It’s a question of which white folks seem never to tire when discussing subjects like affirmative action, or other diversity initiatives intended to expand opportunity and access for people of color in higher education and the job market.

Whenever these matters are broached, the vast majority of us rush to protest: How dare schools or employers consider race in hiring or admissions. They should be colorblind, we insist, merely admitting or hiring the most qualified! And more to the point, we proclaim, targeting folks of color for opportunities, by definition, means discrimination against us. Such efforts make us the victims, even, on some accounts, treating white people “exactly” like blacks were treated under Jim Crow segregation (1).

So, yes, it remains the case that even when black folks have college degrees they’re nearly twice as likely as comparable whites to be out of work; and Latinos with degrees are about 50 percent more likely than comparable whites to be out of work; and Asian Americans with degrees are about 40 percent more likely than comparable whites to be out of work (2). And yes, even whites who claim to have criminal records are more likely to be hired than equally qualified blacks without records, but still, can anti-white lynchings be far behind?

And yes, blacks and Latinos combined only represent about 13 percent of students at the most selective colleges and universities — the only ones that actually practice any kind of real affirmative action for admissions — and there are twice as many whites admitted to elite schools with less-than-average qualifications as there are people of color so admitted, but still, can any rational person doubt that whites will soon be limited to mere token representation at the nation’s best educational institutions?

That such hand-wringing about so-called reverse discrimination reeks of intellectual mendacity should be obvious by now. Despite years of so-called reverse racism, whites remain atop every indicator of social and economic well-being when compared to the African Americans and Latinos who, it is claimed, are displacing us from our perch: employment data, income, net worth; you name it, and we are the ones in better shape without exception.

Indeed, in some regards the gaps between whites and folks of color have grown in recent years, as with wealth gaps, which have actually tripled since the 1980s, now leaving the typical white family with over 20 times the net worth of the typical black family and 18 times that of the typical Latino family. Even when comparing families of middle-class income and occupational status, whites possess 3-5 times the net worth of middle class blacks, suggesting that even African Americans who have procured good careers and obtained college degrees lag well behind their white counterparts, due in large measure to the inherited disadvantages of past generations, affirmative action efforts notwithstanding.

This is why, despite affirmative action — which may well be eradicated (at least so far as higher ed is concerned) by the Supreme Court within the month — white racial advantage remains a real and persistent phenomena in American life, and one with which fair-minded persons should still be prepared to grapple.

To claim that affirmative action not only disproves white privilege, but indeed suggests its opposite — black and brown privilege — as many have argued to me via email exchanges, is to ignore the entire social context within which affirmative action occurs.

It’s like protesting that sick people are privileged, relative to the healthy, because there are no hospitals for the latter.

It’s like complaining that the poor are privileged, relative to the well-off, because no one sets up soup kitchens to serve the affluent; nor does Habitat for Humanity ever show up to build mansions for the rich.

It’s like insisting that the disabled are privileged because they get bigger bathroom stalls, or because of all those special parking spaces, and that the able-bodied are oppressed because we have to walk a bit further when we go shopping at the mall or for groceries

It’s like complaining that women are privileged and men oppressed because of half-price Ladies Night specials at the local pub, or because of Breast Cancer Awareness wristbands that say “Save the Boobies” — after all, there are no “I love Prostate” wristbands — or because female porn stars and strippers make more than their male counterparts, or because hospitals don’t have paternity wards. Yeah, think about that one for a minute!

It’s like whining about how the LGBT community is privileged and we straight folks oppressed, since, after all, “the gays” have their own parades and bars that cater to their needs. Where’s our parade? Where’s our bar?

It’s like inveighing against the privileges enjoyed by Jews or Muslims, what with that Kosher or Halal certification you can find on grocery items nowadays. Obviously, going out of the way to make sure observant Jews and Muslims know what food is OK for them to eat is nothing less than naked favoritism! After all, where’s the little Jesus cross to let Christians know what food is holy for them?

It’s like rich people, who make millions or even billions (and as such, likely pay a pretty hefty tax bill annually) complaining about how working class folks who earn only $15,000 or so not only don’t pay income taxes, they actually get a refund in the form of the Earned Income Tax Credit! As such, it’s obvious that the working poor are the truly advantaged in society! And this is especially true when you think about all the thrift shops and discount stores that are established to serve them, and those check-cashing outlets and pawn shops! An entire infrastructure just for low-income people. Where are our food stamps? Where’s our government cheese?

For that matter, one might ask (and some, with no sense of irony do), where’s our White Entertainment Television? Because when one is white one has the luxury of ignoring that the entire cable broadcast spectrum represents whiteness: from Donald Trump to Honey Boo-Boo and everything inbetween.

Or, as others insist, where’s our National Association for the Advancement of White People? Because likewise, we don’t have to notice how there are several of these, implicitly, throughout the culture: the Fortune 500, the Chamber of Commerce, or your friendly neighborhood police force among the most obvious.

Or, where’s our White History Month? Which is the kind of imbecilic query that could only emanate from the lips of one who has had the luxury of glibly ignoring that we have several, though they go by the tricky names of May, June, July, and so on, and in which months white people’s historical narratives are given quite a bit more than a momentary consideration.

