Observers have tried to fit multiple theories onto why Americans are so singularly stingy toward ourselves: Is it a libertarian ideology? The ethos of the western frontier? Our founding rebellion against government? When I first started working at Demos in my early twenties, the organization had a project called Public Works that tried to understand antigovernment sentiment and find ways of communicating that would overcome it. Community-based advocates who were fighting for things like food stamps, public transit, and education funding sought the project’s help as they faced resistance both in their legislatures and when knocking on doors. Public Works’ research revealed that people have fuzzy ideas about government, not understanding, for example, that highways, libraries, and public schools are, in fact, government. The project encouraged advocates to talk about government as “public structures” that build economic opportunity, with a goal of activating a mindset of “citizens” as opposed to “consumers” of public services.
As I sat in Demos’s staff meeting listening to the two people leading the project present their research, I took notes and nodded. I was just an entry-level staff person not involved in the project, but when the presentation wrapped, I raised my hand. The two presenters were white, liberal advocates from Texas who had spent their lives pushing for economic fairness and opportunity for children. I had no research experience in communications, but having grown up in the 1980s and ’90s, I had the impression that every time anybody in politics complained about government programs, they invoked, explicitly or otherwise, lazy Black people who were too reliant on government. So, I had to ask, “Did race ever come up in your research?” It turned out they hadn’t even asked the question.
The organization eventually stopped working on the Public Works project. Years later, when I set out on my journey to find the roots of our country’s dysfunction, I had a chance to come at the question again—but this time, informed by conversations with community organizers, social scientists, politicians, and historians who did ask the question, I was able to discover a more convincing rationale for why so many Americans had such a dim view of government.
white southerner named Hinton Rowan Helper published a book called The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It. Helper had taken it upon himself to count how many schools, libraries, and other public institutions had been set up in free states compared to slave states. In Pennsylvania, for instance, he counted 393 public libraries; in South Carolina, just 26. In Maine, 236; in Georgia, 38. New Hampshire had 2,381 public schools; Mississippi 782. The disparity was similar everywhere he looked.
Helper was an avowed racist, and yet he railed against slavery because he saw what it was doing to his fellow white southerners. The slave economy was a system that created high concentrations of wealth, land, and political power. “Notwithstanding the fact that the white non-slaveholders of the South are in the majority, as five to one, they have never yet had any part or lot in framing the laws under which they live,” Helper wrote. And without a voice in the policy making, common white southerners were unable to win much for themselves. In a way, the plantation class made an understandable calculation: a governing class will tax themselves to invest in amenities that serve the public (schools, libraries, roads and utilities, support for local businesses) because they need to. The wealthy need these assets in a community to make it livable for them, but also, more important, to attract and retain the people on whom their profits depend, be they workers or customers.
For the owners in the slave economy, however, neither was strictly necessary. The primary source of plantation wealth was a completely captive and unpaid labor force. Owners didn’t need more than a handful of white workers per plantation. They didn’t need an educated populace, whether Black or white; such a thing was in fact counter to their financial interest. And their farms didn’t depend on many local customers, whether individuals or businesses: the market for cotton was a global exchange, and the factories that bought their raw goods were in the North, staffed by wage laborers. Life on a plantation was self-contained; the welfare of the surrounding community mattered little outside the closed system.
With his book, Hinton Rowan Helper aimed to destroy that system. He even took on the most common objection to abolition at the time: the question of how to compensate slave owners for their losses (which President Lincoln managed for District of Columbia slave owners loyal to the Union during the Civil War, at three hundred dollars per enslaved person). But Helper argued that owners should actually have to compensate the rest of the white citizens of the South, because slavery had impoverished the region. The value of northern land was more than five times the value of southern land per acre, he calculated, despite the South’s advantage in climate, minerals, and soil. Because the southern “oligarchs of the lash,” as he called them, had done so little to support education, innovation, and small enterprise, slavery was making southern whites poorer.
Today, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, nine of the ten poorest states in the nation are in the South. So are seven of the ten states with the least educational attainment. In 2007, economist Nathan Nunn, a soft-spoken Harvard professor then in his mid-thirties, made waves with a piece of research showing the reach of slavery into the modern southern economy. Nunn found that the well-known story of deprivation in the American South was not uniform and, in fact, followed a historical logic: counties that relied more on slave labor in 1860 had lower per capita incomes in 2000.
