You might have heard that Bill O’Reilly grew up in Levittown, New York, famous for creating the planned subdivision. Designers wanted Levittown to offer returning WWII veterans an affordable entry to the middle class of property-owning professionals. People with no prior experience in ownership could find a home at a low price with often intimidating details like landscaping, appliances and furniture already taken care of. Along with government policies with similar goals like the GI bill, Levittown and the communities that followed it helped to elevate millions of families that would otherwise have had no easy access to the middle class.
More to the point, it elevated white families.
In 1957, when Bill O’Reilly was 8 years old, the developer William Levitt explained [banning black homeowners from Levittown] this way to the New York Times:
The plain fact is that most whites prefer not to live in mixed communities. This attitude may be wrong morally, and some day it may change. I hope it will. But as matters now stand, it is unfair to charge an individual with the blame for creating this attitude or saddle him with the sole responsibility for correcting it.
A normal person who grew up in freaking Levittown would see that he might have had some chances in life that his black contemporaries never had. Of course saying that makes me a bad liberal, since the diversity of normal people includes more than the people with whom I hang out. Someone like the folks I know would acknowledge it, sure. To me the mental acrobatics it takes to deny that seem painful and maybe dangerous.
But conservatives are normal too. A lot of people would not at all agree with the fairly obvious point that I just brought up, and I think that this issue gets back to what I see as the deep heart of the liberal-conservative divide. Liberals want people to feel guilty about things and conservatives don’t want to. Some are sociopaths who cannot feel guilt but a lot of them just go a little nuts at the idea that they might in any way be a bad person. They’re not entirely wrong that guilt gets used sometimes recklessly and as a weapon but the absolute refusal to feel any at all has become the poisonous seed of our current national dysfunction.
Start with O’Reilly versus Stewart. Bill O’Reilly lifts his persona straight out of a three year old’s memory of John Wayne. He sees himself as not just a good guy but as some sort of moral achetype, crusading against evil and incapable of sin. Poke his pretensions and O’Reilly goes nuts, over the top, into wackadoo land.
Jon Stewart is not a perfect guy in any respect (e.g., his interviews often kind of suck), but then he doesn’t pretend to be. When he screws up a story he admits the mistake, makes fun of himself a little and moves on. I watched when he demolished Crossfire. Stewart looked the opposite of puffed up. He seemed deflated, like he was ahsamed to even be on the stupid program. I think that was more or less his point.
The idea that Levittown, O’Reilly’s values factory that made moral paragons like spicy chili makes unappealing hot gas, only gave those fabled values to white people just short circuits O’Reilly’s brain. To process that cognitive dissonance he would have to become a person who can accept a little ‘personal responsibility’ for the unequal opportunities that America faced then and now. In other words he would have to become a little bit liberal. But he can’t, so he won’t.
And Cliven Bundy is still swallowing that damned foot.
The Other Bob
Deed restrictions like those at Levittown are a perfect example of white privilege and institutional racism that has prohibited black
Americans from obtaining the same advantages as whites.
The G.I. Bill aided returning WWII vets in obtaining homes, but they had to be NEW homes. If the black G.I. was prohibited by racist deed restrictions or redlining from moving to a new sub then there was effectively no G.I. housing benefit for them. Period.
See the segregation of Detroit area as a result.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
Well, you know you have a bright political career ahead of you when you bring Cliven Bundy in on an ad with you. Yup. And to go off on a tangent, why do so many wingnuts insist they “can’t say things” because of “political correctness” right before or right after they say the things they “can’t say”? How does that work?
aimai
A nice book on this subject just came out “Waking Up White.” Its by a “nice” white woman from an upper class suburb in MA, whose father was in banking, who grew up a wasp of the wasps and never realized that all those people who were not living near her–those black people–had a different history and trajectory but one which had been built into her own, touched her own, at key historical moments. Its pretty well done although its painful to read her incident by incident overcoming of the wilful blindness and ignorance of her childhood and her young adulthood.
Betty Cracker
For me, at least, guilt isn’t a necessary requirement; responsibility and acknowledgement are important. It may seem like semantics, but I’ve never talked to a conservative or liberal of the “minorities just need to get over it” school who didn’t say some variation of “I didn’t enslave anyone. I worked hard to get where I am.”
And as far as it goes, those two statements are true, and anything that contradicts them, such as demanding that the individual feel guilt, won’t be heard. What’s more effective in my experience is pointing out that we (by “we,” I mean “white people”) were born on second base in the same sense that someone like Tagg Romney was born on third base.
It’s not our “fault,” but we should certainly acknowledge the advantage, and we have the responsibility to use it to dismantle a system that gives us unfair preferential treatment in whatever way we can.
NotMax
But- but- there’s a Levittown in Puerto Rico.
(Not meant as a serious point of argument, merely as a trivia factoid.)
Tim F.
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.): Someone might ask them to apologize. The way they talk about offending people you would think they are one
flayed calfupset email away from getting their own votive candles in a Catholic church.OzarkHillbilly
Been working up in south side STL a few days a week lately where I have “had” to interact with black people on a regular basis. Funny thing is, after about 4 weeks I suddenly realized how much I missed it. After 12 years of forced whiteness, it feels good.