In other words, when whites critique affirmative action, we typically ignore everything that came before such efforts — and which unjustly skewed the historical balance of power and access in our favor — and even that which continues to favor us now, from funding and other advantages in the schools that mostly serve our children, to preferential treatment in the housing market, to ongoing advantages in employment.

For instance, with black and Latino students far more likely than whites to attend concentrated poverty schools, and with the typical black or Latino student attending school with twice as many low income students as the typical white student, and being twice as likely to be taught by the least experienced teachers and half as likely to be taught by the most experienced, it is more than a bit disingenuous to suggest that it’s black and brown kids receiving “preferential treatment” in education.

With companies filling up to half of their new jobs by way of recommendations made by pre-existing employees — a practice that benefits those persons connected to others already in the pipeline, who will disproportionately be white — and with informal, typically white-dominated networks providing the keys to the best jobs in the modern economy, and with research indicating that employers are more likely to hire people they’d like to “hang out with,” than those who are necessarily the most qualified (which will tend to replicate race and class homogeneity), and with blacks significantly underrepresented in management positions, even and especially in work settings that include large numbers of blacks, it stands as uniquely craven to complain about how persons of color are receiving unjust head starts in the labor market. That even middle class blacks, relatively protected by their economic and educational status from overt mistreatment, still suffer disparate rates of job dismissal (even when their performance indicators are comparable to those of whites), lower mobility when compared to similar whites, and regular harassment on the job, makes such arguments all the more repugnant.

With people of color significantly more likely than whites to be steered to subprime mortgage loans — even when their credit scores and incomes are comparable to (or better) than their white counterparts — makes it downright indecent to argue that it’s whites who are getting the shaft and people of color who are reaping the benefits of some iniquitous system of preference.

And yet, that’s what one can hear, over and again, from the very white Americans who regularly bemoan what they call the “victim” mentality of black folks and other “racial minorities.”

As in, “If I were just black, I’d have gotten into Harvard!” Or, “If my buddy John had been named Juan, he’d have gotten that construction contract,” which arguments brazenly ignore that whites still far outnumber blacks at places like Harvard and white owned businesses continue to receive over 90 percent of government contracts (3). Oh, and such idiocy also, and conveniently, ignores one more not-so-minor matter: namely, that if one had been black, or if one’s friend had been Latino, one’s life and that of said friend would have been completely different, and not only on that day that you or he applied to Harvard or for that particular contract, but every day before that.

Which is to say that long before you sent in your college application, you’d have been a black child, born in a country where black children are twice as likely to die in infancy as the white child you actually were.

You’d have been a black teenager, in a country where black teens who are actively seeking jobs have unemployment rates that regularly hover around 40 percent, and are 2.5 times the rates for white teens, like the one you actually were (4).

You’d have been living in a black family, whose parent or parents would have been twice as likely to be out of work and three times as likely to be poor as the white parents you actually grew up with.

And if you had committed a crime as a youth, you’d have been six times as likely to be incarcerated for that crime than your actual white self, even if the crime details and your prior record were no different than they had been in your actual, white world.

In short, claims of white victimhood only make sense if one has so imbibed a mentality of entitlement that one actually believes whites earned all that extra stuff, that we earned our better health, or the relative wealth status we merely inherited from our families (which inherited it from theirs), or preferential treatment from cops. Which is to say, it’s the kind of thing that can only make sense to those lacking the most basic capacity for critical thought, and anything remotely resembling that which we might call, perspective.

Sadly, this is precisely the mentality adopted by several members — and now perhaps the majority — of the Supreme Court: persons who lash out at any effort to balance out opportunities for people of color, as evidence of unlawful and unfair preference, but ignore the persistent and institutionalized advantages of whiteness, referring dismissively to such things as “societal discrimination,” against which they claim to be powerless.

Such is the face of white privilege in the twenty-first century: a systematized reality so normalized and taken for granted by the majority of whites, that any deviation from its totalizing script becomes cause for alarm in the eyes of millions.

That such a weak, hypersensitive and over-indulged group as this should wield such power would be funny were it not so dangerous.

_______

(1) Yes, I realize that there are more sophisticated arguments against affirmative action than this kind of white victimhood argument, and I have responded to them elsewhere. First and foremost in my 2005 book, Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White, but also in numerous essays. To wit, here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here.

(2) See Table 6, pages 14-16. Note, the white unemployment figures are artificially inflated because roughly 93 percent of Latinos are racially classified as white in Labor Department data, as noted on page 1 of the report. Because Latinos and Latinas tend to have higher unemployment rates than non-Hispanic whites, including them in the white totals skews white unemployment upwards at higher levels of education. While Latino/as with little education actually tend to fare slightly better than comparable whites (likely because they are hired specifically by employers who seek to take advantage of their limited language skills or immigration vulnerability, and thus, inability to complain about bad work conditions, low pay, and no benefits), among Latinos with high school diplomas or college educations, employment status is worse than for comparable whites. Once Latino males are extracted from the white totals for persons with college degrees, Latino unemployment for degree holders is 44 percent above that for whites, while unemployment rates for Latina females with degrees is 59 percent above the rate for comparable white women. For Asian Americans, in the aggregate, unemployment among degree holders is 37 percent higher than for comparable whites, including a whopping 68 percent higher for Asian American women, relative to white women with degrees.

