Transcript for:
Tim Wise on Race and Racism in America

[Music] when it comes to race we've overcome quite a lot in this country slavery civil war [Music] segregation we've even elected a black man to the highest office in the land change has come to america but as tempting as it might be to celebrate these things as signs that we've entered into a period of colorblind post-racial harmony we have to admit that we're moving forward in this world and that race issues are moving to the periphery i think those problems are largely behind us the fact is racial inequalities still exist today there are more african americans in prisoner jail on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850 a decade before the civil war began and racial bias still affects the way we view others uh i want you to check out this protester see the sign he's waving there it's the president made to look like an african witch doctor and when we fail to recognize that we not only continue to do an injustice to people of color we end up doing damage to white folks as well [Music] i'm tim wise an anti-racist educator and author i grew up in the south in nashville tennessee and at a very early age i figured out that race mattered my parents were educated in a completely segregated environment and wanting me to have a different experience than they had had they decided to send me to a preschool program at tennessee state university a historically black college in a class of about 20 kids i was one of only three students who weren't black the teachers the staff the administrators there were also mostly american and this meant that from a very young age i learned to respect black authority figures in a way that many of my white peers probably wouldn't have and this seemingly minor detail made a huge difference in how i came to see the world it meant that most of my early friends were black as a result once we started elementary school and i began to notice how those black friends were treated differently by the teachers it affected me and even though i didn't really have a word for what was happening then that racial division is something i remembered even years later for college i attended tulane university in new orleans it was the late 80s and i got heavily involved on my campus along with other students trying to encourage tulane to stop investing in companies that did business with the racist government of apartheid south africa these university students want their school to get rid of its investments in stocks of companies that do business in south africa to divest it's become a rallying cry on campuses all across the country we spoke out we set up shanty towns on the college quad and in front of the administration building in solidarity with the anti-apartheid movement but even then as i was becoming radicalized to struggles for equality and justice i was largely blind to the privileges i was receiving in my own town the situation lately has become more complicated in the wake of the killing of a policeman and the death of his accused killer around this same time just across town in new orleans a black man named adolf archie was beaten to death in police custody the minute it was discovered that adolf archie had died everybody knew that the police had beat him to death i remember reading about adolf archie's murder in the paper and i remember thinking how terrible it was but i made no connection to what i was doing and the experiences i was having at tulane but that all changed a few weeks later i was speaking one evening at an anti-apartheid event and a young black female student from a neighboring college xavier university asked me in the four years that i'd been in new orleans what had i done to address racism and apartheid in that city especially seeing as how i benefited from it the feeling that came over me was like the way you feel when you see the flashing blue lights in the rear view mirror and you know you're busted because the truth is i hadn't done much of anything i had the privilege of choosing to address racism 8 000 miles away while doing nothing in the face of de facto apartheid conditions that existed right there in my own backyard it was a powerful moment and it made me begin to reflect on my privileges more broadly especially my privileges as a white person from the state of louisiana in 1990 shortly after i graduated from tulane david duke lifelong nazi former clan leader the most prominent white supremacist in the united states was running for the united states senate in louisiana you sell things you pass out things called [ __ ] hunting license a [ __ ] huh we do not i do not pass out you do not but your lieutenants do maybe you do says having paid the license fee is hereby watching the hunt and kill [ __ ] and caps during the open season in texas this is beautiful david i mean you know for a guy who does it's also i mean it's a joke but it is a joke yes it is satire when i interviewed dukes earlier this evening he insisted that the campaign was not about his past but about taxes crime and welfare reform nonetheless he did acknowledge that race is an issue about what she has strong feelings there's racism going on in this country against white people it's called affirmative action i was involved in the campaigns against him ultimately working as the associate director of the louisiana coalition against racism and nazism appreciate it appreciate it his message appeals to many frustrated white voters who believe the civil rights movement has gone too far in the end duke lost the election the nazi was defeated but he received a stunning 60 of the white vote the next year he ran for governor and he lost again but he still received a majority of that white vote and i remember sitting there a couple of weeks after the governor's race realizing there was something truly frightening about the fact that six out of ten people who write the same thing on their census form that i do that they're white were willing to vote for a nazi i mean i knew they weren't nazis but now i also understood they were willing to vote for a guy who was you've got a lot of good ideas that we've been saying for a long time it's time somebody to do it what it told me was that as a white person i had very specific work that i had to do around these issues because these were my people supporting this guy and really for me it was a moment when i decided to try and use what i'd learned to change that mentality in my own community joining us now is tim wise an educator anti-racist advocate and the author of white like me reflections on race from a privileged son for more than 20 years now i've been trying to better understand for myself and to raise awareness among others about the centrality of race and racism to the history of this country and how dangerous and damaging it is when white people like me are blind to racial inequality and our own privileges when you talk about white folk you say white folk white america there are always some white folks in the room that think he hates white people i get that a lot here you hate white people let me just i want to clear this up cause i i don't want to be misunderstood i love me some white people [Applause] my wife is white [Applause] i love her those two little girls are white which sometimes happens when you're both white i love them when i was