The American Status Bargain

"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."  - LYNDON B. JOHNSON, 1960

"It is so simple a fact and one that is so hard, apparently, to grasp: Whoever debases others is debasing himself." - James Baldwin - Fire Next Time

 

Just Like Me

 

Everything I know about race I learned from a twenty year old white girl. 

 

She was in trouble, you see, and although we were strangers I’d nonetheless come to care about what had happened to her  We shared things in common, this girl and I; race and class, of course, but also, a host of other life experiences and personal similarities that in their totality made her a person familiar to me.  Empathy – the capacity to feel someone else’s pain as if it were one’s own – begins with the self and radiates outward in rings of diminishing intensity to embrace first those we love, then those we like and finally, those who are like us.  For me, this particular young stranger occupied a place on the near side of this last empathetic ring – she was neither family, friend nor acquaintance, yet the similarities I perceived between us caused me to recognize her situation as a cruel ordeal and, as if her suffering were in some way my own, to care about it. 

 

Her torment was an affront to my worldview.  Bad things aren’t supposed to happen to bright young women who come from loving, prosperous families like mine.  Girls like that – girls who mind their parents, who study hard and stay out of trouble - are supposed to graduate from college, enjoy exciting careers, meet that perfect guy and then, someday, present me with grandchildren who I get to spoil.  They aren’t supposed to become international symbols for wanton depravity.  They aren’t supposed to be made into handy objects of derision for millions of leering strangers.  They aren’t supposed to go to prison for murder. 

 

Amanda Knox, the then 20 year old Seattle foreign exchange student who was accused in 2007 of having murdered her British roommate in Perugia, Italy confounded my expectations about what was supposed to happen to young, middle-class white women.  The details of how Ms. Knox’s story captured my attention or an explanation of my many particular reasons for becoming invested in her troubles are unimportant except to say that through the narcissistic calculus of empathy I came to perceive her ordeal as an intolerable personal affront.   

 

Although initially agnostic with respect to her guilt, I nonetheless became appalled by the avalanche of irrational hostility that she, as a person, provoked throughout the world.   As I absorbed media reports about her case and surveyed the hostile reader comments that inevitably attended any article about Knox, what struck me was how joyful so much of it was.  Mind you, it was not the “three point shot at the buzzer to win the championship” or the “get up early on Christmas to watch the little kids tear into their presents” kind of joy, but instead, was of the “look on the bride’s face in that moment she realizes that she’s falling into the swimming pool” or the “dignified matron’s squeal as she slips on a patch of ice and lands on her butt” variety.  It was that mean kind of joy that makes the story of the cloistered, triplet-bearing nun riveting or the destitute, drug addicted former child star sublime.   It was schadenfreude, self-righteous, malignant and glorious, directed at an obscure, naive coed that, because she reminded me very much of my own college aged children, seemed for all the world like schadenfreude directed at me.   For the legion of detractors who rallied to participate in Knox’s public excoriation she had ceased to be a human being and had become, instead, a plaything upon whom they had given themselves leave to exercise the cruelest manifestations of their own prejudices and insecurities.  Somehow the world had given itself permission to despise a young woman who had never hurt anyone and whose only crime, I came to understand, was to be convenient and unimportant at exactly the moment that it hungered for a new monster to hate. 

 

Amanda Knox and the Paradoxes of Race

 

Were this all there was to it, however, I doubt that my indignation over the public excoriation of Amanda Knox would have led me to any particular insight about race in America.  What set me on the path, however, was the fact that among Knox’s American detractors, many black Americans feel a particular antipathy towards her.  The source of this hostility stems from the fact that during the course of her 2007 interrogation by Italian police she was coerced into implicating her boss, Patrick Lumumba, who is a black man.  As a result of this, American blacks have largely relegated Knox to that pit of contempt reserved for white people who “name the black guy” in order to avoid responsibility for their own nefarious crimes. 

 

In October 2011 an article by Phillip W. D. Martin articulating the contours of this contempt appeared in the online magazine, “The Root” entitled “Let’s Not Forget Amanda Knox’s Lies” (http://www.theroot.com/articles/world/2011/10/amanda_knox_black_man_blamed_falsely.html).  In his article, published in the days immediately following an appeal court’s acquittal that freed Knox from an Italian prison and allowed her to return home, Mr. Martin admonished his readers to remember that although an Italian court may have affirmed that Knox was innocent of having murdered her roommate, in that she had “named the black guy”, she nonetheless remained as much a criminal as was Boston’s notorious name-the-black-guy supervillain, Charles Stuart.

 

Over the years that I had followed Knox’s case, I had grown accustomed to the cavalier ease with which so many writers had come to regard Knox as an acceptable object of drive-by punditry – a kind of status piñata who, on slow news days, was perpetually available to be hoisted up onto a blog post and then solemnly wacked at with whatever self-righteous silly-stick happened to be convenient at hand.  Yet there was something profoundly cruel in Mr. Martin’s attack that made his article stand out in my mind as particularly unfair.  Details matter, and to declare statements coerced by means of  terror from an innocent twenty year old to be identical to  cynical, self-serving lies volunteered by a man who killed his wife and unborn child in order to collect on an insurance policy is the same as  declaring apples and pizza identical because they’re both food.  Yet this is what Mr. Martin’s article had done, and what those who supported it were determined to celebrate. 

 

While contributing comments along these lines to this article it dawned on me how ironic black enmity towards Knox was.  Of all the people in America evidencing any interest whatsoever in the Knox story, it is American blacks who, it seemed to me, ought logically to be in the best position to understand what had been done to her and so, most inclined to empathize with her ordeal.  While she is, indeed, white and she did, indeed, implicate her black former employer, the context in which she did it was identical to that under which countless terrified black suspects have been coerced over the years by aggressive police interrogators into implicating other innocent black men.  Far from being a cynical, self-serving race dissembler in the mold of Boston’s notorious Charles Stuart, Knox is like the Central Park Five, the Scottsboro Boys or the Groveland Four insofar as her false statements against innocent blacks were not volunteered in a self-serving attempt to avoid responsibility for actual crimes they had committed, but rather, were extracted by police interrogators who would not end their abusive interviews until they had compelled their innocent victims to name the people who the police were intent upon having implicated. 

 

What I failed to recognize at the time was that as a middle-class young white woman, Knox existed so far outside of the grace zone of this group’s particular sphere of empathy that the notion of seeing their own suffering within the circumstances of hers was simply unthinkable.   Far from gaining moral purchase with those with whom I debated, my comments instead provoked outrage among many over the fact that I should attempt…..should dare……to equate Knox’s plight with that suffered by such revered martyrs to the cause of racial resistance as the Scottsboro Boys or the Central Park Five.  Over the course of these several discussions, it became clear to me that many of the blacks with whom I debated were, indeed, actually invested in Knox’s villainy and would not, under any circumstances, be dissuaded from it.  It was as though they needed Knox to be a racial miscreant, as for her to be otherwise represented an intolerable threat to their own particular worldview.  White women cannot be victims……they must, facts be damned, be oppressors.  Always.  No exceptions. 