(3) According to the data in this article, black- and Latino-owned small businesses received about $15 billion, combined, in government contract dollars in 2011, out of approximately $433 billion in overall contracts granted by the government that year, for a percentage of only about 3.5 percent of all contract dollars. This more comprehensive analysis indicates a total of about $36 billion overall in contract dollars for minority-owned businesses that year (including other persons of color, not black or Hispanic), out of $537 billion in overall contract dollars, for a percentage of about 6 percent. Either way, it is safe to say that over 90 percent of contract dollars continue to flow to businesses owned by whites.

(4) According to Table 3 (pp 7-9) of this report, black teen unemployment rates in 2011 averaged 41.2 percent, compared to 19.5 percent for white teens, once Latinos classified in the data as white are removed from the white totals. It was important to remove Latinos from the white totals, because Latino teens are about 60 percent more likely than white teens to be unemployed, thus, keeping them in the larger category of whites (and as noted on page 1 of the report, about 93 percent of Latinos are found there), artificially inflates the “real white” unemployment numbers, whether for teens or adults. For an explanation of how I extracted Latinos from the data, here and in note 2 above, write for details at timjwise@mac.com. The procedure isn’t complicated but is too lengthy to explain here.

To contribute, go here:

WHITE LIKE ME brings the work of anti-racist author and educator Tim Wise to the screen, exploring race and racism in the United States through the lens of whiteness and white privilege. The film’s baseline aim is to make sense of the seemingly abstract concept of white privilege, and to show how our failure as a society to properly acknowledge and confront the psychological, social, and political effects of white privilege continues to perpetuate racial inequality and race-based political resentments. WHITE LIKE ME represents the first attempt to bring the full range of Wise’s work to the screen, to tell a single compelling story about how white privilege continues to shape individual attitudes, public discourse, electoral politics, and government policy in ways most white people have never stopped to think about.

In addition to Tim Wise, the film will feature:

MICHELLE ALEXANDER | Ohio State University Law School, Author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

CHARLES OGLETREE | Harvard Law School, Author of The Presumption of Guilt: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Race, Class & Crime in America

IMANI PERRY | Center for African American Studies, Princeton University, Author of More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States

MARTIN GILENS | Department of Politics, Princeton University, Author of Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Anti-Poverty Policy

JOHN H. BRACEY, JR. | Afro-American Studies, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Author of African American Mosaic: A Documentary History from the Slave Trade to the 21st Century (with Manisha Sinha)

NILANJANA DASGUPTA | Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, National Science Foundation Grant winner for research on implicit prejudice.

OUR GOAL: WHITE LIKE ME aims to help change the national conversation about race and racism, especially among white people. It aims to show how the best way forward is not to try to transcend race in pursuit of a color-blind society, but to talk openly, honestly, and without defensiveness about race, racism, and racial identity, especially white racial identity. With Tim Wise as the guide, we think this film has a good shot at doing just that.

But I dare say there is more; a much less obvious and far more uncomfortable lesson, which many are loathe to learn, but which an event such as this makes readily apparent, and which we must acknowledge, no matter how painful.

It is a lesson about race, about whiteness, and specifically, about white privilege.

I know you don’t want to hear it. But I don’t much care. So here goes.

White privilege is knowing that even if the Boston Marathon bomber turns out to be white, his or her identity will not result in white folks generally being singled out for suspicion by law enforcement, or the TSA, or the FBI.

White privilege is knowing that even if the bomber turns out to be white, no one will call for whites to be profiled as terrorists as a result, subjected to special screening, or threatened with deportation.

White privilege is knowing that if the bomber turns out to be white, he or she will be viewed as an exception to an otherwise non-white rule, an aberration, an anomaly, and that he or she will be able to join the ranks of pantheon of white people who engage in (or have plotted) politically motivated violence meant to terrorize — and specifically to kill — but whose actions result in the assumption of absolutely nothing about white people generally, or white Christians in particular.

