white elite, who have always controlled our institutions and continue to do so by a very wide margin. Of the fifty richest people on earth, twenty-nine are American.Of these twenty-nine, all are white, and all but two are men (Lauren Jobs inherited her husbandâs wealth, and Alice Walton her fatherâs).
Similarly, the white working class has always held the top positions within blue-collar fields (the overseers, labor leaders, and fire and police chiefs). And although globalization and the erosion of workersâ rights has had a profound impact on the white working class, white fragility enabled the white elite to direct the white working classâs resentment toward people of color. The resentment is clearly misdirected, given that the people who control the economy and who have managed to concentrate more wealth into fewer (white) hands than ever before in human history are the white elite.
Consider this data on the distribution of wealth:
⢠Since 2015, the richest 1 percent has owned more wealth than the rest of the planet owns. 11
⢠Eight men own the same amount of wealth as do the poorest half of the world.
⢠The incomes of the poorest 10 percent of people increased by less than three dollars a year between 1988 and 2011, while the incomes of the richest 1 percent increased 182 times as much.
⢠In Bloombergâs daily ranking of the worldâs five hundred richest people, the worldâs wealthiest three (Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Jeff Bezos), all white American men, have total net worths of $85 billion, $79 billion, and $73 billion, respectively. 12 By comparison, the 2015 gross domestic product of Sri Lanka was $82 billion; Luxembourg $58 billion; and Iceland, $16 billion. 13
⢠Of the worldâs ten richest people, nine are white men. 14
⢠In 2015â2016, the worldâs ten biggest corporations together had revenue greater than that of the government revenues of 180 countries combined.
⢠In the US, over the last thirty years, the growth in the incomes of the bottom 50 percent has been zero, whereas incomes of the top 1 percent have grown by 300 percent.
The call to Make America Great Again worked powerfully in service of the racial manipulation of white people, diverting blame away from the white elite and toward various peoples of colorâfor example, undocumented workers, immigrants, and the Chineseâfor the current conditions of the white working class.
The romanticized âtraditionalâ family values of the past are also racially problematic. White families fled from cities to the suburbs to escape the influx of people of color, a process socialogists term
white flight.
They wrote covenants to keep schools and neighborhoods segregated and forbade cross-racial dating.
Consider the extreme resistance to busing and other forms of school integration from white parents. In the landmark Supreme Court decision
Brown v. Board of Education,
the court ruled that separate was inherently unequal and that schools needed to desegregate âwith all deliberate speed.â Busing children from one neighborhood into a school in another to account for residential segregation became a major strategy of desegregation (notably, white children were generally not bused into predominately black schools; instead, black children endured long bus rides to attend predominately white schools). Regina Williams, a black student from Roxbury, Massachusetts, was bused into a school in South Boston. She described her first day in a formerly all-white school as âlike a war zone.â School officials, politicians, the courts, and the media gave precedence to the desires of white parents who overwhelmingly and vehemently opposed school desegregation. It has not been African Americans who resist integration efforts; it has always been whites. 15 The practice of our lives as a white collective has rarely been in alignment with the values we profess.
At the
Similarly, the white working class has always held the top positions within blue-collar fields (the overseers, labor leaders, and fire and police chiefs). And although globalization and the erosion of workersâ rights has had a profound impact on the white working class, white fragility enabled the white elite to direct the white working classâs resentment toward people of color. The resentment is clearly misdirected, given that the people who control the economy and who have managed to concentrate more wealth into fewer (white) hands than ever before in human history are the white elite.
Consider this data on the distribution of wealth:
⢠Since 2015, the richest 1 percent has owned more wealth than the rest of the planet owns. 11
⢠Eight men own the same amount of wealth as do the poorest half of the world.
⢠The incomes of the poorest 10 percent of people increased by less than three dollars a year between 1988 and 2011, while the incomes of the richest 1 percent increased 182 times as much.
⢠In Bloombergâs daily ranking of the worldâs five hundred richest people, the worldâs wealthiest three (Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Jeff Bezos), all white American men, have total net worths of $85 billion, $79 billion, and $73 billion, respectively. 12 By comparison, the 2015 gross domestic product of Sri Lanka was $82 billion; Luxembourg $58 billion; and Iceland, $16 billion. 13
⢠Of the worldâs ten richest people, nine are white men. 14
⢠In 2015â2016, the worldâs ten biggest corporations together had revenue greater than that of the government revenues of 180 countries combined.
⢠In the US, over the last thirty years, the growth in the incomes of the bottom 50 percent has been zero, whereas incomes of the top 1 percent have grown by 300 percent.
The call to Make America Great Again worked powerfully in service of the racial manipulation of white people, diverting blame away from the white elite and toward various peoples of colorâfor example, undocumented workers, immigrants, and the Chineseâfor the current conditions of the white working class.
The romanticized âtraditionalâ family values of the past are also racially problematic. White families fled from cities to the suburbs to escape the influx of people of color, a process socialogists term
white flight.
They wrote covenants to keep schools and neighborhoods segregated and forbade cross-racial dating.
Consider the extreme resistance to busing and other forms of school integration from white parents. In the landmark Supreme Court decision
Brown v. Board of Education,
the court ruled that separate was inherently unequal and that schools needed to desegregate âwith all deliberate speed.â Busing children from one neighborhood into a school in another to account for residential segregation became a major strategy of desegregation (notably, white children were generally not bused into predominately black schools; instead, black children endured long bus rides to attend predominately white schools). Regina Williams, a black student from Roxbury, Massachusetts, was bused into a school in South Boston. She described her first day in a formerly all-white school as âlike a war zone.â School officials, politicians, the courts, and the media gave precedence to the desires of white parents who overwhelmingly and vehemently opposed school desegregation. It has not been African Americans who resist integration efforts; it has always been whites. 15 The practice of our lives as a white collective has rarely been in alignment with the values we profess.
At the
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