 

The debate exposed for me a number of curious paradoxes that were at once fascinating and maddening.  How was it possible, I found myself wondering, that American blacks, a group of people who have historically been the victims of unspeakable social marginalization and cruelty, could be so callous and indifferent to a particular species of abuse suffered by a young woman that was, in all of its essential features other than the race of the victim, identical to that which historically has caused them such unremitting misery?    Moreover, I noted an odd and perverse utility that the various commenters seemed to have reserved for Knox.  To my mind, Knox’s utility (as if one can legitimately speak of another’s suffering in terms of its usefulness to one’s self) specifically for blacks lay in her case being a relevant example of coercive police interrogation techniques whose modes and methods had, over the years, contributed to the wrongful convictions of countless innocent black victims.  Yet among the blacks who had rallied in support of Mr. Martin’s article this particular utility was not only ignored, but when suggested as a possibility, it was angrily rejected.    Notwithstanding the obvious ordeal she had suffered and the potential benefit to the cause of racial justice to be won by at least acknowledging, if not outright promoting, that she had endured an aspect of police abuse that is routinely endured every day by American blacks, I was struck by how determined these commenters were to pen Knox up in the stable reserved for race villains and then, once they had her corralled, to keep her there. 

 

As group of people who have historically suffered the marginalizing stigma of a host of demeaning stereotypes, it was simply incomprehensible to me that so many of the American blacks commenting on Mr. Martin’s article could be so desperate to suborn the marginalization of a young woman who had become a darling object of abuse for misogynists and anti-American xenophobes the world over.  Racism and its inevitable, inane defense is logic resistant, fact denying and reason averse.  In their many angry protestations against the possibility of Knox-as-victim versus Knox-as-race-villain, this cadre of black commenters to Mr. Martin’s article demonstrated exactly this same set of maddening irrationalities.  How could that possibly be?  When was it, I found myself wondering, that these particular black people had become so…..well…..so goddamn white?

 

Despite the sense of frustration I happened to feel at these paradoxes, debating with Mr. Martin’s many supportive readers nonetheless reminded me that in the long history of human beings being rotten to each other, Knox’s ordeal and the international contempt for her dignity that made it possible was neither an isolated nor particularly remarkable case.  Others have suffered as well and many, much worse than Knox.  If finding self-righteous joy in the unfair persecution a college coed was bad, wasn’t, say, suborning the genocide of millions of Jews or celebrating the collapse of occupied office buildings in New York much, much worse?  If it was incomprehensible to me that someone would take to the comments section of an obscure article in an online magazine to participate in Knox’s excoriation, how much more incomprehensible was it that at one point in American history people took up whips to flay the flesh of human beings who they deemed to be their property or looked on impassively as children were peeled from the arms of their frantic mothers to be sold for a profit to far away strangers?   The notion that a particular young woman who could have been my own daughter had been sentenced to spend 26 years in a foreign prison for a crime she didn’t commit appalled me, but how large must the army of the appalled be that stand as supportive family and friends to the estimated hundred thousand wrongfully convicted prisoners who, despite their innocence, are nonetheless sitting in federal, state and local prisons throughout the United States at this very minute?  

 

The dependent variable in an equation whose product had been my interest the trials of Amanda Knox had not been the uniqueness of horror she had suffered, but rather, the degree to which Knox and her family were people who seemed “like me” and with whom I therefore identified.  The independent variable – the things all of these cases, both present and past, had in common – was, it seemed to me, the degree to which the victims had ceased to matter as human beings.  Somehow, by some knowable and discoverable means, the societies in which these victims had lived and come to misery had deemed these unfortunates to be unimportant and so, therefore, exploitable.  That certain black readers of “The Root” had deemed the darling of my particular interest to be “unimportant” was not only grimly ironic, but also, I suspected, illustrative of precisely how and why such abortions of empathy and the horrors they enable ever come to be possible.  Despite sharing at least some common causes in suffering, it appeared to me that to these readers Knox fell squarely into the “not like me at all” category of personal relationships, and so, had made her into someone not only unworthy of support, but more, a human being whose suffering it was acceptable to exploit. 

 

Frustrated by these paradoxes and intrigued by the broad question of how it is that a society decides who among its members they give themselves permission to despise, I set about to understand race.  As should be plain by this point, I did so not out of any particular concern for the victims of America’s racial order, but rather, as a kind of case study in institutionalized social contempt that might help me to explain to myself how it is that people can see another’s suffering and choose to celebrate it.  My interest in Knox was clearly motivated by concern for someone I had come to see as being “like me”, yet I thought that if I could step beyond the reach of my own capacity to feel someone else’s suffering as if it was my own – if I could understand the nature of a thing that my intellect told me was wrong, and yet for whose “not like me at all” victims my heart remained steadfastly ambivalent - that I might learn something useful.  

 

A Babe in the Wood

 

Having decided to learn about race, I suddenly found myself confronted with the daunting prospect of actually doing it.  I had selected for myself a hobby – and it was, let’s be clear, a hobby – that would require me to track a target that was massive, mobile and elusive.  First, understanding race required knowledge of a half millennium of history embracing the cumulative, yet individually unique life experiences of literally billions of people.  Next, as the very concept of race is ultimately a human construct – a fiction with no rational meaning other than the one that each of those billions of people happened to have given to it at the particular point in time that they happened to have lived – it is a fluid thing about which attitudes and beliefs constantly change.  As if these factors alone didn’t add sufficient complexity to the endeavor, my ability to make any sense of them could almost certainly be counted on to be compromised by the obvious fact that I, living as I do at a particular time and being, as I am, of a particular race, happen to be one of those billions of people whose absurdities I wished to understand. 

 

Fortunately, at the outset of my journey I was ignorant of virtually all of these features.  Had I know what I was getting myself into, I almost certainly would never have started.  Having really no idea of the topic’s scope or complexity, there seemed nothing particularly daunting about the prospect of trying. 

 

What ignorance made conceivable, however, social convention almost killed. 

 

As a white man living in the second decade of the 21^st century, the social conventions of my time prohibit me expressing any but the most narrowly prescribed opinions about race. 

 

With respect to race I am not, to coin a phrase popular among some critical race theorists, a “legal storyteller”. The idea behind legal storytelling is that context, history or acknowledged differences in relationship often confers the right to have an opinion on a given topic to one set of people while simultaneously denying that same liberty to others.  I may, for example, in a moment of parental exasperation, offhandedly mention to the attendees of the school’s monthly PTA meeting that my kid is a “brat” – yet if one of those attendees should presume for themselves the right to enthusiastically agree with me; indeed, should actually go so far as to volunteer their own set of examples in support of my thesis, they risk a black eye.  On the matter of my kid being a whiny, snot-nosed shit, I am a legal storyteller whereas little Claire Johnson’s loudmouthed mother, Alice, most certainly is not. 