in high school we read john howard griffin's classic book black like me [Music] in the book and in the movie version a couple of years later griffin a white man tells the story of how he darkened his skin with dye medicine and intense uv rays in order to experience what it was like for african americans in the pre-civil rights south of the 1950s what's the big idea i want to find out what it's like to be a negro in the south you can over the course of six weeks griffin recounts how he was harassed followed and threatened by racist whites you better find yourself another place to set and in the end he says that his assumption blacks were treated like second-class citizens turned out to be wrong it was closer to 10th class you know what we do to troublemakers here nope kill a [ __ ] and toss him one of these swamps nobody ever know anything about it the book became a bestseller and a sensation and it had a profound impact on me and countless other high schoolers but when i revisited the book as an adult something stood out that i hadn't thought about as a kid toward the very beginning of the book griffin asks how else except by becoming a negro could a white man hope to learn the truth ultimately concluding that the best way to find out if we had second class citizens and what their plight was would be to become one of them white southerner has to know what it's like to be a negro really know and you know what it's like after 10 weeks or three months or whatever it is you know i don't know and i can never know rereading this i realized the entire premise was off griffin was attempting to understand racism by momentarily occupying blackness he became a person of color and while there's no question there's real value in whites trying to understand and ultimately empathize with the experience of african americans it struck me that we rarely if ever turn this line of thinking around in other words instead of asking what it's like to be black what if we just asked what it's like to be white i don't really know how what it means really to be white or what it's supposed to mean i guess i never really thought about it but it was always kind of a negative thing when i ask students what it means to be white what i hear from them is a lot of confusion the question what does it mean to be white um it's i it baffles my mind i don't know what it means whiteness isn't something we think much about and in some ways that makes perfect sense in terms of white culture it's very general and very vague i think like sitting down and having dinner with my family but all cultures do that because when you're part of a dominant group you're not forced to spend a lot of time thinking about how you fit in or about how your privileges as a member of the dominant group might affect others who don't belong to it in order to express ourselves we don't have to fit into black culture hispanic culture asian-american culture we can just kind of do what we want and i'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing it's just this doesn't mean that all white people have it easy or that there aren't differences between the struggles of poor and working-class white kids who have to work for everything and rich white kids who have things handed to them of course those differences are real [Music] but none of that changes the fact that throughout the history of this country being white has been far easier than not being white oh god i love being white i really do seriously if you're not white you're missing out because this is thoroughly good it and but let me be clear by the way i'm not saying that white people are better i'm saying that being white is clearly better who could even argue if it was an option i would re-up every year oh yeah i'll take away it again absolutely i've been enjoying that i'm gonna stick with white thank you and let's face it there's no denying that white people in the u.s have had privileges throughout history that people of color simply haven't consider the very first law passed by congress after ratifying the constitution the naturalization act of 1790 which said that free white persons and only free white persons could become full citizens of this country basically our very first law as a constitutional republic gave white immigrants privileges that black people and immigrants of color and indigenous native north americans weren't given all of it based purely on skin color and whether we want to acknowledge it or not this kind of systematic white privilege and race-based favoritism is built into the very foundations of the country [Music] in 1935 franklin d roosevelt put his signature on the social security act look at all the social programs that pulled the us out of the great depression and helped create the middle class in this country programs like job insurance which provided cash to people to give them a leg up as they look for work to show how job insurance works let's introduce steve a louisiana worker who has just lost his job he goes first to the nearest state employment office to register for a new job steve needn't hesitate about going in because this office was set up just to help people like him but while steve in louisiana could apply for job insurance not everyone else could of course he cannot collect if he belongs to any of the groups of workers that the law does not ensure these are agricultural workers domestic service in private homes agricultural workers and domestic service workers didn't qualify for assistance and it turns out this had everything to do with raise these two jobs were overwhelmingly held by black people and over 80 percent of all blacks worked in those professions so the only way fdr could get southern democrats to support the social security act was if he agreed to exclude those workers from benefits this was a conscious attempt by some in congress to exclude as many blacks as possible and the net effect of it was to give preferential treatment to whites [Music] thousands of people get a big thrill out of looking at model houses and a much bigger thrill when they buy one it was the same story with crucial housing assistance for the american middle class loans provided by the fha the federal housing administration families for really the first time in american history to own their own homes homeownership is the basis of a happy contended family life and now through the use of a national housing act insured mortgage is brought within the reach of all citizens but the way the bill was written the american dream of home ownership wasn't within the reach of everyone for the first 30 years of the program about 98 of the recipients were white people of color were almost completely barred then there was the gi bill which provided immense benefits to returning veterans including low-cost mortgages loans to start a business cash payments for tuition and living expenses what the gi bill didn't do is protect black veterans who qualified for that assistance also from the kinds of legal discrimination rampant in pre-civil rights america the result was that the vast majority of those who benefited from the gi bill were white veterans if a program like the gi bill ended up disproportionately benefiting people of color you know what we'd call that we'd call it welfare we call it a reward a handout a gravy drain the gi bill of rights is not