Among these: Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols and Ted Kaczynski and Eric Rudolph and Joe Stack and George Metesky and Byron De La Beckwith and Bobby Frank Cherry and Thomas Blanton and Herman Frank Cash and Robert Chambliss and James von Brunn and Lawrence Michael Lombardi and Robert Mathews and David Lane and Chevie Kehoe and Michael F. Griffin and Paul Hill and John Salvi and Justin Carl Moose and Bruce and Joshua Turnidge and James Kopp and Luke Helder and James David Adkisson and Scott Roeder and Shelley Shannon and Dennis Mahon and Wade Michael Page and Jeffery Harbin and Byron Williams and Charles Ray Polk and Willie Ray Lampley and Cecilia Lampley and John Dare Baird and Joseph Martin Bailie and Ray Hamblin and Robert Edward Starr III and William James McCranie Jr. and John Pitner and Charles Barbee and Robert Berry and Jay Merrell and Brendon Blasz and Carl Jay Waskom Jr. and Shawn and Catherine Adams and Edward Taylor Jr. and Todd Vanbiber and William Robert Goehler and James Cleaver and Jack Dowell and Bradley Playford Glover and Ken Carter and Randy Graham and Bradford Metcalf and Chris Scott Gilliam and Gary Matson and Winfield Mowder and Buford Furrow and Benjamin Smith and Donald Rudolph and Kevin Ray Patterson and Charles Dennis Kiles and Donald Beauregard and Troy Diver and Mark Wayne McCool and Leo Felton and Erica Chase and Clayton Lee Wagner and Michael Edward Smith and David Burgert and Robert Barefoot Jr. and Sean Gillespie and Ivan Duane Braden and Kevin Harpham and William Krar and Judith Bruey and Edward Feltus and Raymond Kirk Dillard and Adam Lynn Cunningham and Bonnell Hughes and Randall Garrett Cole and James Ray McElroy and Michael Gorbey and Daniel Cowart and Paul Schlesselman and Frederick Thomas and Paul Ross Evans and Matt Goldsby and Jimmy Simmons and Kathy Simmons and Kaye Wiggins and Patricia Hughes and Jeremy Dunahoe and David McMenemy and Bobby Joe Rogers and Francis Grady and Cody Seth Crawford and Ralph Lang and Demetrius Van Crocker and Floyd Raymond Looker and Derek Mathew Shrout and Randolph Linn.

Ya know, just to name a few.

And white privilege is being able to know nothing about the crimes committed by most of the terrorists listed above — indeed, never to have so much as heard most of their names — let alone to make assumptions about the role that their racial or ethnic identity may have played in their crimes.

White privilege is knowing that if the Boston bomber turns out to be white, we  will not be asked to denounce him or her, so as to prove our own loyalties to the common national good. It is knowing that the next time a cop sees one of us standing on the sidewalk cheering on runners in a marathon, that cop will say exactly nothing to us as a result.

White privilege is knowing that if you are a white student from Nebraska — as opposed to, say, a student from Saudi Arabia — that no one, and I mean no one would think it important to detain and question you in the wake of a bombing such as the one at the Boston Marathon.

And white privilege is knowing that if this bomber turns out to be white, the United States government will not bomb whatever corn field or mountain town or stale suburb from which said bomber came, just to ensure that others like him or her don’t get any ideas. And if he turns out to be a member of the Irish Republican Army we won’t bomb Belfast. And if he’s an Italian American Catholic we won’t bomb the Vatican.

In short, white privilege is the thing that allows you (if you’re white) — and me — to view tragic events like this as merely horrific, and from the perspective of pure and innocent victims, rather than having to wonder, and to look over one’s shoulder, and to ask even if only in hushed tones, whether those we pass on the street might think that somehow we were involved.

It is the source of our unearned innocence and the cause of others’ unjustified oppression.

That is all. And it matters.

March 14, 2013

Tim Wise is one of the most prominent anti-racist writers and educators in the United States. He is the author of six books including Dear White America: Letter to a New Minority and his highly acclaimed memoir, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son. His forthcoming book is Culture of Cruelty: How America’s Elite Demonize the Poor, Valorize the Rich and Jeopardize the Future (City Lights Publishers). Wise sat down with War Times to talk about the book’s focus that builds on his fierce critique of racial privilege to discuss a related issue: class disparity and a culture of cruelty that demonizes those in need.

Felicia Gustin: Tim, much of your work has focused on racism and white privilege though you’ve often looked at how these intersect with class inequities. Talk about how the idea for this book came about.

Tim Wise: In some ways, I think I’ve been moving towards this in the last three books I’ve done for City Lights (Dear White America, Colorblind and Between Barack and a Hard Place) that included a fairly heavy element of class analysis. The argument that I’ve been making is that in many ways the problem now confronting white America is the indifference that white America has had toward economic injustice because it was perceived that the only people getting hit by that were people of color. So there was a certain ambivalence and that is now starting to catch up with white people with the financial crisis and the housing meltdown.

Seventy years later we’ve come to a place where those very same people – including ironically, unemployed white men – are now being looked as dysfunctional, pathological, having the wrong values, being ‘takers’ not ‘makers.’ So I wanted to look at why. Not only that it happened but why it happened.

FG: And what did you see as the reasons this shift has taken place?

TW: I’ve identified three things. One is the racialization of poverty, that is, once we came to view poverty and need as Black and Latino, the less concern that white America had. There’s study after study that demonstrate that the more we view those needing social programs as people of color, the more whites have hostility for them. Lots of scholars have written about this.

So I think when you take these factors – race, gender and popular culture – and mix them together, you have this perfect recipe for this culture of cruelty, this indifference to suffering that in the long run –as I talk about in the book – is going to vitiate what little safety nets we have left and really jeopardize the economic health of the nation in the next 20 years.

FG: We’ve seen, especially in the last two elections, white people go against their own self interests, who are so hysterical that there is a Black man in the White House, particularly poor and working class white people who have actually sided with those class interests, opposing tax cuts for the rich, opposing health care for themselves, and ultimately believing that one day they too might be rich.

TW: Part of that is an old tradition, particularly among white struggling people, that’s been going on for 400 years going back to the colonies; an attempt to convince them that their real interests were with other whites even if they were rich whites, rather than with their Black and Brown brothers and sisters. And it’s worked with every generation to different degrees.