 

As Alice is to me with respect to my child, I am to my society with respect to race.   

 

No one likes to be told what they are entitled to think and to say, and I am no exception.  Yet for any indignation I might happen to feel about a particular muzzle that my culture had come to place over my opinions, I was also sensible to the fact that it was not as though these social prohibitions come from nowhere.  In the long shadow cast by almost four centuries of North American racial oppression and the multitude of self-aggrandizing sophistries whites have formulated over that history to enact, maintain and perpetuate it, the notion that on matters of race, whites ought best remain mute is understandable.  Moreover, any inclination to disassemble these prohibitions is made not one whit more tempting by certain whites who, in giving voice to their own particular set of obnoxious opinions about “those people”, manage to achieve little more than to distinguish themselves as a particularly loathsome species of idiot. As a rule they are experiments that are as difficult to listen to as they are unlikely to inspire imitation. Who among us really wants to be Cliven Bundy holding a press conference at the bottom of a publicly owned Nevada ditch to share with the world “what [he] know[s] about the black man”? 

 

I certainly didn’t. 

 

Few whites, I suspect, actually do. 

 

The initial sense of social paralysis I felt at the prospect of exploring race had to do with my own racially conferred status an illegal storyteller.  As happens with virtually anyone living in a society that has embraced a given dogma as thoroughly as America has embraced its various dogmas concerning race, I, unlike Mr. Bundy and his ilk, had integrated their several proscriptions and rules into my own particular sense of good manners and civility.  The very idea, therefore, of rationally and logically exploring race with an eye towards understanding what it meant to me and the world I lived in filled me with a kind of sick dread.  While I wanted to erect for myself a rational framework within which to understand the means by which a society gives itself permission to despise “others”, the thought that as a consequence of doing so I might be perceived as having set myself up on a soap box next to the likes of Cliven Bundy was a prospect almost too grim…..and too frightening to contemplate. 

 

I felt like I was already on thin ice by having dared to disagree with Phillip W. D. Martin’s excoriation of Amanda Knox.  What if, upon looking into the matter, I happened to discover other ideas and notions that are embraced as articles of faith by many in America’s black community but that I, after having given them a dispassionate hearing, could not in good conscience ever bring myself to endorse? As a white man, who was I to presume that I would ever be able to learn enough to justify legitimate ownership of opinions that might come to deviate from some of my society’s most scrupulously policed set of social norms? 

 

Yet for all of these doubts, I remained nonetheless convinced that Philip W. D. Martin’s opinions about the supposed race crimes of Amanda Knox were so far beyond wrong as to actually be vile.  Moreover, the set of assumptions about race in general and white people in particular that Martin had blithely taken for granted in ginning up his excoriation of Knox suggested to me that the indignation I had come to feel over a wrong done to a particular middle-class white girl from Seattle was only the tip of much larger iceberg.  If Martin, in his role as a beat cop for contemporary racial orthodoxy, was wrong about Knox, what other wrongs did that orthodoxy sanction? 

 

Ultimately, the impulse to act in response to the empathy that I had come to feel for Knox trumped the reluctance I felt about violating one of my culture’s most complex and scrupulously policed taboos.  By this point, of course, that empathy had very little to do with a young woman I didn’t know, and everything to do with me and the two young people in my life who that particular young stranger reminded me of.  That is, after all, how empathy works – it causes one to feel someone else’s pain as if it were one’s own.  This is why, in casting Knox as the obligatory white villain in his contrived racial parable, Martin had used me, right along with her.  This is why, in simply taking Knox’s mendacity for granted he had belittled the moral capacity of my children, right along with her.  And this is why, in blithely ignoring the horror Knox had faced at the hands of Italian police he marginalized as a triviality the value of my family’s lives, right along with hers.  While I was utterly loathed the idea of being seen as a member of Team Idiot, I was equally loath to tolerate the cavalier marginalization of my own identity in service of a dogma that insisted that my children and I, solely by virtue of the color of our skins, were – as Phillip W. D. Martin would have the world believe about Amanda Knox – monsters.

 

Having worked myself up to a sufficiently agitated state of righteous indignation, I resolved, in spite of my initial misgivings, to continue.  In my more lucid moments I was motivated by the realization that there was something about race that made people crazy, and I was determined to understand what it was.  Yet it would be dishonest to suggest that this was all there was to it, for clearly, it was not.  The rules surrounding racial discourse and the set of narrow, condescending assumptions that gave rise to them were upsetting.  It was irksome to me that the clear wrong Martin had done to Knox should be denied a protest simply because the customs of my culture take for granted that I, by virtue of my race, lacked the standing necessary to voice it. 

 

This, of course, led me to my second unanticipated obstacle. 

 

It should come as no particular surprise by this point that at the outset of my inquiry, I, a fairly typical middle-class American white man, knew relatively little about race.  I was aware that once upon a time there hand been a thing called slavery, and that was bad; but then a war came, the right team won and slavery ended…..which was good.  I knew also that for a time afterwards a slew of petty Jim Crow humiliations were routinely served up to black people in the Deep South, and that was bad; but then Martin Luther King came and Jim Crow ended….which was good.  And since then I knew that despite the abolition of slavery and the death of Jim Crow that blacks nonetheless remained perpetually upset about a whole host of things that I neither understood nor, because they seemed to have little to do with me, particularly cared about, but that the quickest way to become concerned about my physical safety was to get a flat tire in Compton and the quickest way to never to be invited to dinner parties was to act too interested about the endless complaints of black people.    As far as I was concerned this was neither good nor bad…..it just was.   As I was later to realize, this ignorance is an integral part of the story I was setting about to explore; yet that realization was only to come later.  In order to get there, I first had to contend with the fact that I actually knew very little and would need to learn much in order to sensibly answer the question I’d set before me. 