He was building on global comparative research by Stanley Engerman and Kenneth Sokoloff, which found that “societies that began with relatively extreme inequality tended to generate institutions that were more restrictive in providing access to economic opportunities.” Nunn’s research showed that although of course slave counties had higher inequality during the era of slavery (particularly of land), it wasn’t the degree of inequality that was correlated with poverty today; it was the fact of slavery itself, whether on large plantations or small farms. When I talked to Nathan Nunn, he couldn’t say exactly how the hand of slavery was strangling opportunity generations later. He made it clear, however, that it wasn’t just the Black inhabitants who were faring worse today; it was the white families in the counties, too. When slavery was abolished, Confederate states found themselves far behind northern states in the creation of the public infrastructure that supports economic mobility, and they continue to lag behind today. These deficits limit economic mobility for all residents, not just the descendants of enslaved people.
rests on a web of mutuality, a willingness among all involved to share enough with one another to accomplish what no one person can do alone. In a sense, that’s what government is. I can’t create my own electric grid, school system, internet, or healthcare system—and the most efficient way to ensure that those things are created and available to all on a fair and open basis is to fund and provide them publicly. If you want the quality and availability of those things to vary based on how much money an individual has, you may argue for privatization—but even privatization advocates still want the government, not corporations, to shoulder the investment cost for massive infrastructure needs. For most of the twentieth century, leaders of both parties agreed on the wisdom of those investments, from Democratic president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Depression-era jobs programs to Republican president Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System to Republican Richard Nixon’s Supplemental Security Income for the elderly and people with disabilities.
Yet almost every clause of the American social contract had an asterisk. For most of our history, the beneficiaries of America’s free public investments were whites only. The list of free stuff? It’s long. The Homestead Act of 1862 offered 160 acres of expropriated Indigenous land west of the Mississippi to any citizen or person eligible for citizenship (which, after the 1790 Naturalization Act, was only white immigrants) if they could reach the land and build on it. A free grant of property! Fewer than six thousand Black families were able to become part of the 1.6 million landowners who gained deeds through the Homestead Act and its 1866 southern counterpart. Today, an estimated 46 million people are propertied descendants of Homestead Act beneficiaries.
During the Great Depression, the American government told banks it would insure mortgages on real estate if they made them longer-term and more affordable (offering tax deductions on interest along the way)—but the government drew red “Do Not Lend” lines around almost all the Black neighborhoods in the country with a never-substantiated assumption that they would be bad credit risks.
The New Deal transformed the lives of workers with minimum wage and overtime laws—but compromises with southern Democrats excluded the job categories most Black people held, in domestic and agricultural work. Then the GI Bill of 1944 paid the college tuition of hundreds of thousands of veterans, catapulting a generation of men into professional careers—but few Black veterans benefited, as local administrators funneled most Black servicemen to segregated vocational schools. The mortgage benefit in the GI Bill pushed the postwar white homeownership rate to three out of four white families—but with federally sanctioned housing discrimination, the Black and Latinx rates stayed at around two out of five, despite the attempts of veterans of color to participate.
The federal government created suburbs by investing in the federal highway system and subsidizing private housing developers—but demanded racial covenants (“whites only” clauses in housing contracts) to prevent Black people from buying into them. Social Security gave income to millions of elderly Americans—but again, exclusions of job categories left most Black workers out, and southern congressmembers opposed more generous cash aid for the elderly poor. You could even consider the New Deal labor laws that encouraged collective bargaining to be a no-cost government subsidy to create a white middle class, as many unions kept their doors closed to nonwhites until the 1960s.
Between the era of the New Deal and the civil rights movement, these and more government policies worked to ensure a large, secure, and white middle class. But once desegregation lowered barriers, people with power (politicians and executives, but also individual white homeowners, business owners, shop stewards, and community leaders) faced the possibility of sharing those benefits. The advantages white people had accumulated were free and usually invisible, and so conferred an elevated status that seemed natural and almost innate. White society had repeatedly denied people of color economic benefits on the premise that they were inferior; those unequal benefits then reified the hierarchy, making whites actually economically superior. What would it mean to white people, both materially and psychologically, if the supposedly inferior people received the same treatment from the government? The period since integration has tested many whites’ commitment to the public, in ways big and small.