MomSense
If O’Reilly acknowledges that he benefited from institutional racism that favored him over someone else that would challenge one of the tenets of his political belief system and that is much too painful. It seems like every time some piece of data contradicts one of the belief systems, they scramble to deny it. I don’t see the big difference between liberals and conservatives as one of feeling guilt, I see it as people who are either able to integrate new information and ideas or people who believe what they believe what they believe. Colbert said it best at his WH Correspondents dinner when he said that Bush
Svensker
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
They can’t say them….without consequences. Very upsetting to them. Great Big Sea wrote a song about it
Mustang Bobby
When I was growing up in a lily-white suburb in the Midwest in the 1950’s and 1960’s, I heard a lot of concern-trolling: “Of course we’re all equal, but those people aren’t ready to live in nice places like Winnetka or Ottawa Hills.” Then they’d send their kid off to do summer volunteer service at some inner-city soup kitchen or migrant Head Start school so they could say they’re doing their part to get them ready.
jake the antisoshul soshulist
Conservatives are quite willing to leverage guilt in areas where they try to assume moral superiority. (sexual behavior)
raven
@NotMax: Rain on the dry side huh?
Elizabelle
@aimai:
“Waking Up White.” Well there’s the passive-aggressive holiday present of 2014.
Looks good though, aimai. I’d be very interested in hearing her take. Maybe she addresses why so many who profit from white privilege refuse to see it.
Under “events” I see author will be at a March 2105 “White Privilege Conference” in Louisville, KY. My, my.
Bobby Thomson
I don’t give a shit about guilt. I want people to do things that make sense.
MomSense
@Elizabelle:
That is a huge part of the book Learning to Be White: Money, Race and God in America by Rev. Thandeka.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
It’s the idea that ‘freedom of speech’ entails, specifically, ‘freedom from consequences of said speech’. The fact that they aren’t arrested for saying something doesn’t register when they get criticized for saying something dumb, which they interpret, somehow, as oppression.
Redshift
@The Other Bob:
That was the thing that really did it for me. I mean, I was always in favor of government action to aid the less fortunate and reduce inequality, but learning that fact taught me that yes, I directly benefited from institutional racism, and anyone who insists they didn’t is being willfully blind.
schrodinger's cat
Why compare Bill O’Reilly with Jon Stewart? I don’t see the point.
I haven’t seen O’ Reilly’s on his own show but I have seen him as a guest on other shows when he is pimping his books. His entire persona seems fake, a made for TV act, for his Fox viewers. I doubt that he believes half the stuff he says.
As for Jon Stewart, his both sides do it schtick is annoying, he is like the Tom Brokaw for the cool set. Sometimes, he is funny. I much prefer Colbert to Stewart.
Tim F.
@jake the antisoshul soshulist: Willing to throw guilt at other people, yes. Just not accept it themselves. Never.
Conservatives use that tendency in an interesting way to control poor white people. They want poor folks on government assistance to feel guilty or ashamed. Shame creates this intense drive to either relieve it, escape it or pass it on to someone else and destroy it. Take the seemingly crazy decision by people in Steubenville to attack that poor rape victim. They should feel ashamed that they failed to protect her and could not even bring themselves to punish the rapist, so they protected their psyches by passing the shame onto her and trying to destroy it or make it go away.
Conservatives want poor people to feel intensely ashamed. The poor cannot alleviate that shame and they cannot escape it (though suicide rates in those circumstances are pretty high) but they can transfer it. All conservatives have to do then is draw a picture of someone even less deserving, someone who might even have caused some of the problems that made them ashamed in the first place, and most people in that situation will jump like a starving man on a steak.
It’s a clever intellectual trick. Nasty as hell but it works.
raven
@Mustang Bobby: York Center is, or was, in Lombard right next to my home town of Villa Park, IL. We had 3 or 4 African American students at Willowbrook out of a school population near 4,000. I really never knew about York Center until years after I left but it was really cool.
Saint Timonious
I think maybe a better word might be empathy rather than guilt. the inability to see another’s point of view seems to be a problem.
Snarki, child of Loki
“His entire persona seems fake, a made for TV act, for his Fox viewers. I doubt that he believes half the stuff he says.”
If it’s fake, it’s an incredibly accurate simulation of an “old, drunk, Irish uncle. A blowhard and an opinionated asshole.”
Wendy
Just as an FYI, O’Reilly technically lived in a Westbury zip code and in the East Meadow school district, but in a Levitt-constructed house. I grew up in the same area; his house was just blocks away from my elementary school. I will often describe myself as growing up in Levittown because “Westbury” and “East Meadow” just don’t feel right all the time.
However, this is the thing I think that should be pointed out about O’Reilly. I’m about 10 years younger than him. I remember that in the late 70s, my high school (which would have been his–in fact, he lived much closer to it than I did!) was busing in kids from Roosevelt, a community that was predominantly black. O’Reilly did not attend the public schools he lived so close to. He attended St. Brigid’s and Chaminade. On Long Island, one major reason for attending Catholic schools was to avoid people of different races. O’Reilly himself probably didn’t care as a kid, but his parents probably did. That was the atmosphere he grew up in. I know people just like his parents; they’re my aunts and uncles, my in-laws, my sisters’ in-laws (my parents were unusually socially liberal), and the ideas sometimes trickle down to my generation (my BILs still vote Republican).
