay. Ultimately, white Americans’ obsession with racial purity spawned an entire industry catering to their need for control. This went in lock step with white flight from urban areas. Homeowner associations built private pools in the suburbs where pool segregation persisted thanks to housing discrimination and redlining. “Or they built at-home residential pools, so they could really enclose themselves off from the larger public,” wrote Wiltse.

Cervantes on political canvassing:

Almost everyone in Fishtown claimed to be a conservative, and expressed scathing contempt for liberals. So what were some of their conservative ideas? [⋯] nationalizing the oil companies [⋯] government sponsored health care, a higher minimum wage [⋯] massive investments in public transportation [⋯] cleaning up the air pollution — all kinds of radical right wing ideas.

[⋯]

What's going on? I confess I have left out the most important issue that the good people of Fishtown were worried about. In their own words, it was the n*ggers. They were all on welfare, and they were taking all the jobs. (That’s right, I often got that in consecutive sentences. And by the way, I would estimate that ¼ of the households in Fishtown consisted of single mothers on welfare, or disability pensioners.)

[⋯]

Racism has divided the working class, and made the white majority mistrust social programs which they have been persuaded somehow favor the other at their expense.