 

The most obvious way to learn about someone’s problems is simply to ask about them.  The people we are most likely to ask are the people we know and, of course, the better we know them, the more honest and insightful their answers are likely to be.  As I (big surprise) knew no black people – either as a family member, a friend or even as an acquaintance – this obvious means of gathering information was closed to me.  There are approximately 45 million black people in the United States – 13.5% of the total population – and yet, after having lived a half century in America I did not know a single one of them whom I could comfortably approach for help.  While it did not escape my attention that this, in itself, might well be part of the very answer I was seeking, the lack of practical access to the people whose insights I had come to hunger for was nonetheless maddening.  Moreover, it was not a deficit that I could easily rectify – it seemed patently dishonest to strike out and try to artificially engineer friendships with strangers just because I had suddenly come to believe that picking their brains might help me to make sense of something being done to a white girl from Seattle who reminded me of my own blond haired, blue eyed kids.    I would see people on the street or in stores and find myself wondering about their lives.  Tempted though I was, I (wisely, I think) resisted the impulse to tap one or the other of them on the shoulder and say “Excuse me madam, but I couldn’t help noticing that you are black.  Could I interest you in a cup of coffee?” or, “I see, sir, from your nice clothes and expensive car that you’ve confounded the low expectations our society naturally has of you.  Would you mind telling me what compromises you’ve been compelled to make in order to achieve your obvious affluence?”  My forbearance undoubtedly spared me from understandable police scrutiny in the former case and a well-deserved black eye in the latter, yet for all of these benefits I still didn’t have personal access to people whose experiences and insights might be useful to me. 

 

 

Books will speak to you even when people won’t.  It’s one of the things I really like about books….that, and that they’re easy to disregard when they become boring.  So while I couldn’t find any black people to talk to, I found plenty of books that would patiently talk to me.  In order to learn what I didn’t know I set about to read everything I could lay my hands on about America’s racial history, current issues of race and the various schools of thought that have evolved over time to either explain or rationalize it.  There is, I found, plenty to read.  There are, in fact, whole libraries that could be stocked with the various books that have been written over the centuries (particularly, the last century) that focus on race entirely, or for which race is so central to its thesis that one cannot read its pages without finishing it better informed about race than when one started. 

 

Philosophy is the study of that which science hasn’t figured out how to quantify.  Social psychology is the study of what is wrong with everyone except, of course, ourselves.  History is the study of what has been.  While I drew valuable information from all three sources, it was the history, with its stories of what has been, that I found to be most useful.  The histories highlighted the break lines between what I thought I knew, and what really was……between the “what” and “why” I had learned in school, and the “what” and “why’ that people of past ages actually lived.  It is from history that patterns emerge; patterns that explain the current, and predict, if anything can, the future. 

 

Status in America

 

Contrary to what Mrs. Cole taught me in the 10^th grade, American history is rarely the story of noble men and great causes.  Mostly, American history is the story of rich white men convincing non-rich white men to accept far less than they deserve in exchange for the certain promise that there would always be made to exist some debased group beneath them who would never get anything at all…..a group who rich whites were free to exploit and poor whites were free to despise, each without the slightest fear of social sanction or moral consequence.  With the possible exception of Native Americans, the “terrible transformation” of late 17th century colonial North America during which “being black” came to mean “being a slave” represented the inaugural launch of this American societal code modification.  Yet while blacks were the first, and have remained over our history, the most consistently shortchanged by rich-white / non-rich-white status bargains, our society has never limited the scope of its capacity to steal status from others to just victims of African heritage.  In their turn Catholics, Jews and Muslims have each been deemed attractive objects of contempt, as have Irish, Italian, Greek, Eastern European, Asian and, of course, Hispanic peoples.  To these we need but to add the countless status victims of misogyny and homophobia to have created for ourselves a fairly serviceable roster of those whom American society has traditionally given itself permission to demean, belittle, denigrate and exploit. 

 

The nature of the bargain – referred to by some sociologists as “herrenvolk democracy” - is simple.  Within the social hierarchy, non-rich whites receive a status boost measured in “privileges” (i.e. dignity and reasonable treatment that should, regardless of status, naturally be awarded to any human being) relative to the detestable “other” in exchange for their quiescence about rich white patrimony and the abusive exploitation that inevitably attends it. Under this bargain poor whites are guaranteed a spot somewhere above the very last rung of the social ladder and rich whites, in turn, are free to do pretty much anything they want as long its abusive impact on poor whites is either sufficiently obscure as to escape notice or is framed as solicitude for poor white status concerns.  

 

What is remarkable about this status bargain is that given its profound impact on past, present and, presumably, future American political economies, it nonetheless operates completely within the unquestioned realm of cultural “common sense” and functions without ever needing to be explicitly articulated.  While the deal itself is never articulated, however, its tactical embodiments often are.  Over the course of American history people have not been shy to opine, for example, that “blacks are lazy”, “Jews are greedy”, “homosexuals are disgusting” or “women are irrational”, yet no one ever says, “look, let’s all conspire to put these unworthies into their separate, inescapable boxes and then set about to bolster our own fragile self-esteems by giving ourselves permission to routinely treat them like subhuman crap whenever we find ourselves feeling blue.”  Although it operates exactly like a rigged card game in which the shill and the dealer conspire to defraud a mark, the American status bargain works at subconscious  levels of status and interest that leaves the shill actually believing his modest winnings are his righteous due for innate skills that he does not, in fact, possess and the dealer believing his huge winnings are his righteous due for hosting a crooked game that, truth be told, could have easily been had on fair terms without him.    Whether the terms of fraud are articulated or not, the mark, of course, always loses. 

 

In addition to the obvious litany of depredations visited upon the bargain’s undisputed ultimate victims, the detestable “other”, what is also remarkable about this scheme is what a lousy deal it is for non-rich white participants.  For the love of the unearned status that accrues to them as their part of this now ancient status arrangement non-rich whites pay a steep price – a price that the sociologist and black civil rights icon, W.E.B. DuBois once referred to as “the wages of whiteness”.  In addition to the disfiguring moral scars that the human cruelties of status theft carves on the character of the thief, non-rich whites inevitably pay for the status they steal by having to align themselves with leaders and ideologies that are antithetical to their own rational financial and social self-interests.  For the love of white status, for example, the non-slave holding southern yeoman dropped his plow and rushed to fight (and die) for the Confederacy – a regime whose overarching ideological principle was that all men most certainly were not created equal and whose economic foundation was rooted in a system of unpaid slave labor against which the white yeoman could never compete and would never prosper.  The powerful and impactful promise of the multi-racial 1890’s populist movement was abandoned in favor of rewritten state constitutions that limited the franchise to whites and provided the legal basis for Jim Crow.  The consolidated negotiating leverage possible through multi-racial union participation was consistently undermined by black exclusion from union membership.  For the last 35 years, the politics of our contemporary era has been largely defined by middle-class, working-class and poor whites willing to cede tax decreases to the wealthy and tolerate the evisceration of American domestic industrial capacity and the jobs that come with it so that not one single “young buck” might be able to buy a steak with food stamps or gain access to higher education and affordable health care.