was once graced with resplendent public swimming pools, some big enough to hold thousands of swimmers at a time. In the 1920s, towns and cities tried to outdo one another by building the most elaborate pools; in the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration put people to work building hundreds more. By World War II, the country’s two thousand pools were glittering symbols of a new commitment by local officials to the quality of life of their residents, allowing hundreds of thousands of people to socialize together for free. A particular social agenda undergirded these public investments. Officials envisioned the distinctly American phenomenon of the grand public resort pools as “social melting pots.” Like free public grade schools, public pools were part of an “Americanizing” project intended to overcome ethnic divisions and cohere a common identity—and it worked. A Pennsylvania county recreation director said, “Let’s build bigger, better and finer pools. That’s real democracy. Take away the sham and hypocrisy of clothes, don a swimsuit, and we’re all the same.” Of course, that vision of classlessness wasn’t expansive enough to include skin color that wasn’t, in fact, “all the same.” By the 1950s, the fight to integrate America’s prized public swimming pools would demonstrate the limits of white commitment to public goods.
thirteen-year-old Black boy named Tommy Cummings drowned in Baltimore’s Patapsco River while swimming with three friends, two white and one Black. The friends had been forced to swim in the dangerous waterway because none of the city’s seven public pools allowed interracial swimming. Tommy was one of three Black children to die that summer in open water, and the NAACP sued the city. It won on appeal three years later, and on June 23, 1956, for the first time, all Baltimore children had the chance to swim with other children, regardless of skin color. Public recreation free from discrimination could, in the minds of the city’s progressive community, foster more friendships like the one Tommy was trying to enjoy when he drowned. What ended up happening, however, was not the promised mingling of children of different races. In Baltimore, instead of sharing the pool, white children stopped going to the pools that Black children could easily access, and white adults informally policed (through intimidation and violence) the public pools in white neighborhoods.
In America’s smaller towns, where there was only one public pool, desegregation called into question what “public” really meant. Black community members pressed for access to the public resource that their tax dollars had helped to build. If assets were public, they argued, they must be furnished on an equal basis. Instead, white public officials took the public assets private, creating new private corporations to run the pools. The town of Warren, Ohio, dealt with its integration problem by creating the members-only Veterans’ Swim Club, which selected members based on a secret vote. (The club promptly selected only white residents of the town.) The small coal town of Montgomery, West Virginia, built a new resort pool in 1942 but let it lay untouched for four years while Black residents argued that the state’s civil rights law required equal access. Unable to countenance the idea of sharing the pool with Black people, city leaders eventually formed a private “Park Association” whose sole job was to administer the pool, and the city leased the public asset to the private association for one dollar. Only white residents were allowed admission. Warren and Montgomery were just two of countless towns—in every region in America, not just the South—where the fight over public pools revealed that for white Americans, the word public did not mean “of the people.” It meant “of the white people.” They replaced the assets of a community with the privileges of a club.
Eventually, the exclusion boomeranged on white citizens. In Montgomery, Alabama, the Oak Park pool was the grandest one for miles, the crown jewel of a Parks Department that also included a zoo, a community center, and a dozen other public parks. Of course, the pool was for whites only; the entire public parks system was segregated. Dorothy Moore was a white teenage lifeguard when a federal court deemed the town’s segregated recreation unconstitutional. Suddenly, Black children would be able to wade into the deep end with white children at the Oak Park pool; at the rec center, Black elders would get chairs at the card tables. The reaction of the city council was swift—effective January 1, 1959, the Parks Department would be no more.
The council decided to drain the pool rather than share it with their Black neighbors. Of course, the decision meant that white families lost a public resource as well. “It was miserable,” Mrs. Moore told a reporter five decades later. Uncomprehending white children cried as the city contractors poured cement into the pool, paved it over, and seeded it with grass that was green by the time summer came along again. To defy desegregation, Montgomery would go on to close every single public park and padlock the doors of the community center. It even sold off the animals in the zoo. The entire public park system would stay closed for over a decade. Even after it reopened, they never rebuilt the pool.
I went to see Oak Park for myself in 2019 and walked the grounds looking for signs of what used to be. I was able to spot the now-barren rock formation where the zoo’s monkeys used to climb. I asked the friendly women in the parks office where the pool had been, but nobody was quite sure. Oak Park used to be the central gathering place in town for white Montgomery; on that hot afternoon, I was one of only four or five people there. Groundskeepers outnumbered visitors. I noticed an elderly white couple sitting in a car in the parking lot. They saw me approaching and stared without welcome. I stood for a beat, smiling at the car window, before the man reluctantly rolled it down.