Belafon
@schrodinger’s cat: I believe the point was that if you show Stewart he is wrong, he admits it. If you show O’Reilly he’s wrong, he declares you a liberal white male hater.
Randy P
Of course it’s possible that O’Reilly didn’t grow up in Levittown at all. That’s part of the working-class mythos he has tried to build for himself. Al Franken at one time had a hilarious argument going with O’Reilly as to whether his home was actually in Levittown or in a richer (also white of course) suburb
Woodrowfan
I agree, “empathy” is a better fit.
Harold Samson
@Betty Cracker:
This
It’s all too easy for liberals to try to pile guilt upon conservatives, expecting some kind of contrition I suppose.
But liberals too often don’t realize that conservatives already pack a load of guilt about immediate and personal failings from being unable to live up to ridiculous expectations of conservative models.
It’s hardly surprising conservatives reject feeling guilty about injustices brought about by society at large. And it just makes liberals seem like screeching guilt-bomb-throwers.
schrodinger's cat
@Belafon: Ok so he admits that he is wrong, I mean isn’t that the least one can expect? But Stewart is unduly deferential to war criminals in the Bush admin and incredibly harsh on Democratic office holders like Obama and Pelosi.
ETA: As for O’ Reilly, he has zero credibility outside his sphere of influence. Does anyone who hasn’t drunk the Kool-aid believe anything that he says?
Belafon
@Harold Samson: Not really. Someone suggested empathy as a better word than guilt. And, from what I’ve seen, the conservatives I live near – and I’m related to – have all the trouble in the world understanding what it must be like in someone else’s shoes. And when they can’t feel it, they don’t do the liberal “I don’t quite understand it, so I’ll take your word for it” (thought believe me, we’re not perfect); they, instead, reject that point of view as legitimate.
Belafon
@schrodinger’s cat:
Part of that is slightly beside the point. An over-representative sample of people who will be voting this November believe most of what he says.
raven
@schrodinger’s cat: O’ Reilly was born 2 months to the day before I was. His wiki makes no notice of how he dodged the draft.
schrodinger's cat
@raven: How many of these warmongers in the media and the GOP ranks are also draft dodgers? I wonder?
schrodinger's cat
@Belafon: Is that right? Even my slightly paranoid friend, who watches Fox News for “balance” along with CNN doesn’t buy O’Reilly’s BS.
Harold Samson
@Belafon:
And isn’t it possible that that inability to empathize is a
real failing? Not everyone is wired the same.
I’m just saying that guilt is a tool of social crusaders, or social reformers or whatever, and that button on conservatives has already been pushed to death.
raven
@schrodinger’s cat: Beaucoup
schrodinger's cat
@raven: So they do feel guilt and are over-compensating but with other people’s lives. Lack of empathy seems to be the problem here not the lack of guilt.
raven
@schrodinger’s cat: They feel guilty that “media” let them down. If we had just killed another 200,000 or so they would have given up.
dmbeaster
Its not capacity re guilt that divides, but empathy. Sometimes guilt factors in with empathy, but not always. Conservatives openly deride empathy as a basis for doing anything.
JPL
@aimai: Thank you for recommending that. I just added it to my nook wish list, so I can download next.
PJ
@Bobby Thomson: Tim F. is the only “liberal” who seems to think that the political role of liberals is to scold conservatives. I also could not care less if conservatives, or anyone else, feels guilty or not; I just want them to do the right thing. Because this means changing their behavior or attitudes, often conservatives take this as a judgment that they are “bad” people in the eyes of liberals, which they strenuously reject as an attack on their identity, instead of thinking about whether the recommended action is beneficial to society or themselves directly. And this is because conservatives embrace a shame culture, whereby the individual is controlled by authority figures. Liberals, believing in individual conscience and liberty, reject this in favor of arguments about what is better, or best, in the belief that when, given a chance, a rational individual will choose the better thing, despite the fact that conservatives routinely choose the worse thing because it makes them feel better about themselves.
negative 1
What conservatives feel is that they’re wise to the game, and liberals are not. If you point out that rigging the outcomes of a society without mitigating the effects of ‘losing’ that game is selfish, and that their success is more predicated on luck than just outworking everyone, what you’ve pointed out is a twofold problem. First, that they’ve been selfish not ‘streetwise’ so they’re both meaner and dumber than they thought previously. Secondly, that the world is more random and scary than they think and that try as they might there are plenty of problems that they can’t solve with hard work.
No one wants to believe those things about themselves, and they will work hard to resist thinking of themselves in that light. No one believes themselves to be a bad person…
Harold Samson
@dmbeaster:
Empathy is a lot easier to achieve if you don’t start out with a pile of guilt.
Guilt is an attack, it’s blaming, it’s personal.
Liberals lose when they lead with guilt.
catclub
@Betty Cracker:
I think that is a good way to put it. It should be obvious ( and admittable) that Tagg Romney has lots of advantages that most people (white or black) never get. It does not matter how hard Tagg Romney may have worked in school.