There’s a study that was done a few years back in ’08, that when white voters were shown the 10 basic key points of Obama’s healthcare plan and told it was Bill Clinton’s plan, 2 to 1 supported it. When they were told it was Obama’s, there was 2 to 1 opposition. So what is that? Same plan. But when they hear it’s Obama’s plan they either assume it really must not be about helping “us” or even a crazier thing which is, “I’d rather not be helped at all then have a Black man help me.” It just goes to show that that notion of confusing one’s interests can really be part of this racial conversation that we’ve been having for hundreds of years and haven’t resolved.

FG: With the emergence of Occupy movement, there were some powerful shifts that popularized the notion of a 99% and a 1%. Granted there were issues within that movement in terms of racism, but that frame became pretty widespread in the national dialogue and in popular culture. What are you thoughts on this?

TW: I think that the thing that Occupy accomplished for those of us who talk about inequality is that it put that on the map of our political consciousness as a society in a way that had not been done in awhile. Yes, there had always been some of us who talked about those inequities, but for the most part those were third rail politics. You didn’t talk about inequality, you talked about opportunity, you talked about how we need to have better jobs and better income, better schools but you didn’t by and large frame it in the mainstream imagination as not just a matter of some people having too little but also some people having too much. And that was new for a national political conversation.

Interestingly, Occupy forced the conversation about who’s on top and who’s on the bottom and that forced the Republicans to out themselves as the party of the top and how we’ve got to stop those people who are coming to take what we’ve earned. So in a way, Occupy influenced the outcome of the election indirectly. That certainly wasn’t their goal and President Obama may not be a progressive on economic issues, but it is the first step in saying this is a conversation we need to have. I hope that with my new book and works by others who are trying to deepen this discussion that Occupy started that we figure out how to take what was this very germ of an idea that was brought to the American public and turn it into a longer, more steady and fulfilling narrative.

FG: What is it going to take to shift things to an understanding of class solidarity?

TW: We’re going to have to invert the blame and get back to understanding who the people are with the truly bad values. It’s not the people who are poor. So we not only have to defend the poor and working class from those attacks by explaining the myths that are held about them and exposing them for the lies they are. But we also need to be aggressive in saying that the people whose values we need to worry about and whose behaviors are sociopathic and even psychopathic are the ultra rich, the super elite. They’re the ones with the bad values and here’s the evidence, the studies, the research that prove this. It’s about flipping the script on the demonization of poor people and holding the mirror up to those people who are the problem: the rich and the elite.

FG: How do you do that when the rich and elite own the media, Congress, prisons, the criminal justice system, etc.?

TW: They owned all those things 100 years ago too but there was still a counter narrative that existed among working people at the time. Working people didn’t have social media that they could try and counter it with. They didn’t have their own newspapers, radio and TV shows. They may have had little tabloids. The rich have always controlled politics and the media. If anything right now, despite the concentration of media power, there’s also a contravening trend which is that communities around the country – and granted there’s an economic division to this and a racial division to this and a cultural and language division – but there is more opportunity today I would say, for working class folks to counter those messages in ways that especially young people are hearing.

So the good news is that we have a whole generation now who are seeking out alternative forms of information. So if we’re thinking as organizers, we can stay one step ahead of those forces who are trying to limit and manipulate information, and counter it through music and through art and through alternative media and various sources of social media exchange on the internet. We can move the conversation in a positive direction and show that it is the culture of affluence and power that is to blame for America’s economic and social crises.

With that in mind, and before proceeding with a deeper and hopefully more constructive commentary about male violence and misogyny, perhaps it would do me well to release my first, instinctual thoughts about the guilty verdicts recently secured against two members of the Steubenville (OH) High School football team, who raped a young woman last year after a night of heavy drinking. Not because these are thoughts about which I am proud, or even the least bit satisfied — as we’ll see below — but because they are necessary perhaps, or at least pure, and human, and suggestive that beyond political and philosophical posturing, even we who make our living with rational argument are yet capable of feeling, and anger, when called for.

And so here they are.

First, good.

Go directly to jail.

Do not pass go.

Do not pick up your trophies or your letterman jackets. You will neither need nor be allowed them where you’re going.

No more pep rallies.

No more adulation from the cheerleaders or the jock-besotted fans of your community, so many of whose members still apparently believe that high school football is actually important.

Your loss to the juvenile justice system, in which you will now be firmly ensconced for so long as it takes to reach your 21st birthdays will be no loss whatsoever to the rest of us. Honestly, and despite all the crocodile tears shed on CNN, amid lamentations that your futures looked so bright, I have to wonder, did they really? I mean really? Somehow, I rather doubt it. In all likelihood, neither of you were headed for anything much greater than a barstool, right there in Steubenville, where you would eventually have managed to attain middle age, all the while (and every Saturday) regaling your fellow losers with stories about that time you threw the winning touchdown, or caught the same in the face of two defenders, thereby securing the state championship for your little band of brothers. For people like yourselves, high school more often than not proves to be the pinnacle of your lives, from which lofty perch everything else is almost ineluctably downhill.