a reward or a handout or a gravy train but that's not the way it was described but rather an american way to make it easier for each man to take his place once again in the community and get some of those things for which he went to war i'm not trying to say programs like these are bad there's no question they've been instrumental in creating and expanding opportunities for millions of people the point is that we're being dishonest if we fail to explicitly acknowledge how they almost exclusively benefited white people who is covered by the social security act people like these it needs to be understood that for hundreds of years government assistance programs pumped literally hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars worth of wealth into the hands of white families before people of color even got to the starting gate this is what we're talking about when we talk about white privilege the structural advantages built into our very system that have helped white people often without us knowing it while making things more difficult for people of color for me being white means that i'm treated as the default in a lot of cases some of those privileges would be material better job opportunities better housing access better educational opportunities but some of them are psychological just the realization that i'm not gonna be racially profiled uh when i'm driving around town or when i'm shopping in the mall and i'm not gonna be followed by store security because they think i might shoplift before i got to college and stuff i i don't know i was more of like a punk and what have you so there were times where uh i would be like shoplifting and my race occurred to me then because i was like man i feel like if i was any other race or ethnicity i would be being watched by like security so i felt very you know un uh like nothing would happen so i didn't really mind doing it because i didn't get caught ever i read a paper uh where somebody was listing an experience where it was a group of females talking about you know what it's like to be a woman and there was a white woman talking to a black woman saying you know what we have similar experiences because we're both women and the black woman looks at her and says no we don't and she goes well yeah but we're both women and the black woman says no because when you look in the mirror you're a woman when i look in the mirror i'm a black woman so it's that thing that you have to um it's that thing that you don't notice for myself from the very beginning i was seen as a bright and capable child and i was trapped into the higher level classes if i didn't do well i never had to worry that it would be ascribed to my race that someone might say well of course he didn't do really very well on the s.a.t because you know he is white and this isn't just an anecdotal one-off story the fact is there are 20 to 25 years of research studies which have found that students of color all around the country are worried about confirming negative stereotypes in the classroom any fear that somehow they might live down to a negative group stigma directly affects their performance on tests that's something that i as a white student didn't have to worry about and so we live with the legacy of inequality that began so long ago but also the legacy of obliviousness that allows those of us in the dominant group to rarely even think about these matters and even with all the changes and the progress we have seen that is something that hasn't changed take another break in our coverage here as we look at some of the pictures of the gathering crowd in grant park chicago illinois this crowd as you said brian they're expecting as many as 500 000 people to come out here barack obama seems on the verge of the presidency who could have imagined it on november 4th 2008 at a little after 10 p.m eastern standard time television networks began announcing the big news and cnn can now project that barack obama 47 years old will become the president-elect of the united states almost immediately discussion turned to the historical nature of the moment and with good reason for a country with such a dark history of slavery disenfranchisement and segregation to elect a black man to the highest office in the land well it made for an emotional night this is a wonderful day wow it's serena macon first african-american president in the united states is this beautiful it's very very beautiful i know what my grandparents and great-grandparents uh really witnessed and really went through so it means a lot african-american men and women talked proudly about how far the country had come from just a few decades before when merely registering to vote could be a matter of life and death a church with a pastor's own distant cousin was shot and killed for simply trying to vote in 1930. it sends chills up my spine white americans too talked about the country moving forward to a better and more tolerant place i think it demonstrates the best of america they had a son born eight weeks ago and i think he's in a better world now reverend jackson thank you very much legendary civil rights leaders like the reverend jesse jackson who served as an aide to martin luther king jr and was with him the night he was shot wept openly as he watched obama's victory speech on election night well i must tell you this is unreal it's unbelievable and there was a similar sense of accomplishment from congressman john lewis who put his life on the line during the freedom rides in the 1960s to help end segregation in the south and to this day bears scars on his head from being mercilessly beaten by angry white moms the struggle the suffering the pain and everything that we tried to do to create a more perfect union it was worth it uh i i just don't know how to express myself tonight i'm overwhelmed it's been a long time coming but tonight because of what we did on this day in this election at this defining moment change has come to america feels like america did the right thing it feels like there's a shift in consciousness it feels like something really big and bold has happened we all grew up in school classrooms with some variation of this graphic 43 people who have occupied the office what do they all have in common all the faces uh in these ovals uh 43 of them are white males that's the barrier that's been broken tonight it was an exciting night and it was easy to get swept up in the moment clearly the election meant something but what exactly did it mean does anyone know what this means in terms of change of of racial relations in the united states or perception of well i'll tell you one thing it means as a former secretary of education you don't take any excuses anymore from anybody who says the uh this deck is stacked i can't do anything there's so much inbuilt this and that did it mean that racism and hatred no longer posed a barrier to people of color and and yes it should have ended this discussion of there is a glass ceiling upon or beyond which uh african-americans cannot go that's nonsense did it mean that racism as we knew it had been dealt a death blow and that a post-racial america had finally arrived we've achieved history tonight and we've moved beyond something that has plagued this country from the very beginning the whole idea of race and racial separation and unfairness of course