Violet
Lack of empathy is the defining characteristic for conservatives.
Tractarian
I get what you’re saying. In a similar vein, liberals drive like beep beep and conservatives drive like BEEP BEEP BEEP.
Harold Samson
@Snarki, child of Loki:
I really doubt anyone could act or fake OReilly’s level of toxic sarcasm for year after year without having a deep well of poison inside.
schrodinger's cat
I find it funny that Stewart is being held here as a paragon of virtue.
Harold Samson
@Tractarian:
No No, the truth is obvious.
Conservatives feel guilty 24/7. All over their own stuff, the John Wayne ideals, the radical Christian sins, just not ever being able to live up to these and much more. They’re so riddled with guilt they often can’t even admit it.
Of course they bat away attempts by “the other side” to make them feel more guilty.
libarbarian
They are certainly wise to the #GamerGate. Seriously, look how they identified a target demographic that they care nothing about but who shares their fear of any change in the social status quo and so they decide to pretend to care about these people and their cause in order to recruit them into political conservatism.
Mike in NC
I’m hoping to see a new book called “Killing Bill O’Reilly”. Will buy several copies as Christmas presents.
Chris T.
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.): But if you say those things you’ll be called names, like racist, and that’s way worse than being denied the opportunity to buy a house in Leavittown!
Chris T.
@Betty Cracker:
Exactly. Guilt, shmilt. (Is that a word?) It’s not the “being born advantaged” that’s the problem: there’s nothing we could have done about it at the time. It’s what we do about it now that matters.
ericblair
@Harold Samson:
There is a troupe of lefties who are far more concerned with asserting moral superiority than fixing anything, who do do that. They’re using guilt the way conservatives do.
However, a lot of it is how conservatives are interpreting an argument like “well, you know, you worked hard to get where you are, but so did these other people and they had a set of obstacles that you never had to face and couldn’t overcome them. So we may need to change things to let people have a fair shake at success no matter who they are, where they come from, and who they were born to.” That gets passed through a moralistic filter, a zero-sum outlook, and a deep need for universal validation that turns it into “conservatives must be punished because they are inherently bad people.”
catclub
Could Bloomberg have come up with a more useless headline?
“Ebola Fear Stalks Home Hunt for Quarantined Now Released”
You have to read 7 paragraphs to get an idea of what it even means.
Botsplainer
To be a libertarian or conservative means you get to say the following:
Gex
I continue to maintain that I don’t want to make people feel guilty at all. I think one only need feel guilty if they aren’t willing to acknowledge privilege they receive and to do what they can to make things better for those without those same privileges.
It is not that we want them to feel guilty. It’s that we want them to accept responsibility for behaviors that make things worse for others. And they don’t want to. And that is what makes them feel guilty. The fact that they know they are getting things that they did not earn at the expense of others or the environment or whatever and they do not want to do anything differently.
I don’t know why you keep insisting we want them to feel guilty. Maybe you do. I want no such thing. I just want empathy, reality, responsibility, and an investment in the common good to be part of their actions and views.
Ruckus
@MomSense:
A portion of humans do not like change. It upsets events and makes the world an unsure place. It matters not that the change might benefit them.
A second portion of humans love change, it gives them a boost, a live worth living. They like change and how it may positively affect chance for them and are willing to suffer change because they see that it may hugely benefit them.
The largest portion likes stability but is willing to have some rate of change because it is inevitable and in some ways it benefits them.
This change may take many forms, things, people, relationships, government or it’s programs, risk, etc.
IOW
Group one likes a no risk life. The less risk the better.
Group two likes a risky life. The more the better.
Group three will take risk, may enjoy it sometimes, but likes a balance in how big that risk is, the risk needs some benefit for them to be worth taking.
aimai
@JPL: It not anything that a witting white person wouldn’t already know–but its well written and well thought out as a kind of primer for discovering racism at a late age without the accompanying backlash of denial caused by shame.
I find it interesting because this woman and I are the same age and grew up in nearly adjacent towns in MA we are utterly different: where she is Upper class protestant I come from a radical leftist Jewish background, where her family avoided all talk of politics my family talked of nothing *but* politics. Where race was never discussed in her household race, racism, history, civil rights etc…were always on the table at our house. Every single thing she says in the parts of her book about her taken-for-granted experience is utterly foreign to me, though I recognize some things from the lives of my Wasp friends. Its kind of like reading an ethnography of whiteness from the point of view of the natives.
Mike E
@Harold Samson: Empathy is a capacity issue and it’s presence indicates a fully functioning, healthy and integrated emotional state. If you page through the DSM, you’ll find a large cluster of disorders that indicate a fundamental absence or suppression of empathy.
Also,see: Party, Republican.
cmorenc
I don’t feel the slightest guilt about having grown up comfortably upper-middle-class white in a small segregated town in eastern North Carolina in the 1950s and early 1960s. Nor should I feel the slightest guilt about it – it was simply the environment I and the other similar upper-middle class kids took for granted without doing anything consciously to either reinforce it or resist it.