But now, you won’t even get to play in that last game, or be hoisted upon the shoulders of your teammates and carried off the field to the screams of the Friday Night crowd-gasms upon which you had staked your entire pathetic existence.

And once again, good. Double good in fact. You digitally violated (or as you and your boys likely prefer to exclaim amid appropriately bro-worthy high fives, finger-banged) a young woman who you knew full well, given her inebriation, was incapable of consenting to any form of sex act. That is rape, first by law, and then, according to any decently calibrated notion of morality, the latter of which concept I realize remains horribly perplexing to you. And if you didn’t know that such behavior constituted a crime before that night, well that’s too bad. You sure as shit do now. And if, as I suspect, your parents weren’t competent enough or informed enough or concerned enough to share such minor details with you before your hormones and general disregard for women kicked in, lubricated as they were by all that alcohol, well too bad for them too. You wouldn’t be the first kids with crappy parents, and I am quite certain you won’t be the last.

But in addition to your ethical depravity, your stupidity in texting about your crime, and having people take pictures, and more or less bragging about getting hand jobs from a drunk girl, all suggest that you really are the kind of people who deserve more than most to be locked up. And if there were cells nearby sufficient to hold those among your fetid classmates, who thought those pictures and your texts were funny — like former Steubenville student, Michael Nodianos whose video joking about the rape went viral, or like the ones who have been publicly threatening the victim on Twitter (because they have no real employment or college futures, the likes of which they would need to worry about jeopardizing with public displays of dumbshittery) — then I’d gladly secure them away with you. The world, and surely the mostly good people of Steubenville, would fare better without any of you around.

Those are my first thoughts, and understandably so, not only as the father of daughters, but as a person who thinks of rape and sexual assault as the most thoroughly evil of violations, and will offer no forbearance to the rationalizations — whether by media mouthpieces, politicians, priests, or frat boys who have too much to drink at their kegger — that continually and in every generation seem to surface whenever an event such as this happens, yet again.

But that — and now that I’ve gotten it off my chest, I can acknowledge it — is the easy part. It’s way too easy in fact, and wholly unsatisfying, for just as with any rage directed at a criminal perpetrator, it falls short of actually doing anything to change the culture in which criminal violence so often transpires. In the instant case, our anger — whether mine or yours — will do nothing to move by even a millimeter, the society in which those young men and the woman they violated were raised. Which is to say, that anger cannot and will not make my own daughters one bit safer. And if something like this were ever to happen to either of them, God forbid, they wouldn’t likely take much solace in the fact that their dad was on record, officially, as standing foursquare against rapists, so utterly un-brave is such a stance. So let us dig deeper now.

For the real problems, the real issues, are far harder to excavate than simply this. They go well beyond the matter of “no means no,” and standards of consent, and legal boundaries; well beyond images of lecherous men and their victims; well beyond questions of self-defense, and athletic hero-worship, to questions regarding the broader culture we share, well beyond the confines of this one Ohio town.

At the heart of our national dialogue on rape — to the extent we can even be said to have one, in the true sense of what dialogue implies — stands a persistent and rather transparent contempt for women, indeed a hatred so complete as to call into question just how many of us actually accept the idea that women are full human beings at all.

When those who seek, again and again, to minimize the crime of rape, can — and they do — come up with the same rationalizations, the same deflections, the same blame-shifting bullshit, over and over, you know you’re dealing with more than merely an individual pathology; rather, it is at that point that one must confront the possibility, indeed likelihood, that the sickness is cultural; that perhaps one is staring at the rank detritus of a society that inculcates as a matter of course — as part of its normal operating procedures — misogyny. That you are living in a rape culture, plain and simple.*

For how else can we understand, except as a thoroughly entrenched remnant of woman-hating, the persistent cries of so many that those who are sexually violated by men are somehow responsible for those violations? That either their clothes, or how many drinks they had, or their penchant for flirting somehow can make acceptable whatever a man might wish to do to them for the sake of his own gratification? After all, we don’t apply this same solipsistic illogic to other situations in which, one supposes, it might be available to us. So, for instance, we wouldn’t say that the wealthy arts patron who exits the symphony only to be mugged at gunpoint and relieved of her jewelry was somehow asking for it by virtue of having donned such shiny objects, or merely for having partaken in such bourgeois entertainment pleasantries. We wouldn’t, I hope, decide that a carjacker might in some sense be blameless for his crimes, at least so long as he plied his trade only against persons driving really nice, expensive cars, the fanciness of which naturally rendered said carjacker incapable of controlling his urges to punch the drivers in the face, throw them from their vehicles, and speed away.

No, victim blaming is something we reserve, when it comes to acts of violence, almost exclusively for women who are sexually assaulted. Or perhaps also LGBT folks, attacked for their sexuality, but then too by men whose masculinity is so insecure — another symptom of and contributor to misogyny — as to be enraged by the sight of two men together, or two women needing only each other, or a trans man or woman whose sexuality the misogynist and straight/cis supremacist finds too confusing to fit within the bigoted confines of their own desiccated brains. Even then, there is a hatred of women — or in the case of gay men a hatred of men perceived as less than men, which is to say, as women — operating here.