no one would say that because pakistan elected benazir bhutto as prime minister in 1988 that somehow that meant there was no more sexism in pakistan but that was exactly the kind of logic we got from a lot of people on election night here in america regarding race we have to admit that we're moving forward in this world in this country and that race issues while not gone are moving to the periphery these are the kind of issues that race scholar imani perry has been studying for years one of the things that happened with the election of president obama is that he began to operate in the minds of some as an example that there were no longer barriers to racial discrimination in the american society and those who tell us that we can't we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people yes we can the argument goes well this person was able to excel this person was able to beat the odds so why in the world can't you but really here's one person amongst 40 million right who has done this extraordinary thing what we need to do to understand whether the society is racially just is to look at what's happening amongst the 40 million and why it is that we have a belief in racial equality and yet seem to have such difficulty in moving in the direction toward it we still have a problem with race and i think that until we confront it we address it and we work on it we won't be anywhere near pulse racial and it's really not pulse racial that we're trying to become we're trying to become post-racist of course if you bought into this post-racial thinking you had to ignore quite a few glaring facts first and foremost the actual election results while barack obama won the popular vote by a solid margin few seemed to notice that he lost the white vote in a landslide 57-43 or that in southern states like alabama and mississippi he received only 10 of the white vote now does that mean that every white person who voted against him did so because he was black of course not but there's no question that for some white folks that was exactly [Applause] [Applause] even in northern states like pennsylvania it became clear that we were a long way from achieving the dream of a colorblind uh senator mccain society you're a democrat yeah sure [Applause] let me read some of the things that we've heard at these rallies or people have heard that kill him that was the first little bit of sound someone yelling killed him referring to barack obama in the background then treason has been yelled out terrorists and even someone's heard someone at the rally say off with his head but none of this stopped the conservative pundits from blatantly ignoring this unpleasant reality the days of racism are over we have just achieved an incredible milestone and i take it therefore around the world criticism of the united states for being a racist nation will now stop right they thought everything's fine when it comes to race in america and that it's time to move on to other things we don't have racism in america anymore so just knock it off but in reality the claim that we've gotten past racism and entered a post-racial 1963 when pollsters from gallup went door-to-door and asked white americans if they thought whites and racial minorities were treated equally in matters of housing education and employment 66 of whites said yes in other surveys around the same time gallup found that nearly 90 percent of whites believed that black children had the same opportunities as white kids when it came to education six kids were murdered in birmingham on a sunday and in sunday school in a christian nation and nobody cares now bear in mind this was the height of segregation a time when african americans were forced to sit in the back of buses where they were routinely refused service at restaurants and barred from voting in elections a time when if they dared to protest these things or step out of line they were fire hosed on the streets beaten by police and white vigilantes lynched and often jailed i am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation in other words around the same time that 200 000 people were gathering in washington dc to hear dr king rail against racism and injustice and demand a better future most of us white folks were sitting at home wondering why the blacks were making such a fuss [Music] [Applause] who's listing opinions on the civil rights bill would you like to give us yours i'm sorry but i don't think it's the time right now i think they have equal rights too and i think this is the most ridiculous thing that has ever happened the neighbors are just as free as we are we have the same opportunity it'll work i i just don't understand it and don't approve of it i'm going to stand up tomorrow americans have a long history of wanting to believe that everything's fine when it comes to race in america and that it's time to move on to other things and when we hear claims that we've finally entered a post-racial colorblind society with the election of barack obama we need to remember this history because the fact is racial inequalities still exist and racial bias still affects the way that we view others [Music] [Music] the truth is there are large and seemingly intractable gaps between whites and folks of color when it comes to income wealth and educational attainment even basic health children born to african-american women for instance are more than twice as likely to die within their first year than children born to white women even black women who don't smoke have higher rates of infant mortality for their children than white women who do smoke you see the same trend with life expectancy african american women will die three years before white women on average african-american men five years before white men part of this has to do with access to quality healthcare african americans are twice as likely as whites to be uninsured and when they do receive medical attention studies have shown that they get inferior and unequal care but even more than these factors what the research increasingly finds is that dealing with racism and discrimination on a regular basis has incredibly damaging repercussions for black people's health but maybe the most disturbing example of all of how race-based inequality persist in america is in our criminal justice system today there are more african-americans under correctional control in prisoner jail on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850 a decade before the civil war began michelle alexander's book the new jim crow mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness argues persuasively that america's war on drugs has resulted in a devastating new system of racial control many americans just have no idea the scale of mass incarceration in the united states because it's a phenomenon that does not affect everyone it affects certain groups defined largely by race and class breaking news out of contra costa county a drug bust charged in what officials say is the largest drug bust in baltimore county that's not home but minutes later he unwittingly walks into the dragnet what's your name my the size of our prison system quintupled in a 30-year period of time not due to rising crime rates but rather because we declared a drug war a war on drugs these people are wrecking our society if you're a casual drug user you're an accomplice