However, RETROSPECTIVE AWARENESS of how wrong the formally segregated society I grew up in was – that’s another thing entirely. Awareness of how heavily social and economic forces, the law, and the bedrock structure of society held blacks and Lumbee Indians back (we were a tri-racial county). Awareness of how that wrongful legacy continues to reverberate and infuse American society, why black men stopped by police are at far higher risk of getting shot than I am e.g. at traffic stops.
But I’m not puttin’ on any hair shirts or sack cloths and ashes about growing up white in the segregated south. Who am I now and what I understand now are the relevant issues. Fuck that guilt trip.
aimai
@Gex: I agree with you Gex but I think its important to recognize that although Liberals/progressives think people should be moved to act morally by ethical, humane, and rational considerations people on the far right believe differently. They believe that people act out of selfish motives unless restrained by an outside force (god or society) and that people never choose to change their behavior except through threats–one of the biggest threats they recognize is shame. Shame at being found out by god or society. Shame and fear at being punished for having brought disgrace on the community, god, society, or family. So even though *we* may not be arguing for a guilt based activism *they* will almost always assume that is our mode of argument.
Hillary Rettig
@Harold Samson: what a smart comment. Conservatives tend to equate failure and weakness (ordinary human weakness) with moral depravity – see Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant – AND they don’t believe in therapy or other self-help (see Satel’s “Therapism” and others of that ilk). Their motto is “straighten up and fly right.” And because they’re not superhuman but ordinary like the rest of us, they paint themselves into a corner. This viewpoint also inevitably leads to hypocrisy of the “welfare for me but not for thee” sort. I’ve never met a conservative who didn’t crave the compassion, understanding, and support they routinely deny others.
big ole hound
@Chris T.: Right on, I cannot fathom how so much conversation can be devoted to our racial divides. This talk has been going on my entire lifetime and has not changed much since Lyndon Johnson’s and Martin Luther King Jr’s. great legal strides in the 60s and 70s. So it has spanned three generations and not much progress has been shown since then. Maybe humans are just tribal enough that our instincts are to remain mostly with our own no matter how hard we try to change. Just a thought.
Chris
@Betty Cracker:
Yeah.
Even calling it “guilt” feels like conceding the argument, since I rarely hear anyone but right wingers talk about “white guilt.” They use it as a shitty strawman that allows them to tell their base “it’s not YOUR fault that slavery happened” (ignoring the fact that no liberal is making this argument in the first place) and reframe efforts to help racial minorities and other disenfranchised groups as a deliberate attack against white people (“the government is taking your money and giving it to blacks because they think you’re guilty of oppressing them because you’re white,” rather than “the government is using the public funds it’s supposed to operate with to help a community that happens to badly need it,” which is really no more objectionable than intervening, say, to help rural communities get electricity and roads or helping the elderly who can no longer help themselves. It doesn’t mean you hate or blame urban communities or people who aren’t old just that those communities face difficulties the others don’t).
Speaking for myself, I can’t say I feel a particular amount of “guilt” – I’m aware of privilege, which is entirely different. To turn the argument around, I don’t expect the super-rich to feel “guilty” for my problems being “merely” middle class in 2014 either – but I do expect them to acknowledge that these problems exist and that, to put it bluntly, their desire to have enough money for seven or eight houses instead of just five or six comes second to my need to have health care, employment, a living wage, and a roof over my head.
SatanicPanic
I’m not above using guilt as a hammer. Sometimes you just need people to shut the hell up.
Tim F.
@PJ: You clearly misunderstand what I think.
@schrodinger’s cat: You got literally the exact opposite of what I actually said.
Botsplainer
@cmorenc:
Thank you for saying this. You, of course, aren’t the problem.
KG
I don’t feel guilty or responsible for the current state of affairs, in large part because I wasn’t there to create them. However, any right thinking person can see that shit is fucked up and bullshit. And that it makes sense to change it for the better. I don’t have a tardis, so I can’t go back and influence history to be better. All I can do is work to make the future better. You don’t get to work with the history you want, you work with the history you have.
There are arguments to be made that aren’t based on guilt and shame. Which is a good thing because guilt and shame are terrible motivators
JPL
@aimai: Thanks. I grew up with a certain amount of naivety but as a family we were inclusive of others, but although the town had a lot of different cultures, there were no blacks. We had your Irish church, your Polish church, your French church, synagogue and many Christian denominations. Pretty much your typical New England town.
WayneL
Conservative find it hard to admit they are wrong, probably because they feel if they admit one thing, their whole world will collapse. Someone will inevitably ask the next question which is “What about this?” And there will be another thing they will have to admit being wrong about. This might take some time.
The conservative ideology has spent thirty years experimenting with ideas that have ultimately failed. There has not been one useful idea that has come out of the “Reagan Revolution.” All have been poor ideas that became overwhelmingly bad policies. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone in the national media would hold them responsible? (See: Iowa Senate race.)
Eric U.
I had no idea I went to segregated schools. Still hard to believe seeing as how I started first grade after it wasn’t legal any more. What the school system did was have a “special ed” school out in a rural area and all the black kids were deemed to need to go there. So they were bused at least 45 minutes each way. It helped that there were very few black people in my area of Appalachia. I think they only did it for a couple of years
Mike E
@SatanicPanic: Agree, but, good luck with that…there are people who cannot shut up even if their lives depend on it, and some who are mic’d that know their next paycheck hinges on them not shutting the hell up. 1st
worldamendment problems…WereBear
Because they are Zero-Sum People.