In short, the problem with rape and sexual violence is not women or the behaviors of women. The problem is men, and the broken notions of masculinity that define our culture, and have been (for too long) allowed to predominate throughout the modern world.

This is not to say, and please make a note of it, that women should simply and without thinking not concern themselves with their personal behaviors when around men. No doubt it would be best if all women were extraordinarily cautious as to the ways in which they interact with men, especially when alcohol is present. I am quite confident that my wife and I will have these conversations with our girls, and that they will be very well versed as to that part of sexuality over which they have some control; namely, their own presentation. But what they will also surely understand is this: regardless of what outfit they wear for the night, regardless of whether they make eyes at some boy, giggle a bit too long at a joke that really wasn’t funny, or even agree to make out, that none of those are invitations to sex.

And if the parents of boys out there are not making that clear to their children, well that is on them. It is not going to be my daughter’s — or anyone’s daughter’s — fault, when the boys they failed, the boys they raised to be stunted men, turn their damage upon a woman just because they think they can.

But now here’s the irony: To not understand this — and it is painfully obvious that millions don’t understand it in the least — is to not only denigrate the agency of women, it is to actually operate from the implicit assumption that men have no human agency at all. Which is to say, it is an attitude that is not only misogynistic but oddly enough, evidence of misandry as well. In short, to suggest, as rape culture and its enablers do, that men just can’t help ourselves in the presence of a woman showing cleavage (or any woman, no matter how she’s dressed or how old she is, since rape has little to do with merely trying to get laid and everything to do with domination and subordination), is to render men little more than involuntarily manipulable vertebrates, utterly devoid of the ability to make moral decisions. That such a verdict, were it true of such a powerful and dangerous group as this, would justify quarantining the lot of us until individually we managed to demonstrate that we had broken with our lower-order brothers, should be apparent. That rape culture not only violates women by definition, but by holding men to such a low standard of expectation, violates us as well, may be less obvious, but is no less true.

It is no different than the way male sexist behavior always denigrates the practitioner, even as its target remains located elsewhere. When men exchange chauvinistic pleasantries with their buddies (or for that matter perfect strangers with whom they feel oddly and almost uniformly comfortable engaging in such banter), they are, in effect, presuming that all men are assholes of a similar size and shape as themselves. They are suggesting with their words, or jokes, or catcalls or whatever, that when it comes to guys, “we’re all pigs here, right fellas?” That so many men — and probably all of us at least occasionally — have ratified this intrinsically offensive and even self-hating notion at some point (or many points) in our lives is tragic, but no less true for the designation. Much as white folks so often remain silent in the face of racist humor, even when it troubles us to the core of our beings, so too have men decided in far too many cases to go along to get along, and in the process we demean not only our mothers, our wives, our girlfriends, our sisters and our daughters. We diminish ourselves as well.

And it needs to stop.

But it won’t stop, and we won’t abolish once and for all the mentality of human disposability that animates misogyny (and all hatreds) by way of our criminal justice system, at least not alone. Though one can perhaps envision such a system capable of restoring violent offenders to a better and more contributory place, let us acknowledge that this is not the system we have at present. Ours, rather, is one predicated on punishment as an end in itself, on retribution, on the infliction of pain. Not because pain or retribution have any positive correlation with reducing future violence — if anything they enhance the likelihood of repeat offending, since most of those to whom we direct our retributive instincts will one day walk free, angrier and even less whole than they were on their first day of incarceration — but because it makes us feel better. Because it allows us to preen about as moral superiors, to remind ourselves of how good we are, precisely because we can point to others and affix to them the permanent mark of “bad.”

Yet, if we remain satisfied with this, remain sanguine about a system that gives little thought to what comes next, no one is safe. Not me, not you, not any woman from the predations of a rapist. No one. And in the case of Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond, the fact is (and this is true no matter how one may feel about it), these two young men will be released in just a few years, tops, into a world that will not have changed much since the time of their trial. It will be the same culture, with the same proximate views of women, all of which they will once again be free to imbibe unless the rest of us demand something more from them. Something that is predicated not on punishment and pain, but on restoration, redemption and accountability. For just as certain as I was above about the likelihood that these two men were headed nowhere fast prior to their crimes, I am equally confident that if we demand it, and make room for it, they might now — and precisely because of their crime and the punishment they will be expected to serve — come out the other end capable of taking the kinds of actions, in line with restorative justice, that will not only allow them to change, but will go further than any other possible punishment in terms of healing the community from which they came, and importantly, the victim and her family.

Restorative justice is the only hope we have as a society. It need not foreclose the possibility of incapacitation and incarceration, but it has to be considered superior to those options, or else we are to be forever trapped in a cycle of action and reaction, crime and punishment, and crime again. To simply dispose of them, as many would like to do — and as I too initially countenanced without much compunction — would only ratify the mentality of human disposability that animated, at least in part, their crimes to begin with.