 

Additionally, as events of history have moved the terms of trade from one of explicitly articulated racial bias (i.e. black=slave) to unspoken yet nonetheless real forms of bias articulated in scrupulously colorblind terms (e.g. “war on drugs” and “tough on crime”, etc.) the lines between the bargain’s intended beneficiaries and its intended victims have blurred.  Poor whites are increasingly getting caught up in projects whose implied objective had always been to control unruly “urban” blacks.  In other words, by continuing to participate in the ancient status bargain between rich and non-rich whites, non-rich whites, particularly poor whites, have unwittingly created an environment through which their children are put at risk by traps set to snare the children of their black neighbors.  While blacks, for example, constitute a disproportionate share of the nation’s incarcerated prisoners (45% of prisoners versus 13.5% of total U. S. population), since the end of the Civil Rights Era and the dawn of colorblind bias the absolute number of white prisoners serving prison terms (often for petty, non-violent crimes) has risen a staggering 1200% to over 650 thousand inmates.  For these prisoners and their families, their participation in the status bargain has been an own-goal of truly epic proportions.  The same cuts to social welfare programs aimed at helping the poor denies meal certainty to the little white girl living in a rural Alabama trailer park as surely as it does to the little black boy growing up in urban south Chicago.  If early childhood education is a key to adult social mobility, cuts to programs like Head Start ensure that multi-racial generational poverty will be as firmly entrenched for the next Civil War as it was in the last. 

 

When did Things Go So Wrong?

 

The answer to the “when” question is to be found, I believe, in the status exigencies encountered by the early settlers of colonial Virginia. There was lots of land in the New World, but no labor to work it.  To fill that labor gap, the British merchants financing the colony devised and implemented a system of indentured white servitude.  It is here that the story of tyrannous status hierarchies in America begins. The status of unfree labor in British North America in the first decades of the 17th century was a reflection of the status such persons had in England.  By the end of the 16th century a multitude of social, political and economic factors had converged in England to produce vast numbers of indigent poor.  Deprived of land and work, they were forced to flee to large urban centers and reduced by their abject poverty to crime and beggary in order to subsist.  They were, moreover, detested – thought of and treated as lazy, promiscuous, indolent, unmannered scum – the scourge of society and the refuse of a nation.   The turbulent political upheavals of 17th century England only exacerbated the problem, adding war refugees, political prisoners and religious dissenters to the already huge contingent of despised paupers that constituted a broad underclass of the relatively short English social pyramid.  It was from this generally detested group that the majority of indentured servants were recruited, deported or kidnapped as an exploitable source of unfree labor in colonial Virginia. 

 

While the physical depredations visited upon these individuals have been thoroughly documented and are well understood, the transition to a race-based conception of unfreedom had much to do with the psychological economy of abject poverty.  Despised in England and seconded (often against their will) to Virginia where they were forced to labor under cruel, dehumanizing conditions, upon ending their period of indenture (assuming they survived) they were left landless, destitute and forced to migrate westward into the furthest reaches of a violent and inhospitable southern colonial frontier.  As if the debased circumstances of their daily existence wasn’t already depressing enough, the contempt that their more fortunate betters within the social hierarchy had for them cannot helped but to have gained purchase in their own self-images.  Abject, inescapable generational poverty has consequences; one of which is to promote a general sense of intolerable (and undeserved) self-loathing.  They were seen as, and so (I would expect), saw themselves as, losers – the lowest of the low, themselves the children of failures who, amid conditions of enduring filth, unremitting danger and perpetual want, were busy raising a next generation of losers that could be expected to do little better than to stagger to its feet and trudge forward in the muddy ruts created by their parents’ own pitiful footsteps. 

 

Oppression cannot maintain itself without some semblance of community quiescence.  While in the second half of the 17th century the conditions on the ground changed in ways that favored African slavery over white indenture, the racialized system of perpetual, life-long generational bondage that ultimately emerged throughout the southern colonies could not have been established and maintained solely at the whim of the planter class alone.  Just as a bully is nothing without a crowd of cheering supporters available to celebrate the humiliation he visits upon a victim, status theft is unsustainable absent a community that is inclined to not only tolerate, but indeed, to actually encourage its abuses.  In order to keep and maintain Africans and their offspring in a condition of perpetual slavery required the consent (even if that consent came of the form of not objecting) of the entire white community – this community of need included that massive and growing class of freed but destitute white indentured servitude survivors and their children. 

 

It begs a question similar to the one I posed above about blacks and Amanda Knox - how could this class of poor whites, after having suffered the depredations of near-slavery themselves, not have objected when dark-skinned fellow victims were singled out to be afflicted with the depredations of a status even more debased than the one they’d been compelled to suffer?  Yet rather than object, I think this class of poor whites likely, in some perverse yet unconscious way, actually welcomed the imposition of African slavery.  Think of how refreshing….how liberating it must have been to have a group of individuals introduced into the community who, merely by virtue of the color of their skin, were always and without exception deemed to be inferior.  From one generation to the next, this large group of landless, penniless white rejects suddenly, and for the first time ever, had someone else for a change who they were allowed to despise.  Suddenly, no matter how ignorant, how poor, how dirty or depraved a white man was, he could take some measure of perverse comfort each day from the fact that at least he wasn’t black.  Never mind that their improved relative status was not earned as the product of any particular accomplishment or in acknowledgement of improved social or market utility, but rather, accrued to them by virtue of status being unfairly denied to someone else.  Status is status, and for people who had none, the self-aggrandizing high that first dose undoubtedly produced must have eclipsed by a wide margin any scruples that nominally functioning capacities for empathy would normally be expected to provoke. 

 

Very quickly, the self-aggrandizing benefits of this status bargain became institutionalized as racial “common sense”.  Of course, the natural human capacity for empathy demands that reasons be formulated to justify kidnap, torture, rape and wholesale life-long economic exploitation.  Among nominally functioning human begins who desire to think of themselves as moral, fair and reasonable, such a cruel and violent system cannot simply be allowed to exist without comment or reflection – it must be explained; it must be rationalized.  If the system was to co-exist with the work-a-day consciences of its white beneficiaries, the inherent “wrongness” of it had somehow to be made “right”.  The white settlers of the last third of the 17th century anesthetized themselves to the wrongness of slavery by building walls around their natural capacity for empathy towards other human beings.  These walls were built of bricks made from thin pretexts and inane sophistries whose sole purpose lay in quarantining blacks beyond the outermost ring of their personal empathy spheres – from the realm of “those who are like us” to the neglectable nether land of “those who are not like us at all”. These settlers achieved this trick of conscience by convincing themselves that African kidnap victims were unworthy of the same deference and respect that they, depending on their relative status, either enjoyed or aspired to.  Blacks were heathens.  Blacks were savages.  Blacks were lazy, lascivious, indolent, servile, childlike yet cunning sub-humans.  Blacks could be denied empathy because they, by virtue of their natural inferiority to whites, were simply unworthy of it.  The deed did not follow the excuses, but rather, the excuses rationalized the deed.  It was by this means, I believe, and at this time the human inclination to inexcusable and barbarous tyranny became racialized in British North America. 