Any compassion, understanding, and support other people might get is that much less for them.
SatanicPanic
@Mike E: This is true. I should add sometimes you just need to send someone into sputtering rage. That can be fun.
cokane
Great little essay Tim. I think the biggest problem is still segregation. Not Jim Crow, but self-imposed. I think I read a recent poll, can’t find the link, which stated that ~75% of white people have no non-white close friends. That’s just a staggering figure. White people just don’t know what it’s like to be not-white in the US, much less to know what it’s like to be non-white and grow up in a problematic neighborhood.
Meg
I am still waiting for Jon Stewart to admit his mistakes in trashing ACORN and Shirley Sherrod after James O’Keefe’s smear campaigns.
He never did an update on those reports.
Villago Delenda Est
@MomSense:
Pretty much like Harry Potter telling Tom Riddle at the end that if he shows some remorse for his actions, he might suffer a less horrifying fate in the afterlife than the one he’s on the glide path for.
Not going to happen.
O’Reilly is utter, irredeemable scum.
Just like Tom Riddle.
Villago Delenda Est
@WereBear: Probably why they wouldn’t grok what Smith is saying in The Wealth of Nations if they ever bothered to read it, mind.
MomSense
You are obviously a commie librul! This is exactly what Bill O’Reilly wants and that is to believe in the history that supports his worldview and that affirms his identity as a self made man who has made it by his own gumption without any structural advantages.
Our history books are full of the history or mythology we want to believe about ourselves and our country. Look at how the Texas Board of Education has butchered history so that it doesn’t challenge what they want to believe about themselves, their state, their history, our country.
Mnemosyne
@WayneL:
Fred Clark at Slacktivist once told a really poignant story about going on a church trip to Israel and having a friend of his (who had been raised in an even more restrictive version of conservative Christianity) come close to a mental breakdown because they were at Jericho, looking at a wall that was 12,000 years old. This was, of course, impossible, because the entire world was only 6,000 years old. They had to take some time to talk the poor kid down from a total meltdown because his entire world had been completely shattered by one ancient, broken wall.
He was eventually able to introduce some more flexibility into his thinking without having a mental breakdown, but it’s not that unusual for people from a conservative upbringing to come to a crossroads and discover that they either have to double down on what they believe regardless of the evidence or they have to reject everything — and everyone — they know. And, for most people, it’s easier to stay within their in-group than it is to reject everything.
Goblue72
Just because white people alive today didn’t enslave anyone is besides the point. If you benefit from the institutionalized & systemic racism today – which all white people do – that is a direct consequence of those acts in the past, and fail to do a whit about it, you are just about as guilty of the same thing.
Obtuseness is the sickle cell anemia of Caucasians.
MomSense
@Villago Delenda Est:
My youngest and I were talking about that very thing last night. My son told me that it couldn’t really be remorse if V only regretted behavior because of the consequences he would face in the afterlife if he didn’t. He thinks remorse is something you feel out of concern for the victim and when there is no benefit.
Mike E
@Goblue72: Sickle cell affects 28%?
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Meg: You’ll be waiting forever. Stewart is a hypocritical, manipulative scumbag, whose one real skill in life is “punching down”, and the only appropriate punishment for his many crimes against those less fortunate than himself will be to have the same shitty joke of a job he has now for the rest of his rotten long life.
Calling Tucker Carlson a dick on live TV requires zero skill or insight and does not in any way make up for a career based on suckering America into believing that “both sides do it”.
ruemara
I take a wee bit of offense at the idea that liberals want you to FEEL guilty. What the heck does guilt have to do with improving things? Not to mention, that’s often a neocon framing of what liberal/progressive issues are about. What liberals want is for information to guide actions. Educated empathetic responses as a base guideline. That’s it.
Rex Everything
Yeah, but they both want to take structural problems inherent to capitalism, atomize them, chalk them up to individual choice, and thus deflect any drive toward systemic reform. They’re both aggressively pro-capitalist.
schrodinger's cat
@Tim F.: You do compare him favorably to O’ Reilly, as if it was a major achievement on Stewart’s part. A bar so low, that any sentient being who is not Dick Cheney should be able to cross without much difficulty.
catclub
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
This reminds of Joe Klein, who also punches down, but when he has a personal stake ( such as calling him anti-semitic) he can be excellent.
There was a profile of Stewart that showed he is usually a disinterested interviewer, since he is just killing time, unless he has a particular interest in the topic, then he can be pretty good. It was wondering what he would be like on MTP. They thought if he took the job seriously, he could be far better than the guys who are there now. But since he ain’t got the gig, who knows.
RSA
@Hillary Rettig:
Some religious conservatives have an out in these situations: If they dig themselves out of a hole, they can say that they did it with God’s help. Which means that if others have been unable to do the same, well, hey, that must be either because God wanted it that way or because those other people just weren’t good enough.
Jonny Scrum-half
As many here already said, it isn’t (or shouldn’t be) about “guilt.” It’s not even about the ability to feel empathy – “conservatives” are just people, and unless they’re sociopaths they are capable of feeling empathy.