“Hi, sir, ma’am,” I ventured, getting nods in return. They appeared to be in their eighties. “Are you from around here?” More nods. “I am doing a project and was wondering if you remember when there used to be a big pool here?” The couple looked at each other, still wary.
“Yes, of course,” the man replied curtly.
“Do you remember where it was?” They hesitated, and then the woman pointed straight ahead to where they’d been looking moments before. I took a sharp breath of excitement. Had I interrupted them reminiscing about the pool? Maybe they’d met there as teenagers? I leaned forward to ask more, but the man recoiled and rolled up his window.
I backed off. Where the woman had pointed was a wide, level expanse rimmed with remembering old oak trees. The only sounds were the trilling of birds and the far-off thrum of a lawn mower.
The loss of the Oak Park pool was replicated across the country. Instead of complying with a desegregation order, New Orleans closed what was known as the largest pool in the South, Audubon Pool, in 1962, for seven years. In Winona, Mississippi, if you know where to look, you can still see the metal railings of the old pool’s diving board amid overgrown weeds; in nearby Stonewall, a real estate developer unearthed the carcass of the segregated pool in the mid-2000s. Even in towns that didn’t immediately drain their public pools, integration ended the public pool’s glory years, as white residents abandoned the pools en masse.
Built in 1919, the Fairground Park pool in St. Louis, Missouri, was the largest in the country and probably the world, with a sandy beach, an elaborate diving board, and a reported capacity of ten thousand swimmers. When a new city administration changed the parks policy in 1949 to allow Black swimmers, the first integrated swim ended in bloodshed. On June 21, two hundred white residents surrounded the pool with “bats, clubs, bricks and knives” to menace the first thirty or so Black swimmers. Over the course of the day, a white mob that grew to five thousand attacked every Black person in sight around the Fairground Park. After the Fairground Park Riot, as it was known, the city returned to a segregation policy using public safety as a justification, but a successful NAACP lawsuit reopened the pool to all St. Louisans the following summer. On the first day of integrated swimming, July 19, 1950, only seven white swimmers attended, joining three brave Black swimmers under the shouts of two hundred white protesters. That first integrated summer, Fairground logged just 10,000 swims—down from 313,000 the previous summer. The city closed the pool for good six years later. Racial hatred led to St. Louis draining one of the most prized public pools in the world.
Draining public swimming pools to avoid integration received the official blessing of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971. The city council in Jackson, Mississippi, had responded to desegregation demands by closing four public pools and leasing the fifth to the YMCA, which operated it for whites only. Black citizens sued, but the Supreme Court, in Palmer v. Thompson, held that a city could choose not to provide a public facility rather than maintain an integrated one, because by robbing the entire public, the white leaders were spreading equal harm. “There was no evidence of state action affecting Negroes differently from white,” wrote Justice Hugo Black. The Court went on to turn a blind eye to the obvious racial animus behind the decision, taking the race neutrality at face value. “Petitioners’ contention that equal protection requirements were violated because the pool-closing decision was motivated by anti-integration considerations must also fail, since courts will not invalidate legislation based solely on asserted illicit motivation by the enacting legislative body.” The decision showed the limits of the civil rights legal tool kit and forecast the politics of public services for decades to come: If the benefits can’t be whites-only, you can’t have them at all. And if you say it’s racist? Well, prove it.
As Jeff Wiltse writes in his history of pool desegregation, Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America, “Beginning in the mid-1950s northern cities generally stopped building large resort pools and let the ones already constructed fall into disrepair.” Over the next decade, millions of white Americans who once swam in public for free began to pay rather than swim for free with Black people; desegregation in the mid-fifties coincided with a surge in backyard pools and members-only swim clubs. In Washington, D.C., for example, 125 new private swim clubs were opened in less than a decade following pool desegregation in 1953. The classless utopia faded, replaced by clubs with two-hundred-dollar membership fees and annual dues. A once-public resource became a luxury amenity, and entire communities lost out on the benefits of public life and civic engagement once understood to be the key to making American democracy real.