to murder all of us agree that the gravest domestic threat facing our nation today is drugs and launched a get tough movement that swept millions of poor people overwhelmingly poor folks of color into our prisons and jails primarily for non-violent and drug-related offenses the very sorts of crimes that occur with roughly equal frequency in middle class white communities and on college campuses and go largely ignored you know a white kid living in rural kansas doesn't drive to the hood to get his marijuana or his meth or his ecstasy or a little bit of cocaine he's buying it from someone most likely of his own race down the road drug dealing happens in all communities of all colors but those who do time for drug crime in the united states are overwhelmingly black and brown once they're caught they're swept in to the criminal justice system branded criminals and felons and then ushered into a parallel social universe in which the basic civil and human rights that were supposedly won in the civil rights movement are stripped from them once branded a criminal or felon they're denied the right to vote in many states automatically excluded from juries and legally discriminated against an employment housing access to education and public benefits if you break the law you no longer have a home in public housing so many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind in the old jim crow era are suddenly legal again once you've been branded a felon that's why i say we haven't ended racial cast in america we've just redesigned it it might be difficult to admit but it's certainly not difficult to understand how this kind of racialized justice system ends up benefiting white people we're not only much less likely to be harassed by the police when we're innocent we're also more likely to get away with illegal activity when we're guilty congratulating ourselves on how post-racial and colorblind we are does nothing to change these facts and in many ways makes things worse i think these examples of black success help to blind us to the ways in which systems and structures operate in our society today to lock millions of people out really big and bold has happened you know during the jim crow era examples of black success undermine the logic of the prevailing caste system today you know these black success stories actually reinforce the logic of the prevailing caste system the superficially colorblind logic that it's their fault they're at the bottom and if they only tried harder they could be president obama and that simply isn't the case going for jobs and even applying to universities you'll hear everyone talk about like the quota they have to meet their quota of you know their diverse population in the workplace or in the student body so if there's you know a lot of white females applying for a job and they have a similar resume to one um african-american female she may get that over the white female whether she has as much experience or not just because everywhere i give talks whether it's the deep south northeast midwest or the west coast white folks ask me well what about us why don't you talk about racism against white people the undercurrent in all of this is the sense that efforts to curb discrimination against people of color while admirable in the past have gotten out of control and are somehow now hurting whites and you'll hear this kind of thing all the time people complaining about what they call reverse discrimination this is a case of clear and obvious perverse discrimination complaining about affirmative action what do you what do you think that affirmative action is for affirmative action is to increase diversity by discriminating against white males and that's why i oppose it or they say that since we have scholarships for black students we should have scholarships for white students only as well dozens hundreds thousands of ethnically based scholarships that were for this group that group or whichever but none of them were focusing on caucasian americans the implication is that if we're being fair we should also talk about how white people are sometimes the victims of racism in fact when researchers from tufts and harvard universities recently asked white people if racism against whites was worse than racism against people of color most of them said yes that the gains of people of color were coming at a direct cost to whites i'm really not proud of this statement that i'm about to make but if i look at an application i see we're an equal opportun equal opportunity employer like that's great a plus job but in back my mind i'm kind of like crap i hope they don't have like this kind of quota thing like you guys were saying were they certain amount of different races i feel i feel weird saying anything about this just because it's just like oh this is what it's like so and while there's no question there's real anxiety and fear when it comes to programs like affirmative action the fact is for every person of color who benefits from affirmative action in college there are two white students who received preferential treatment because of their parents alumni status or other family connections if in fact the concern over so-called reverse discrimination had any relationship to reality people of color would in fact be getting all the good stuff some people think they are i hear it all the time people of color are taking all the good jobs where the hell are these jobs in second life another study found that only about one quarter of one percent of all the scholarship money in this country is specifically earmarked for students of color which means 99.75 of all that scholarship money is money that whites can compete for and the vast majority of those dollars will in fact go to white students there's also the fact that the schools attended by mostly black and latino students are more than 10 times as likely as majority white schools to be places of concentrated poverty by the time anyone steps on a college campus there has already been 12 to 13 years of institutionalized affirmative action for white folks that is to say racially embedded inequality which has benefited those of us who are white but even though that's true there's clearly this feeling among a lot of white people that things used to be easier and that now those good old days are slipping away how did we get here i don't even understand this america anymore and underneath all of that is a very clear if unstated racial subtext time now to talk about what matters and we're going to continue our conversation about all the vitriol going on in the country i spoke with anti-racist activist tim wise about the tone of the tea parties being held in 2009 i was asked to appear several times on cnn to talk about the tea party a group of conservative americans who had been holding rallies around the country clamoring for the u.s to return to a time of low taxes and small government basically restoring conservative values to the country too much government but the government is never bigger than the people smaller government lower taxes and individual freedom the author between barack and a hard place the same as tim wise he told me there are some racist undertones to these rallies well like i've said on the show before it is the background noise of a lot of the opposition not all of it but a lot of it my