And so we need to expect more from them than to simply go away, to be disappeared into a justice system, juvenile or otherwise, from behind which edifice we may merely put them out of sight, out of mind. We must demand of them that they, beginning now, step up and become peacemakers by challenging other men like themselves, be they jocks or not, about rape and their own fractured understanding of the humanity of women and men alike. They should be expected to spend time not only being counseled on these matters, but then counseling others, to serve as living examples of both the terror of sexual violence, but also the possibility of human redemption. They should be expected, right now, to tell their peers in Steubenville to cease with their blaming of the victim in this case. To apologize in court is not enough. Now they must take the lead in demanding a change of thinking in the culture that nurtured them, or rather, perhaps, failed to. None of this will erase the damage they have done. None of it is intended to make it okay. But unless we expect this, and more, from them, nothing will change.

Additionally, there is more we should expect, and in keeping with the notion of restoration, should demand. As diarist/blogger UnaSpenser noted on dailyKos, among other things:

The parents of the boys could meet with the parents of the girl and ask them how they can support them. They could meet in private and discuss ways in which the families could support each other, but particularly what can be done to help the girl heal, gain emotional strength and a sense of safety in the world.

The coaches of Steubenville — all of them — could be required to get training about how to guide students regarding a culture of consent. Since what appears to be so important to everyone in Steubenville was that these boys were football players, it seems that the sports teams are accorded a higher status in Steubenville than other citizens…So, the first place to instill a culture of consent is at the top…The coaches need to be trained and need to adopt a culture of consent. It needs to be a part of their required coaching curriculum to instill this culture in their athletes.

The town could inject a “culture of consent” curriculum into their entire school system. From teaching toddlers not to hit people, to teaching elementary children not to mock each other or take lunch money, to teaching middle- and high-schoolers that sex without consent is assault.

The town could offer parenting courses on how to model a culture of consent at home and teach the principles of consent to their children. Parents of Steubenville could start a foundation to support rape victims and restorative justice. Victims could receive counseling, college scholarships, or whatever they find that they need. Those who have committed rapes could receive counseling, be given community service to perform and be guided through a process of apologizing and offering restitution to their victims.

The bottom line is this: women will never be safe, so long as we continue to treat them as the inevitable victims of men who not only cannot control their sexual urges and desires for domination, but who also cannot change or be changed, and so must simply be locked away and perhaps brutalized themselves. That isn’t to say that no one should ever be incarcerated. I am certain there are some for whom separation from society, and for very long periods of time, may be the only way to protect the rest of us from their predatory behaviors. But I am just as sure that such a system — for it is the one we live with now, as incarceration continues to spiral out of control and as we continue to lock up more people than any nation on Earth — is not, on the whole, working. And so we have to think bigger.

Revenge, though it is an absolutely normal human instinct — and though the desire for it has its place I suppose — is unsustainable as a motivator for human thought and action. It is a recipe for constant violence and endangerment. So while the victims of violent crime have every right and reason to desire it — I get it, I really do — the state, and we the people as represented by it, must at long last demand something more. Because when we allow the state to operate on the basis of the same enraged human emotions as victims at their darkest and most pained moments, we set in place the instrumentality of torture, of cruelty, of war without ceasing, of mass death and destruction.

Revenge has no place as a motivator for public policy. And this is especially true when it comes to correcting and altering the actions of misogynists, racists and other haters of all stripes. After all, many a misogynist himself operates from a place where he believes he is somehow avenging a slight at the hands of a woman, perhaps his mother, perhaps a lover who spurned him, or whomever. That his anger, his understanding of his real injury, and his vengeance are all psychotically misplaced is, of course, self-evident. But that anger and vengeance almost always are misplaced, even if not psychotic, remains less so to most of us.

Let us learn it, and fast, before it swallows us whole.
________

*Note, when I call this culture a rape culture, I do not intend to suggest that it is uniquely so, or even more so than others, in other nations around the world. Sadly, misogyny and rape are global problems, and rape culture is all too ubiquitous. But the fact that there are other rape cultures as well, neither should allow us to accept such a thing as normal and natural — and thus incapable of change — nor encourage us to duck our responsibility for challenging ours, here in the U.S. The fact that others are guilty of the same horrors as we, should provide no solace here.

Working on it now, and should have it out sometime in Fall…

BOOK DESCRIPTION:

Tim Wise is one of the country’s most prolific public intellectuals. His critically acclaimed books, high-profile media interviews and year-round speaking schedule have established him as a leading voice for racial equity. In Culture of Cruelty, Wise aims his incisive commentary at a new Goliath: class disparity and a growing culture of cruelty that demonizes those in need.

As Wise demonstrates, there was a time when the hardship of fellow Americans stirred feelings of sympathy and prompted support for public policies to alleviate private pain. But today, mainstream discourse increasingly blames low-income folks for their own situation, and the notion of an intractable “culture of poverty” has pushed our country in an especially ugly direction. Wise shows how the economic elite have commandeered the discussion about class, moving the nation from compassion to scorn for the marginalized. With clarity and precision, Wise not only documents growing contempt for the nation’s have-nots, but also explores the reasons for it. In doing so, he convincingly demonstrates how classism, racism and sexism are inextricably linked, and how popular culture has also inadvertently contributed to a deepening indifference towards the plight of the poor. Finally, Wise shows that far from a culture of poverty, it is the culture of affluence and power that deserves the blame for America’s economic and social crises.