 

It’s All about Status

 

The limitations that human physiology places on our ability to perceive the world around us necessarily compels a decidedly egocentric frame of reference.  While the multitude of relationships and interactions that a given human being experiences throughout their lifetime conveys a sense of cosmic connectedness, in the final analysis this sense is nothing more than a wonderful, highly useful illusion.  In a number of ways that materially matter and although it seems provably foreign to our shared sense of community, we are each damned to experience life from the prisons of our own minds, alone among a multitude of similarly confined inmates.    

 

Alone we have no particular sense of ourselves.  It is only by comparison to others – by looking through the bars of our own cells to observe what our neighbors are up to inside of their cells - that we acquire a frame of reference necessary to judge who and what we are.  Are we fat?  Are we smart?  Are we ugly?  Are we wise?  These, and every other possible question one can and, inevitably, does ask about one’s self can only be answered by comparing ourselves to those around us. 

 

In its (albeit, generally grudging) admiration of intellect, for example, humankind acknowledges a small yet inspired group of individuals whose mental capacities so far exceed those of the average human being as to make them and their accomplishments worthy of nothing but unstinting admiration and praise.  De Vinci, Newton, Einstein, just to name a few - we call these people “geniuses” and revere them with a sense of abject and sincere humility that is actually quite rare for our species.  Yet it is important to remember that we award these individuals with our hyperbolic accolades as the result of a process by which we compare their capabilities to those of other human beings.  In a very real sense, Einstein is thought a genius only by virtue of a comparison of the power of his intellect to that of everyone else. 

 

When my mother was a girl, she had a little dog named Zipper.  Mom liked to tell a story about how her mother used to slip a dime between the folds of a red bandana that Zipper wore around his neck and then send him to town to fetch hamburger from the butcher.  After presenting himself at the butcher shop where the butcher would swap the dime for a pound of carefully wrapped ground round, Zipper would trot home carrying the package in his jaws.  Improbable though it may seem, he could always be counted on to perform this trick without ever succumbing to what one would think would be the natural dog-like temptation to stop on the way, tear the package open and devour the meat for himself.  So was Zipper a genius?  Among dogs he probably was; yet relative to a typical eight year old human being, Zipper’s trick was hardly remarkable at all.  Had my mother perhaps regaled me with stories about the solid tax advice that Zipper had shared with my grandfather or told of how Zipper used to routinely beat my uncle Ken at chess, I might be inclined to upgrade my opinion.    Yet for all of his cleverness, there was little in my mother’s stories to recommend Zipper as an object of undue veneration for superiority of his particular intellect.  

 

We deem Newton a genius only by virtue of our inclination to compare his intellect to our own; but who’s to say that there isn’t a species somewhere out there in the Universe whose intellectual capacity so routinely exceeds that of humankind as to make even Newton, when compared to them, seem like a drooling moron.  Maybe, within the context of “all the things there are in the Universe to know”, the theory of relativity is no more remarkable than the fact that my grandmother made her meatloaf with ground beef delivered by a dog.  Maybe De Vinci was the human equivalent of my mother’s childhood pet; the Zipper of human beings. 

 

My point, of course, is that what we know of ourselves…..and all we know of ourselves…..is derived solely from how we each stack up in comparison to other human beings. 

 

Our fundamentally egocentric natures, of course, naturally lead us to want to tally up as many favorable comparisons as possible while, at the same time, conceding as few unfavorable comparisons as are only absolutely necessary.  This cumulative tally of net favorable comparisons, when acknowledged by others, constitutes our own relative status among our fellow human inmates.   Status, therefore, is communally conferred emotional currency that establishes and routinely validates our own sense of personal worth and self.  This is all just a long-winded way of saying that alone we are nothing, and that it is only through the acknowledgement of our “somethingness” by others that we actually feel like something ourselves. 

 

While there are any number of ways to articulate the means by which one acquires and retains status, I’ve come to think of essentially four principal avenues of status acquisition as most all-encompassing; born status, status earned, status bartered and finally, status stolen.  Natural physical attributes necessary or, at least, useful for survival such as strength, agility, size, shape, natural intellectual capacity and, adjusted for community standards, beauty, are currencies of self-worth conveyed by biology and constitute what I think of as “born status”.  This is the approbation awarded to individuals for no other or better reason than that they are handsome, beautiful, fit or clever.   Another source of status is that which is earned, and accrues to us through old fashioned hard work – the diligence, energy, self-denial and drive necessary to make the very most of those status endowments we all inherit at birth or otherwise acquire throughout our lifetimes.  Through the dint of hard work, status deficits that we’re born with can be overcome and frequently surpassed, just as neglect and disuse can serve to squander inherited surpluses.  The third means of acquiring status is through barter – the voluntary surrender of status from our own reserves in deference to and for the benefit of someone else.  This source accounts for status accruing to individuals as the superficially counterintuitive result of actually giving status away.  In addition to the net status surplus (or deficit) resulting from mundane commercial transactions, this category also encompasses status mediated as the result of compromise, negotiation, favors granted and favors accepted as well as seemingly selfless acts of generosity, kindness, courage, loyalty, altruism, compassion, steadfastness, courtesy, etc. 

 

For purposes of a discussion about America’s racial reality, however, the last means of acquiring status is the most relevant.  In addition to inheriting it, working for it or bartering for it, status is also acquired by stealing it.  If our sense of self is ultimately determined through comparisons to the various members of our community, status thefts are projects whose object is to negate the status rightfully due to others - to denigrate, belittle, malign, subjugate and exploit - such that the victim “looks bad” so that the thief, by comparison, may “look good”.  In the game of status theft the old joke about the two men running away from the bear applies – “Do you think we can outrun the bear?” asks the second man who, in flight, is tracking just behind the first.  “I don’t need to outrun the bear,” says the first man, “I only need to outrun you.” 

 

This articulation of the various means by which status is acquired provides the basis for understanding why status is valuable in any practical sense.  In addition to being a totem of self-worth, it is also a unit of exchange with others.  If status is awarded by the acknowledgement of our fellow human beings, the authority each of us have to either affirm or deny another’s status, itself, is a tremendous source of personal power.  Status, then, is the ultimate currency in the game of acquiring and retaining this indispensable, communally conferred validation of self.  Status, in a word, is power, and our desperate, lonely need for a sense of self compels us to amass as much of it as we can by whatever means, fair or foul, that lay at our disposal – to inherit it if there is luck, to earn it if there are jobs, to barter for it if there are deals and, of course, to steal it if there are victims. 