point on the show was that while the tea party movement purported to be about things like big government exploding debt and deficits liberal elites being out of touch with the common man in reality there was something else going on we are losing our country we think the muslims are moving in and taking over they're taking our liberties ways it's tyranny it's a good gestapo type uh i want you to check out this protester see the sign he's waving there that's the president made to look like an african witch doctor that was a popular prop at saturday's rally along with anxiety and fear about the economic crisis there's also been a lot of unease about the fact that we have a black president and that the demographics of the country are shifting in ways that point to a future where whites will no longer be the clear majority all of this helps explain why some of these folks are so adamant so angry so upset that they and i'm using their words now want to take their country back we want our country back we want our country back tea party message to washington that we're going to take our country back we're just plain american people who are mad we want to take our country back i've got to run here but just real quickly i know i was at a town hall yesterday and i really had to take some people to task very nice people but they were using those buzz words that i don't think people realize all the time like real americans or uh give me back my america was one of the songs or take back america it's like where has i don't what do you mean by that well when you stand up and you wax nostalgic and say things like i want the country that the founders envisioned when the country the founders envisioned was a formal system of white supremacy excuse me if i find it a little hard to think that race is not perhaps playing a pretty big role after one of the cnn appearances i got an email from a woman who was a tea party supporter who was upset with my characterization of the tea party movement she said that their calls to take the country back had nothing to do with race that they were simply calling for a return to an era of low taxes and small government when i replied to her i asked her to give me a year a year that epitomized in her mind this era of american history which year did she and the rest of the tea party want to return to her response was almost immediate and not very surprising the year she chose 1957. leave it to beaver [Music] it's a year that many conservative white americans hold dear and not just because it's the year leave it to beaver premiered on television traditional america as we knew it is gone ward june and wally and the beave out of here for many conservatives that was the golden age of american history a time when everything was in its place before all the struggles for equality and justice came along in the 60s and messed everything up do you remember how that felt do you remember what life was like there's this sense that we've lost something precious special deeply american this is about the systematic dismantling of this country we are truly concerned about the the heartbeat of our country they can have my country [Applause] that people are over taxed overburdened forced to hand over their hard-earned money to government bureaucrats so they can reward people for not working i think the fact is americans are overtaxed government is spending too much that we pay too high taxes i mean everyone in america knows that americans are over taxed hello we pay more taxes than we used to pay at every level the only problem with that argument it's not even close to being true the fact is the top marginal tax rate in 2012 was 35 percent a lot of people today think that rate is too high but what was the rate in 1957 it was a whopping 91 nearly three times higher than what it is today there's too much involvement in the government we can take care of ourselves our government is spending far too much and our federal government is far too large trying to do far too much as for the size of government in the pre-civil rights golden age it wasn't small by any stretch of the imagination the programs created by the new deal which disproportionately and almost exclusively benefited white people weren't just massive in scale they were massively popular so why do we have this idea that the pre-1960s was this bastion of american independence and freedom of small government and low taxes and why do so many people today want to go back to that mythologized past according to martin gillian's it has everything to do with our perception of who we think is benefiting from government programs today especially those programs we like to call welfare i'm marty gillins i'm a political science professor at princeton university and much of my research is on public attitudes towards anti-poverty policy and racial policy the major work that i've done in that area is a book called why americans hate welfare welfare spending now topping one trillion dollars a year the american public tends to view welfare recipients as undeserving uh not really working hard to support themselves and the view welfare recipients as disproportionately black both of those perceptions are at variance with what we know about the reality of welfare recipients even though the clear majority of people who benefit from government assistance are white there's this perception that welfare and other government programs are somehow a black phenomena why is this well gillen says it's because that's who we see on tv starting in 1965 media portrayals of the poor have been disproportionately african-american esther williams 21 years old mother of a 19 month old infant and a welfare client if you look at either print news or television news coverage of poverty you see far too many black faces relative to the true proportions of african americans among the poor in this country alcinet vargas who has six children and a husband with a minimum wage job reached her time limit in january without full-time work and was cut from welfare so when we see stories about the poor the poor are represented by people of color at a rate that is far greater than statistical reality but it wasn't always that way before the mid 60s media coverage of the poor consisted mostly of whites it was the unemployed during the depression the people who fled the dust bowl the rural poor in places like appalachia and the coverage of these poor white folks was overwhelmingly sympathetic and humanizing as a result public support for social safety net programs was high from the period of the great depression all the way into the 1960s but all of that changed there are too many people taking advantage of the system why don't we spend some time developing a system that weeds out the cheaters once news coverage media imagery and political rhetoric started to equate poverty with people of color we began to view the poor not as fellow americans who were the hard luck victims of a system that had failed them but instead as moochers who were abusing the system and undermining the nation's work ethic and the sad irony is that there are millions of white people in this country who need those programs too and now they're not there those programs have been cut to the bone because the beneficiaries have been seen as undesirable undeserving others how long will we have to