Today, we don’t even notice the absence of the grand resort pools in our communities; where grass grows over former sites, there are no plaques to tell the story of how racism drained the pools. But the spirit that drained these public goods lives on. The impulse to exclude now manifests in a subtler fashion, more often reflected in a pool of resources than a literal one.
spent a career in politics, where the specter of the typical white moderate has perennially trimmed the sails of policy ambition, I was surprised to learn that in the 1950s, the majority of white Americans believed in an activist government role in people’s economic lives—a more activist role, even, than contemplated by today’s average liberal. According to the authoritative American National Elections Studies (ANES) survey, 65 percent of white people in 1956 believed that the government ought to guarantee a job to anyone who wanted one and to provide a minimum standard of living in the country. White support cratered for these ideas between 1960 and 1964, however—from nearly 70 percent to 35 percent—and has stayed low ever since. (The overwhelming majority of Black Americans have remained enthusiastic about this idea over fifty years of survey data.) What happened?
In August 1963, white Americans tuned in to the March on Washington (which was for “Jobs and Freedom”). They saw the nation’s capital overtaken by a group of mostly Black activists demanding not just an end to discrimination, but some of the same economic ideas that had been overwhelmingly popular with whites: a jobs guarantee for all workers and a higher minimum wage. When I saw that white support for these ideas crumbled in 1964, I guessed it might have been because Black people were pushing to expand the circle of beneficiaries across the color line. But then again, perhaps it was just a coincidence, the beginning of a new antigovernment ideology among white people that had nothing to do with race?
After all, white support for these government commitments to economic security has stayed low for the rest of the years of ANES data, through a sea change in racial attitudes. As the civil rights movement successfully shifted cultural norms and beliefs, it became rarer and rarer to hear the argument that people of color were biologically inferior. That kind of “old-fashioned,” biological racism waned relatively quickly over the decades (by 1972, 31 percent of white people subscribed to it; by 1986, just 14). Racism couldn’t still be lowering support for government antipoverty efforts today.
It turns out that the dominant story most white Americans believe about race adapted to the civil rights movement’s success, and a new form of racial disdain took over: racism based not on biology but on perceived culture and behavior. As professors Donald R. Kinder and Lynn M. Sanders put it in their 1996 deep dive into public opinion by race, Divided by Color: Racial Politics and Democratic Ideals, “today, we say, prejudice is preoccupied less with inborn ability and more with effort and initiative.” Kinder and Sanders defined this more modern manifestation of anti-Black hostility among whites as “racial resentment.” They measured racial resentment using a combination of agree/disagree statements on the ANES that spoke to the Black work ethic, how much discrimination Black people had faced as compared to European immigrants, and whether the government was more generous to Blacks than to whites. They found that “although whites’ support for the principles of racial equality and integration have increased majestically over the last four decades, their backing for policies designed to bring equality and integration about has scarcely increased at all. Indeed in some cases white support has actually declined.”
I wasn’t surprised to read that Kinder and Sanders found that people with high racial resentment opposed racial public policies such as nondiscriminatory employment and college quotas. The researchers couldn’t explain this correlation away using demographic characteristics or other beliefs, like abstract individualism or opposition to government intervention in private affairs; nor could they pin it to a genuine material threat. But my data analyst colleague Sean McElwee and I found that white people with high levels of resentment against Black people have become far more likely to oppose government spending generically: as of the latest ANES data in 2016, there was a sixty-point difference in support for increased government spending based on whether you were a white person with high versus low racial resentment. Government, it turned out, had become a highly racialized character in the white story of our country.
When the people with power in a society see a portion of the populace as inferior and undeserving, their definition of “the public” becomes conditional. It’s often unconscious, but their perception of the Other as undeserving is so important to their perception of themselves as deserving that they’ll tear apart the web that supports everyone, including them. Public goods, in other words, are only for the public we perceive to be good.
I could understand how, raised in an explicitly white-supremacist society, a white New Dealer could turn against the Great Society after the civil rights movement turned government from enforcer of the racial hierarchy to upender of it. But how to explain the racial resentment and the correlated antigovernment sentiments by the 1980s? By then, white folks had seemed to acclimate themselves to a new reality of social equality under the law. The overt messages of racial inferiority had dissipated, and popular culture had advanced new norms of multiculturalism and tolerance. What stopped advancing, however, was the economic trajectory of most American families—and it was on this terrain that racial resentment dug in.