It’s about education, and the difficulty that everyone has with understanding facts that don’t fit within the framework of what they believe. Americans are taught – really, brainwashed by propaganda – from birth that America is the greatest country that ever existed, and that Americans are free and have unlimited opportunity if they work hard. This message is propagated from mass media like TV and film, from history books in school, and from everyone else in society who grew up with the same brainwashing.
It takes time, effort and an open mind to break free from that framework. It took me a long time, and even then it was a years-long process where I had to be willing to challenge myself, and to accept challenges from others. John Cole went through this, too. Not everyone has the time to do it, and really almost no one has the inclination to do so.
Things can change, but only if people actually try to persuade others to change their minds. Language like “guilt” and even “privilege” isn’t helpful, because even for people who grew up in “privilege,” day-to-day life can present many difficulties, some of which are real (personal tragedies and the like) and some of which are not so real (anxiety about getting into a particular college, for example).
rk
The same guy planned Levittown PA.
historyengine.richmond.edu/episodes/view/5272
How many other suburbs were planned this way? They just found more creative ways to discriminate. Just like abortion. You have the right to an abortion, but unfortunately you’ll have to drive 300 miles, and rent a room, and watch a video, and walk past raving lunatics.
Difference between conservatives and democrats seems to be that conservatives never stop fighting to get their way. Democrats seem to think that once they’ve scored an initial victory the war is over. Once Obama was in office there was no need to vote in 2010. No need to vote again in 2014.
People like Bill ‘O’ Reilly are racist to the core. FOX news is They’re much more dangerous than any yahoo openly spewing racism. I don’t know why John Stewart bothers engaging him in any discussion. Has Bill ‘O’ Reilly ever shown any sign that his views will change? The only thing that ‘O’ Reilly deserves is merciless mockery.
Tim F.
@schrodinger’s cat:
I think that how I compare him favorably is worth considering here. I piss on Bill O’Reilly precisely because he puffs himself up as a moral paragon. Stewart never pretends to be a paragon. He’s just a guy with a nice gig doing fake news and he knows it. He sucks at some things – acting in movies for example, interviewing for another – and he never goes HULK SMASH on people who point that out.
The one time he tried to really evangelize and tell people what’s what, his basic message was for people to stop being dicks to each other. It looked a little too much like a pretentious man-in-the-middle last sane person on Earth schtick, but I think if you asked him about it he would never pretend to be a Glenn Beckian messiah for sanity. Rather seemed to present himself as one normalish guy (two guys) who had the money to rent a stage and buy some ads.
schrodinger's cat
@Tim F.: I don’t disagree with you are saying about Stewart in your last comment, but what is the point of comparing him to BOR in the first place?
ETA: Stewart’s civility schtick is annoying. John Yoo, Rumsfeld etc., deserve none.
Another Holocene Human
Isn’t guilty like the first reaction, not the last reaction? Like when a child finds out that not all homes and households are the same?
Isn’t the last reaction just to acknowledge reality and to fight like hell for justice? Because that is what we’re all called to do? Unless you’re a selfish fuck, whether because of tribalism (the “innocent” explanation) or because of an Axis B personality disorder?
Another Holocene Human
@Mustang Bobby: What I heard working in the DC area in the 90s and 2000s was “those people don’t deserve to govern themselves” because Marion Barry.
Clearly an unrefudiatable argument!
JR in WV
@ruemara:
Hi Ruemara,
How are you doing? I recall that your job had a terrible event, is it still a business? Are you doing well in whatever aftermath there is?
Best wishes for fall,
JR
Another Holocene Human
@Elizabelle:
Looks like we’re getting somewhere. I remember finding books about whiteness in the 1990s and it was almost like a taboo subject. It’s not that Black writers and activists hadn’t been talking about the white power structure for a while, but whiteness as a thing was a void, a negative. (To be white culturally was to be ‘unmarked’ hence white had no characteristics that one could describe.) And here you had some crazy behind researchers actually talking about it.
Another Holocene Human
@Redshift: Shit, don’t forget the homestead act. I guess if your family are more recent immigrants that doesn’t apply but majority of white people are lying to themselves on this issue. There was an enormous wave of European immigration between 1840s and 1860s and they benefitted from the Homestead Act. If they were white. A point which was not lost on MLK, btw.
Another Holocene Human
@Snarki, child of Loki: Sexually harassing his assistant and stalking his ex-wife and trying to get the chief of police through the charities he’s involved in to fire his ex-wife’s new boyfriend were all a Andy Kaufman-esque act?
Btw, just try to grok the white privilege in that one.
Cervantes
Or:
That’s Richard Wright in Native Son, of course.
Another Holocene Human
@Jonny Scrum-half: This essay was written for you:
whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is/
dmbeaster
@Jonny Scrum-half: The point is not whether they can feel empathy. It’s that they embrace an ideology that disparages empathy, and therefore can subvert those emotional feelings to the detriment of us all.
pseudonymous in nc
This is the real subject of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ‘The Case for Reparations’. This is why TNC should get a Pulitzer.
For centuries, America has systematically turned unpropertied white people into property-owning citizens. For centuries, America has excluded African-Americans from this sweet deal.