pay for slavery man i'm talking about the people on welfare trying to suck out the economy of this country get a free house a free car free gasoline they want it all because they think they deserve it well in this country you got to get a job so don't you know and work did you get a tax cut this year from barack obama i don't pay taxes i don't understand taxes i'm disabled from a truck accident and veterans benefits may i speak now yes ma'am oh i'm 90 years old and i just wanted to ask the colored man why don't colored people instead of seeing what we did to them why don't they say him what we did for them uh they they talk about the the slavery but since then they have given welfare free medicine free everything ma'am i think this is more of a conversation about the relationship between the administration and the people on wall street and not necessarily one that's based on race oh okay i'm not a racist i that's that was my comment thank you none of this is by accident the racial subtext that runs through a lot of the anti-government rhetoric is the result of an explicit political strategy that's been put to use by conservative public here's how i would approach that issue as a as a statistician or a political scientist or no as a psychologist which i'm not is is how abstract you handle the race thing in a recently uncovered recording the late republican strategist lee atwater one of the pioneers of race-based political appeals was heard talking quite openly about how the strategy works you start out in 1954 by saying [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] by 1968 you can't say [ __ ] that hurts your back fire so you say stuff like force busting states rights and all that stuff and you're getting so abstract now you're talking about cutting taxes and all of these things you're talking about are totally economic things and the byproduct problem is blacks get hurt worse than white the idea was for republican politicians to speak in a kind of racial code designed to turn white working-class voters against government programs the very programs that they themselves had benefited from for years the present welfare system has become a monstrous consuming outrage government is not the solution to our problem government is the problem and this kind of thing runs right up to the present day president obama is the most effective food stamp president in american history this is precisely the point historian john bracey a veteran of the civil rights movement has been trying to make for years what the ruling class in this country has successfully done is to label social programs as black programs minority programs and you can kill it i don't want to to make live people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money i want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money you know that's the most foundational thing in american life i mean that's obamacare everything that is getting pushed through congress including this health care bill are transforming america and they are all driven by president obama's thinking on one idea reparations uh virtually every normal kind of social program that would have kicked in in europe in the 19th century you know in order to help working people you know survive on the capitalism we don't have while the state's budget deficit has reached almost a half billion dollars now the state's medicaid program has announced more than 14 million dollars is being cut to various providers throughout the state there are people that won't expand medicare like i just got back from mississippi they're debating expanding medicare and mississippi they need every nickel and dime they can get in there from anybody they should not question anybody if martians came and said we're going to give you something they should say whatever it is we'll take it because they need everything they refuse they have a political system that's still dysfunctional enough that they turn down aid for white people in mississippi because black people get some too this is how racism victimizes white people indirectly as well american history is full of examples of white anxiety and resentment around race being used to undermine their own interest and their own well-being [Music] the most obvious kind of cost of failing to deal with black people as human beings it's the almost million casualties of white people during the civil war itself by postponing the struggle you know to end slavery by not dealing with it in a political fashion he had to fight a war that lasted four years that was resulted in the largest number of casualties in any war in american history this is a war an internal war a war on this continent fought between white people on one side of white people on the other side if you would ask them you know would they be willing to give their lives to free black people they probably wouldn't have said yes right but by failing to see black people as people by failing to see slavery as as a detriment to the social order they resulted you know it resulted in them losing their lives you can never quit these birds if you don't keep you and them separate i found that out blaming you you've got to keep the white and the black separate in other words for generations political elites have deliberately manipulated the white racial fears and resentments of the majority population pitting white folks and people of color against each other for the spoils of a system that really none of them benefit directly from fighting over the pieces of a pie that none of them own we can try to ignore and deny this history but we can't change it it's real and it's a part of who we are the biggest challenge is figuring out how to confront the truth without being overwhelmed by it [Music] i think we talk about race too much i think there are i think those problems are largely behind us i i just think we talked so much about it that we helped i think create somewhat of an illu illusion many of us have come to believe that the real problem with racism is that we talk about it too much we need to talk about race we need to stop talking about race that if we just didn't talk about it if we just didn't bring it up nobody would know anything about it i think more of the problem is the accusations of racism and that does drive the races apart i i think that we should be colorblind in every way that we should aspire to be colorblind that we should ignore racial and ethnic differences and just treat everyone the same we really want to get beyond the hyphenated america i mean i do i mean i'm half polish and then i think irish english we want to get beyond that unfortunately there are a couple of big problems with that approach well one it's it's absurd right we obviously notice race all the time if we didn't we wouldn't have evidence that people treat people in unequal ways on the basis of race but on top of that color blindness as an ideology is almost a willful neglect i'm going to close my eyes to the reality both of diversity and the reality of inequality and injustice because america is about opportunity and chance an equal shot fundamentally everybody is equal in america everyone has equal opportunity there's also the fact that if we don't have a context for understanding the kinds of racial disparities and inequalities we continue to see in america then racist explanations