While racial barriers were coming down across society, new class hurdles were going up. It began immediately after the federal civil rights victories of the mid-1960s, when President Johnson accurately predicted that, by signing these bills into law, he had given away the South. Over the next decade, the New Deal–era social contract that existed between white power-brokers in government, business, and labor came to a painful end. It had never been a peaceful one, but over the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, its signatories had generally seen a mutual benefit in ensuring better and better standards of living for white men and their families as they moved up from the tenement and the factory to the suburb and the office. Economic growth and wage growth were high, as were taxes (which hit their peak as a percentage of the economy in 1965). The biggest industries were highly regulated, and antitrust protections worked to prevent monopolies. During these years, the leaders in government, big business, and organized labor were often white men only years or a generation away from the same circumstances as the guy on the shop floor; perhaps this accounted for the level of empathy reflected in decisions to, for example, pay low-skilled workers middle-class wages and benefits, or spend hundreds of billions to make homeownership possible to millions with no down payment. Perhaps managers still saw themselves in workers, people they considered their fellow Americans. I often picture it literally—three white men seated in a room, signing a contract: Walter Reuther of the United Automobile Workers; Charles Wilson, the General Motors chief executive; and President Dwight Eisenhower. Their handshakes seal the deal for a broad, white middle class. Then, in the mid-sixties, there’s a commotion at the door. Women and people of color are demanding a seat at the table, ready to join the contract for shared prosperity. But no longer able to see themselves reflected in the other signatories, the leaders of government and big business walk out, leaving workers on their own—and the Inequality Era was born.
That era began in the 1970s, but the policies cohered into an agenda guided by antigovernment conservatism under the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Reagan, a Californian, was determined to take the Southern Strategy (launched by President Nixon) national. In southern politics, federally mandated school integration had revived for a new generation the Civil War idea of government as a boogeyman, threatening to upend the natural racial order at the cost of white status and property. The Reagan campaign’s insight was that northern white people could be sold the same explicitly antigovernment, implicitly pro-white story, with the protagonists as white taxpayers seeking defense from a government that wanted to give their money to undeserving and lazy people of color in the ghettos. (The fact that government policy created the ghettos and stripped the wealth and job opportunities from their residents was not part of the story. Nor was the fact that people of color pay taxes, too, often a larger share of their incomes due to regressive sales, property, and payroll taxes.)
My law professor Ian Haney López helped me connect the dots in his 2014 book Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class. Reagan’s political advisers saw him as the perfect carrier to continue the fifty-state Southern Strategy that could focus on taxes and spending while still hitting the emotional notes of white resentment. “Plutocrats use dog-whistle politics to appeal to whites with a basic formula,” Haney López told me. “First, fear people of color. Then, hate the government (which coddles people of color). Finally, trust the market and the 1 percent.” This type of modern political racism could operate in polite society because of the way that racial resentment had evolved, from biological racism to cultural disapproval: it’s not about who they are; it’s about what some (okay, most) of them do. He went on, “Dog-whistle politics is gaslighting on a massive scale: stoking racism through insidious stereotyping while denying that racism has anything to do with it.”
For a few moments in a tape-recorded interview in 1981, however, the right-wing strategist for Presidents George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, Lee Atwater, admitted to the plan:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites….“We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
In the 1980s, Republicans deployed this strategy by harping on the issue of welfare and tying it to the racialized image of “the inner city” and “the undeserving poor.” (An emblematic line from President Reagan, “We’re in danger of creating a permanent culture of poverty as inescapable as any chain or bond,” deftly suggests that Black people are no longer enslaved by white action, but by their own culture.) Even though welfare was a sliver of the federal budget and served at least as many white people as Black, the rhetorical weight of the welfare stereotype—the idea of a Black person getting for free what white people had to work for—helped sink white support for all government. The idea tapped into an old stereotype of Black laziness that was first trafficked in the antebellum era to excuse and minimize slavery and was then carried forward in minstrel shows, cartoons, and comedy to the present day. The welfare trope also did the powerful blame-shifting work of projection: like telling white aristocrats that it was their slaves who were the lazy ones, the Black welfare stereotype was a total inversion of the way the U.S. government had actually given “free stuff” to one race over all others. To this day, even though Black and brown people are disproportionately poor, white Americans constitute the majority of low-income people who escape poverty because of government safety net programs. Nonetheless, the idea that Black people are the “takers” in society while white people are the hardworking taxpayers—the “makers”—has become a core part of the zero-sum story preached by wealthy political elites. Whether it’s the more subtle “47 percent” version from millionaire Mitt Romney or the more racially explicit Fox News version sponsored by billionaire Rupert Murdoch, it works. In 2016, the majority of white moderates (53 percent) and white conservatives (69 percent) said that Black Americans take more than we give to society. We take more than we give.