The American way has always been to divvy up handouts to individuals: the GI Bill gave out subsidized mortgages, while western European countries rebuilding after WW2 generally chose to build public housing. The problem with divvying out handouts is that it doesn’t take long for the beneficiaries (or the beneficiaries’ children and grandchildren) to forget that there was a handout. Instead, they claim it as a product of their own hard work.
Another Holocene Human
Jon Stewart may be a victim of his choice to interview–briefly, with rather generic preparation–GWB admin figure after GWB admin figure.
Sociopaths and narcissists often have what is known as superficial charm. They may be quite smooth on a very temporary basis when they want something from you and think they can get it.
Exposure to people increases our empathy to them. Jon Stewart was literally hypnotized by a parade of no-conscience hollow freaks who nevertheless have it together enough to make pleasant conversation for a few minutes. Stewart did not deeply research guests (when would he have time?) although he did follow political news.
Without a lot of understanding of psychology (he’s an actor after all, not a scientist), without being an actual wonk or researcher who would have a much deeper and broader view of the iniquities these people visited on others, it was easy for Stewart to rationalize that this bigwig or that was the real evil calling the shots and these lower toadies seemed nice and …
Looked at how Karen Hughes worked him. She is a pro, and Stewart was a lot more naive and gullible than the journalists she usually had to deal with. And then there were the others.
Still, trolling Bill-o is probably one of the better things JS has done lately. Because he’s got relationships with news people he can get them to answer his phone calls. Bill wouldn’t have done that for another comedian. Think of it as a gift to every beleaguered GenXer or Millennial who has to deal with Dad or Uncle who is fucking obsessed with O’Reilly Factor and throws a mini-tantrum if they miss it.
Another Holocene Human
So…..
Some posts get you put in moderation.
Some posts get you error messages.
But if you link to J*hn Sc*lz*’s 2012 essay on white male privilege, FYWP will eat that shit without a trace.
You will NOT go to blog called “whatever”. You will NOT see metaphor comparing white privilege to video game.
This post never happened.
Mnemosyne
@Jonny Scrum-half:
It also doesn’t help that the extent of media censorship prior to about 1967 has pretty much gone down the memory hole. The reason there are very few black people (except as servants) in “classic” Hollywood movies isn’t because there weren’t black people in America — it’s because they were deliberately and systematically censored out, ostensibly so the Southern theater owners wouldn’t refuse to show the films. Movies about interracial romance always featured two white actors in the roles, because censorship rules forbade them from casting the film any other way. (The only exception I can think of is the 1934 version of Imitation of Life, which starred Fredi Washington as the “tragic mulatto” Peola Johnson.)
People don’t realize today how thoroughly bowdlerized and censored our view of the past is thanks to strict film (and later TV) censorship.
Mnemosyne
@Another Holocene Human:
There’s probably a stupid FYWP word somewhere in the URL, like when we can’t mention the name of Sherlock Holmes’s doctor friend. Run it through TinyURL or Bit.ly and it should be fine.
VFX Lurker
@MomSense:
That was pretty a sharp observation by your son.
When I read THE DEATHLY HALLOWS, genuine remorse was the only kind of remorse I thought would repair Voldemort’s soul, too. Harry recommending that Voldemort feel remorse would not be enough, and Voldemort trying to feel remorse to save himself would not be enough. It had to be genuine, heartfelt remorse.
SWMBO
@Betty Cracker: Liberals think that giving everyone a chance and equal rights doesn’t diminish them as rights or as people. Conservatives think that if it was an equal playing field that it would diminish them in some way. They just don’t see that others should have the same rights because they are lazy, evil, undeserving or incompetent. Their rights can’t be the same because it would make those attributes fall on them as well…
Jamey
@ericblair:
Please tell me that you’re joking–or at least do a better job of convincing me that inherently bad people [of late] aren’t drawn to modern Republicanism, precisely because it espouses a common moralistic and judgmental belief system (that poors = lazy; more guns and less regulation = safer schools; etc). Because I just don’t see where your “facts” add up to anything even remotely approximating your conclusions.
A Humble Lurker
@Meg:
You know, I don’t like Stewart much these days either, but he did acknowledge on his show that he was wrong about those things. If I’m remembering correctly on one of those issues he had a bunch of clips with dudes who got it wrong…and then himself at the end of it.
Jamey
@ericblair:
Please tell me that you’re joking–or at least do a better job of convincing me that inherently bad people [of late] aren’t drawn to modern Republicanism, precisely because it espouses a common moralistic and judgmental belief system (that poors = lazy; more guns and less regulation = safer schools; etc). As you’ve explained things, I just don’t see where your “facts” add up to anything even remotely approximating your conclusions.
KS in MA
@Betty Cracker:
This.
Kenneth Almquist
“conservatives already pack a load of guilt about immediate and personal failings from being unable to live up to ridiculous expectations of conservative models”
This may be the reason why some conservatives like to view themselves as victims; it’s a way to excuse (to themselves) stuff that they would otherwise feel guilty about.
O’Reilly isn’t one of conservative I refer to in the previous paragraph, but he plays to that type of conservative with things like his “War on Christmas” rehtoric.