begin to make sense if the one story from american history that we've bought into is that we're a meritocracy a colorblind society that rewards people or punishes them based purely on how hard they work or how capable they are then the entire history of institutional racism magically disappears and we're left to wonder what's wrong with black people who can't seem to get it together half of african americans in the state of california roughly half of latino families have no access to a checking account or an atm things we take for granted they don't have a check what's wrong with them we can talk about no they're hardly flawed but they're struggling genetics why so many of them in other words colorblindness by virtue of keeping matters of discrimination and racism under wraps can lead to an actual intensification of racist thinking [Music] so let me give you an example in april 2003 on my way to a conference in iowa i boarded a plane bound for st louis as i walked down the jet bridge that morning i glanced in and saw something i'd never seen in all my years of air travel not one but two black pilots at the controls of the plane now you'd think this would be a welcome sight to me and after reflection it was but that wasn't my initial reaction sadly my first thought was more along the lines of all right now everybody get crash positions oh god can these two guys really fly this plane now don't get me wrong just as quickly as that thought came into my head i was able to defeat it i knew instantly that such a thought was absurd but in that moment i was beholden to my conditioning and i'd been conditioned no less than anyone else to see people of color and automatically assume they aren't as qualified as a white person neuroscientists and psychologists have been studying this phenomena for decades they call it implicit or unconscious racial bias implicit racial bias is the thoughts that pop into our mind it's the quick random gut reaction when we think about a particular group so when i see somebody who is is white how quickly and easily do good thoughts good healthy successful educated smart come to mind and versus when i see someone who's black or latino how quickly do those kinds of happy successful educated smart pop into mind and we typically find that people are faster at associating those good stuff with white rather than black or hispanics the reason why these implicit attitudes preferences and biases make a big difference is that there's quite a bit of data showing that these implicit attitudes affect people's behavior in a whole host of areas that will either maintain or sometimes exacerbate inequalities in one test that looked at unconscious stereotyping the vast majority of whites implicitly associated the faces of black americans with negative words and traits like evil character or failure and they had far more trouble linking black faces to pleasant words and positive features a rough estimate is that 75 of people who are non-black um tend to show some degree of implicit preference for white silver blacks in the same test nearly half the african-americans tested also showed a preference for whites over blacks so none of us are immune we're all subject to the same conditioning one of the things that's so interesting to me about the unconscious bias research is that this is not simply you know white people having biases against black people and latinos this operates across groups this is a culture that we have learned that practices inequality this is not um simply animus between groups but this is a way that we are socialized to treat people the logical question is what can we do you can't be color blind because that means that you're not seeing the disparity and you're not trying to address it we all have to see it address it make it real and try to resolve it as opposed to pretend it's not there it's there the goal in my view isn't to be blind to one another but to see each other as we are with our full range of experience all of our baggage as well as all the beauty that we bring and still love one another still care about each other i don't want to say to the young kid who grew up in the hood and who's being stopped and hounded by the police i don't care if you're black of course i care i care about you and your experience and i see you as you are the answer is being color-conscious not color-blind it means confronting the truth about race and racism in this country and it means asking the tough honest questions about how the history of racism in america continues to shape the present when you're a member of a dominant group it's very easy isn't it to view the world that way to view the world as an individual to not recognize that other people are not leading simply individual lives and neither are you that's why people will say things like well i'm not white i'm just tim i'm just an individual i'm just an american why can't we just all be why can't you drop the hyphen because it's not your hyphen to drop jack that's why in other words we need to have an awareness about how racism racial conditioning and prejudice have affected us as white folks unless we get a hold of that we'll continue to go down the path of privilege and racism and inequality rather than connecting to a very different tradition in our own history a tradition of white allyship a tradition of white anti-racism in addition to the typically pathetic way our history books address the contributions of people of color very rarely as much attention paid to the average everyday white folks who stood up and opposed injustice people like will campbell advanced units are already on duty on the grounds of central high school [Music] [Applause] current people here in the south have got better schools and some are white kids like it is let them go their own school [Music] imagine how different the racial dialogue might feel for us if we knew of those white folks who opposed enslavement who opposed segregation jeremiah evarts john fee helen hunt jackson sarah and angelina grimke robert flanoy matilda gage lydia child how helpful might it be for lessening our anxiety as whites and allowing us to embrace the multiracial future of america if we knew about the history of white anti-racism [Music] what if we learned of the alternative tradition in our history the one in which members of our community said no to racism and white domination and yes to justice precisely because they realized not only the moral evil of those systems but also because they saw both of them as cynical manipulations intended to divide and conquer working people to keep us at each other's throats people like anne braden the real danger today comes who are from the white people but if their taxes are eaten up their paychecks it's not because of our voted military budget but because of government programs that benefit black people virginia foster dirt jay watis waring constance curry bob and dottie zellner and mab siegrist along with literally thousands of others who in their own way have demonstrated that there is more than one way to live in this skin it's a tradition that fits with the best of the american ideal and can elevate that ideal to a place far more concrete than it's been up to now and if we do that there's no reason why we as a committed and decent people can't move to a different place as a country you