Seeing this high a number among white moderates jogs a memory: I’m in the seventh grade, for the first time attending an almost all-white school. It’s a government and politics lesson, and the girl next to me announces that she and her family are “fiscally conservative but socially liberal.” The phrase is new to me, but all around me, white kids’ heads bob in knowing approval, as if she’s given the right answer to a quiz. There’s something so morally sanitized about the idea of fiscal restraint, even when the upshot is that tens of millions of people, including one out of six children, struggle needlessly with poverty and hunger. The fact of their suffering is a shame, but not a reason to vote differently to allow government to do something about it. (We could eliminate all poverty in the United States by spending just 12 percent more than the cost of the 2017 Republican tax cuts.) The media’s inaccurate portrayal of poverty as a Black problem plays a role in this, because the Black faces that predominate coverage trigger a distancing in the minds of many white people.
As Professor Haney López points out, priming white voters with racist dog whistles was the means; the end was an economic agenda that was harmful to working- and middle-class voters of all races, including white people. In railing against welfare and the war on poverty, conservatives like President Reagan told white voters that government was the enemy, because it favored Black and brown people over them—but their real agenda was to blunt government’s ability to challenge concentrated wealth and corporate power. The hurdle conservatives faced was that they needed the white majority to turn against society’s two strongest vessels for collective action: the government and labor unions. Racism was the ever-ready tool for the job, undermining white Americans’ faith in their fellow Americans. And it worked: Reagan cut taxes on the wealthy but raised them on the poor, waged war on the unions that were the backbone of the white middle class, and slashed domestic spending. And he did it with the overwhelming support of the white working and middle classes.
The majority of white voters have voted against the Democratic nominee for president ever since the party became the party of civil rights under Lyndon Johnson. The Republican Party has won those votes through sheer cultural marketing to a white customer base that’s still awaiting delivery of the economic goods they say they want. Despite the dramatic change in white Americans’ support for government antipoverty efforts, the typical white voter’s economic preferences are still more progressive than those of the Republican politicians for whom they vote. I looked at the two economic issues that have been top priority for Republicans in Washington since 2008, healthcare and taxes. Republican politicians have thoroughly communicated their positions on these issues to their base through campaign ads, speeches, and the conservative media echo chamber, so one would think that their voters would get the message. That message is: cut taxes whenever possible and oppose government involvement in healthcare. But 46 percent of Republicans polled in the summer of 2020 actually supported a total government takeover of health insurance, Medicare for All—even after a Democratic primary where the idea was championed by a Democratic Socialist, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. Zero Republican politicians support this policy, and almost all voted in 2017 to repeal the relatively modest government role in healthcare under the Affordable Care Act. On taxes, nearly half of Republican voters support raising taxes on millionaires by 4 percent to pay for schools and roads, but the Republican Congress of 2017 reduced taxes by more than a trillion dollars, mainly on corporations and the wealthy. In the Inequality Era brought to us by racist dog-whistle politics, white voters are less hostile to government policies that promote economic equality than the party they most often vote into power. But vote for them they do. Racial allegiance trumps.
Most white voters will deny that racism has anything to do with their feelings about government. And many political pollsters will believe them. For instance, in fall 2009 focus groups, conservative anti-Obama Republicans mentioned race only in order to complain that they couldn’t express their opposition to Obama without being labeled racists. The influential Democratic pollsters Stan Greenberg and James Carville, who were conducting the focus groups, took them at their word, writing in their summary of the findings, “The press and elites [who] continue to look for a racial element that drives these voters’ beliefs…need to get over it.” But they were missing how political race-craft works. There is such a strong cultural prohibition on being racist (particularly during the color-blind triumphalism in the wake of Obama’s election) that it’s important to look at what voters feel and perceive, not just what they say. Race isn’t a static state; it’s better understood as an action, and one of its chief functions is to distance white people from people who are “raced” differently. When race is introduced in this fashion to white voters, it activates seemingly race-neutral reactions such as demonization, distrust, zero-sum thinking, resistance to change, and resource hoarding. Note how Greenberg and Carville followed the section in their memo advising commentators to “get over” the role of race in opposition to President Obama:
They are actively rooting for Obama to fail as president because they believe he is not acting in good faith as the leader of our country. Only 6 percent of these conservative Republican base voters say that Obama is on their side, and our groups showed that they explicitly believe he is purposely and ruthlessly executing a hidden agenda to weaken and ultimately destroy the foundations of our country.