 

And there are always victims.  Always.   The classic victims are individuals who present themselves as being in want of those natural endowments that typically attract status – the frail, the unlovely or the simple.  The schoolyard bully, possessed of an uncanny ability to intuit potential status deficits in his classmates, aggrandizes himself by engaging in sustained projects of emotional or physical humiliation that target those unworthies – the fat kid, the crippled kid, the ugly kid, the effeminate kid, the dumb kid, the poor kid - who are unfortunate enough to come to his attention.    As the human lust for status is insatiable, we are driven not only to exploit these vulnerabilities for their own sake, but also, to make as much of them for ourselves as we possibly can.  In the hands of the schoolyard bully the merely plain girl becomes a “dog”, the merely slight boy becomes a “wimp” and the merely uninformed peer becomes a “moron”.  Moreover, not only do we conflate the significance of “real” deficits whenever and wherever we intuit them, but also, we create fictional deficits when there are no actual deficits to exploit.  It is in the exercise of this tactic that the schoolyard bully will single out and ridicule the pretty girl for her inordinate beauty, the smart kid for his excessive aptitude or the wealthy kid for his material advantages. The abundance of status theft victims, therefore, is principally due to the singular human capacity to intuit status deficits where they exist or to create them when they don’t. 

 

Moreover, status theft is, at its heart, a community endeavor.  The goal of status theft is to accrue status to one’s self by denying the status rightfully due to another.  As status is a thing conferred upon individuals by the approbation of the community, its theft requires the community at large to not only celebrate its virtue, but also, to ignore its wrongness.  While the schoolyard bully may be the principal antagonist in any drama of playground tyranny, the bully is nonetheless utterly reliant on his non-threatened classmates to award him the status he’s seeking.  Of course, he is heartened by the active encouragement that he receives from vocal supporters, but also, by the quiescence of those who recognize his tyranny for what it is and yet ignores it as well as by the sullen silence of those who are merely thankful that it is finally someone else, and not they, who is the current object of humiliation.  Thus it is that bully acts as an agent for his classmates - by means of cruelty and meanness he harvests some measure of status from his victim and, while naturally keeping the lion’s share for himself, distributes some portion of it in various forms to his peers.  Everyone wins – except, of course, the ravaged victim whose status has been pilfered. 

 

As one of the essential reasons for “community” is the opportunity it affords for self-validation by means of comparison to others, by their respective natures each of the four modes of status accumulation outlined above are fundamentally self-aggrandizing.  Yet among these, status theft stands apart as being uniquely selfish.  The status thief elevates himself in the esteem of his community not by any exhibition of virtue or quality, but rather, solely by exercising whatever power he has to humiliate, denigrate, belittle and malign his victim such that by comparison the bully appears remarkable. 

 

Moreover, in devouring his victim’s dignity, the status thief makes the victim available to others to gorge upon as well.  In return for this service the community’s members confer status upon the thief, thus effectuating the rules by which the community’s various actors are granted membership and are rewarded with rank.  

 

It is not, however, a free-for-all and the context of status theft is subject to a number of severe limitations.  To deny status to someone who is rightfully due it is not necessarily an easy thing to do.  Along with our own innate, self-aggrandizing need to accumulate as many favorable comparisons to others as is possible comes also a fierce aversion to ceding status when it’s challenged.   While to cede status in the context of barter may be necessary and even beneficial, there is no upside to having one’s status simply taken.  By rights we feel that we own the status we’ve earned, and to have the status that we have worked so hard to amass be abridged is an intolerable affront to self. This aversion to status wrongs therefore begins with the self and manifests as the familiar human senses of fairness and justice.  Yet as status itself is a construct of community – status has no meaning absent a body of group members who are available to acknowledge it - the abhorrence and outrage we feel at status wrongs done to ourselves extend with varying degrees of intensity to our community brethren. 

 

To see wrongs done to others and to feel their malignant potential as if they were wrongs done ourselves is the essence of empathy – that thing that I contended above was denied to African slaves by 17th century white colonial settlers just as it was denied to the Central Park Five by white New Yorkers and was denied to Amanda Knox by black readers of “The Root”.   The range of empathy varies in terms of both intensity and scope.  We feel wrongs most intensely when they’re done to ourselves and, beyond ourselves, the degree to which we identify with the constituent members of the various communities with which we have aligned ourselves will dictate the intensity of abhorrence and rage we feel at wrongs done to others and, in reverse, the intensity of outrage we expect from others when we, ourselves, are wronged.  After ourselves, the intensity of our empathy (and expectation of empathy in return) burns hottest for those we’ve decided we love, followed by those we’ve decided we like, followed again by those who we’ve decided are “like us”.  Those who are “not like us very much” rarely benefit from the protection afforded by our indignation over wrongs, while those who are “not like us at all” can reasonably expect to never enjoy it.  It follows then that our own individual senses of empathy do not extend equally and evenly over the broad scope of humanity, but rather are proportional to the degree to which we identify with a given individual who may lay claim to our empathy by virtue of having been wronged. 

 

Empathy flows in an unrestricted flood to those who stand closest to us in our lives (what, for example, would most parents not do for their children?), but is reduced to the barest trickle by the time need of it reaches those who we perceive to stand furthest from us.  To the extent that those who stand furthest are also likely objects of self-aggrandizing exploitation, even that trickle of empathy is cut off by means of the excuses we create for ourselves (the walls we build) to deny it to those who, notwithstanding their distance, nonetheless, deserve it. 

 

The example of the schoolyard bully is sufficiently generic in its cultural scope as to recommend it as a teachable metaphor for the broad phenomenon of status theft.  Anyone who has ever gone to school has experienced a bully and so, can relate, either as victim, enthusiastic supporter, indulgent observer, gratefully overlooked victim or, perhaps, as the bully himself, to his (or her) activities.  Yet the bully metaphor is universally applicable to any manifestation of the almost infinite human inclination to accrue status to one’s self by means of stealing it from someone else.  Homophobia, misogyny, religious intolerance and xenophobic nationalism are just a few of the most common incarnations of status theft projects; yet as different and varied as the evident details of each of these projects are, at their core they are like manifestations of this ubiquitous status-seeking behavior.

 

Just as homophobia is status theft that uses sexual orientation as the criteria for identifying its victims, misogyny is status theft based on gender, xenophobic nationalism is status theft based on country of origin and religious intolerance is status theft based on belief, that thing we call racism is nothing less, but also, nothing more, than status theft based on race.  While the victims of each of these various projects may have cause to feel their own particular afflictions are more intolerable than, and so, are in more urgent need of redress than those of other victimized groups, the essence of their individual grievances are fruit of the same noxious tree.  In response to these grievances, we set about to hack away and the one or the other branch that happens to yield the particular bitter fruit that we, in the moment, find most obnoxious, yet in failing to see it as all part of the same pathology, it never occurs to us to take an ax to the tree itself and chop it down. 