Experts on the way racialized thinking operates would read the same comments and see the fingerprints of racism all over them. In studying the same anti-Obama sentiment during the same period, psychologist Eric Knowles and his colleagues devised experiments to minimize the silencing impact of social desirability (that is, giving answers you know society wants you to give); to analyze based on implicit, not explicit, bias; and to control for other rationales such as ideology and partisanship. With all that stripped away, racial prejudice remained. They explained, “People may fail to report the influence of race on their judgments, not because such an influence is absent, but because they are unaware of it—and might not acknowledge it even if they were aware of it.”
There are many white Americans who think of themselves as nonracist fiscal conservatives and who are sincerely “unaware” of the influence of race on their judgments, as Knowles describes. Then there are the increasing numbers of white Americans who are aware of the influence of racism and yet do not acknowledge it—further still, they claim that it’s the liberals and the people of color who are the racists. This is the narrative they receive from millionaire right-wing media personalities, and hysteria over Obama’s secret plan for racial vengeance was one of their mainstay narratives during his presidency. Here’s Rush Limbaugh:
Obama has a plan. Obama’s plan is based on his inherent belief that this country was immorally and illegitimately founded by a very small minority of white Europeans who screwed everybody else since the founding to get all the money and all the goodies, and it’s about time that the scales were made even….It’s always been the other way around. This is just payback. This is “how does it feel” time.
It sounds a lot like Greenberg and Carville’s focus group respondents, but with the race part dialed all the way up. Here’s Glenn Beck: “Have we suddenly transported into 1956 except it’s the other way around?…Does anybody else have a sense that there are some that just want revenge? Doesn’t it feel that way?” Or Bill O’Reilly: “I think Mr. Obama allows historical grievances—things like slavery, bad treatment for Native Americans, and U.S. exploitation of Third World countries—to shape his economic thinking…leading to his desire to redistribute wealth, thereby correcting historical grievance.” Just what were the anti-white comeuppance policies Obama was pushing to merit these reactions? Economic recovery from the financial crisis and the radical idea that wealthy people and businesses depended on public investments such as roads and the internet.
Racism, then, works against non-wealthy white Americans in two ways. First, it lowers their support for government actions that could help them economically, out of a zero-sum fear that it could help the racialized “undeserving” as well. Yet racism’s work on class consciousness is not total—there are still some New Deal–type economic policies that the majority of white Americans support, like increasing the federal minimum wage and raising taxes on the wealthy. But the racial polarization of our two-party system has forced a choice between class interest and perceived racial interest, and in every presidential election since the Civil Rights Act, the majority of white people chose the party of their race. That choice keeps a conservative faction in power that blocks progress on the modest economic agenda they could support.
Political scientists Woojin Lee and John Roemer studied the rise of antigovernment politics in the late 1970s, ’80s, and early ’90s and found that the Republican Party’s adoption of policies that voters perceived as anti-Black (opposition to affirmative action and welfare, harsh policing and sentencing) won them millions more white voters than their unpopular economic agenda would have attracted. The result was a revolution in American economic policy: from high marginal tax rates and generous public investments in the middle class such as the GI Bill to a low-tax, low-investment regime that resulted in less than 1 percent annual income growth for 90 percent of American families for thirty years. According to Roemer and Lee, the culprit was racism. “We compute that voter racism reduced the income tax rate by 11–18 percentage points.” They conclude, “Absent race as an issue in American politics, the fiscal policy in the USA would look quite similar to fiscal policies in Northern Europe.”
In the social democracies of Northern Europe, families are far more economically secure; middle-class workers there don’t have American families’ worries about their healthcare, retirement, childcare, or college for their kids. But if government tried to secure these essential public benefits for families in the United States, in the political culture of the last two generations, it would signal a threat to the majority of white voters. Government help is for people of color, the story goes. When you cut government services, as Reagan strategist Lee Atwater said, “blacks get hurt worse than whites.” What’s lost in that formulation is just how much white people get hurt, too.