 

Back to the Girl

 

I understand now why, despite having been victimized by many of the same mechanics of injustice that have afflicted black Americans for centuries, so many blacks feel compelled to loathe Amanda Knox.  Being white, she exists beyond the reach of their capacity for empathy – not as a human being entitled by virtue of common suffering to support and solidarity, but rather, as an acceptable object of self-aggrandizing exploitation.     She cannot be tolerated by blacks as a victim of the same species of police abuse as was inflicted upon the Central Park Five, the Scottsboro Boys or the Groveland Four because to acknowledge her as a victim likewise compels an intolerable claim upon their empathy.  If she cannot be wronged, she must, therefore, be vile.  She must be the conniving white race criminal who, like Charles Stuart, committed a heinous crime and then implicated the nearest black guy to save her own hide.  That this belief is in contravention of all known facts and doesn’t even make sense in the context of the horrors she endured is quite beside the point.  Status is status, and for people who for centuries have consistently been denied the status they were due, the self-aggrandizing high inherent in vilifying a young white girl existing firmly in the realm of “not like us at all” eclipses by a wide margin any scruples that nominally functioning capacities for empathy would normally be expected to provoke.  Many blacks loathe Amanda Knox not because it is logical, reasonable, fair or just, but because their sense of self and community simply demands it. 

 

Most modern race theories hold that race is sociological construct that arbitrarily endows superficial phenotypical differences with irrational, yet profound social meaning.  As Shakespeare had Hamlet say, “there is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”, and so it is with race. If Shakespeare and contemporary race theorists are correct, then my question – “When was it that blacks became so goddamn white?” - is poorly phrased.  The question is not when blacks became white, but rather, when did being black ever become something that being white wasn’t. The reactionary bile heaped upon a 20 year old white college coed by black readers of Philip W. D. Martin’s article in “The Root” points to a fact that should be intuitively obvious to everyone – that beneath the sociological construct that thinking has made so, blacks have always been white.

  

 

The World We’ve Created

 

 

My interest in race grew from indignation that I felt over a vicious ordeal that someone who I empathized with had suffered.  What I have come to understand as a result is that irrational cruelty of the sort visited upon an Amanda Knox is not an aberration – it is a ubiquitous manifestation of our own, utterly status-coveting human natures.   We give ourselves permission to despise others because doing so helps us to feel better about ourselves. 

 

America’s racial history is a testament to the perverse yet profound allure of the human propensity to status theft.  The, comparatively speaking, rather mild consequences of status theft suffered by a particular college coed with whom I happened to identify were, in America, visited in far more brutal and enduring forms upon African slaves and their descendants.  That, “rather mild consequences” in this context involved four years in an Italian prison for a crime she didn’t commit, internationally celebrated destruction of her reputation, death threats directed at herself, her parents, her younger sisters, to be thought of by millions as depraved, a witch, a whore, a murderess……and yes, by some self-aggrandizing status thieves, a Charles Stuart-style “racist” provides a benchmark against which to measure the scope of the truly profound depredations visited upon hundreds of millions of American blacks over the course of four centuries. 

 

 

Yet while this difference exists and must, of course, be acknowledged, to do so risks making a zero-sum competition of human suffering whereby the horrible depredations visited upon one individual or group are made to seem trivial by comparison to the even more horrible depredations visited upon another.  Indeed, the perverse, self-aggrandizing imperatives of status virtually assures that competing aggrieved groups set about to battling with each other over whose suffering is worse, whose grievances are most legitimate and whose needs are most urgently in need of redress.  In a war necessarily fought with tactics of suffering marginalized, legitimacy denied and action deferred, the victims become the victimizers.  When these competing streams of contempt are added to the contempt that actuates the original oppression, it creates a kind of cascade of contempt that permeates itself throughout the entire society.  Contempt – the permission we give ourselves to denigrate, belittle, marginalize and exploit others in order to aggrandize ourselves – becomes normative, and leeches out to afflict not only its originally targeted victims, but indeed, everyone…..including the original status thieves themselves. 

 

 

On a very microscopic scale, Philip W. D. Martin’s article excoriating Amanda Knox was a status theft project whose goal was to marginalize Knox’s suffering and cast her, instead, as a practitioner of racial mendacity.  In doing this, what Martin was forced to sacrifice was the opportunity to use Knox’s story to illustrate that particular species of terror – coercive, unmonitored police interrogations – that is routinely visited upon the group of afflicted constituents with whom he deeply identifies.  In effect, to make Knox into a race criminal, he was forced to overlook as irrelevant the suffering endured by the Central Park Five, the Groveland Four, the Scottsboro Boys along with an untold number of black victims of the very same type of interrogations that Knox was compelled to endure. 

 

 

On a broader, societal scale, however, we see exactly the same sacrifices to rational self-interest that Martin tricked himself into with his vilification of Knox in the utterly self-destructive neo-conservative politics of the last 40 years.  Although whites living in poverty are almost double the number of similarly afflicted blacks, a mistaken belief that poverty is exclusively a black problem combined with the contempt for blacks to which our nation over its history has habituated itself to has created a political environment whereby the creation of rational pathways out of that poverty are rejected…..with a sneer.  Although white children born to single mothers outnumber black children born to single mothers by 200,000, the mistaken belief that such mothers are always black combined with habituated contempt for blacks that inspires a belief that all such mothers are inherently irresponsible conspires politically to ensure that those mothers, and their children, do not receive the infrastructure, support and tools they need to create decent lives for themselves.  These, and countless other examples, are the very real “wages of whiteness” inherent in the ancient status bargain.  And they begin exactly where Phillip W. D. Martin began – with self-aggrandizing contempt for the cruel suffering of another human being; suffering that by any objective standard demands the indignation, the support and the activism of any nominally functioning moral human being.

 

Conclusion

 

 

Everything I know about race I learned from a twenty year old white girl. 

 

 

What began as indignation over a bad thing that had happened to someone who was “like me” has evolved, I think….I hope…..I self-aggrandizingly assert, a deeper understanding of human nature, its pitfalls and its promise.  We are status whores, you and me, and possess within ourselves the capacity to do horrible things to each other in order to make us each feel better about ourselves.   Yet despite the undeniable harm we can do to each other, we also need each other.  Everything I know about myself, I know because you exist.  Everything you know about yourself, you know because I exist.  Alone we are nothing, and it is only when we are together that we become something.  What that something is...or can be….depends on how we each chose to feed our own status addiction.  If we choose to feed it by stealing status from each other – by demeaning each other, belittling each other, marginalizing each other and exploiting each other – we may, each of us, indeed enjoy the benefits of an occasional status high, yet with each dose of self-aggrandizing nastiness we serve up to each other, we create pathways for contempt which, sooner or later, no matter how clever we think we are, will lead back to ourselves and our children.  If, however, we choose to feed our additions through barter…..by risking our status in the hope of receiving more in return….we create pathways of mutual respect, courtesy, kindness and, most valuable of all, empathy upon which we can build some hope of consistently relying.