Why White People Don’t Know Their Place

May 14

May 14 Why White People Don’t Know Their Place

To minimize offense to innocent bystanders, I’m going to be very euphemistic and clean up the terminology here.

I mean really clean it up.

In the bad old days in the antebellum south, plantation owners divided their workers into two groups: Field Hands and Household Servants.

(Boy howdy, how I’ve cleaned this up…)

Now, I’m going to sidestep the specific racism to focus on the real underlying problem: Classism.

American racism is like the caste system in India, samurai and peasants in ancient Japan, nobles and serfs in medieval Europe: You are born into a specific class through no effort or fault of your own and are expected to stay there your entire life.

It’s possible to drop down in class under such systems, but not to rise above one’s current status.

(There are exceptions in history; the Roman and Ottoman Empires allowed upward mobility as a reward for exceptional service, and that served as a safety valve for their societies.)

The Field Hands in the Ol’ South understood this; they didn’t like it, but they understood it.

They knew they would never be allowed to rise above their race-imposed class status, but they also knew they could improve their condition within their class.

For Field Hands, it would be as a work gang boss, or as a skilled worker who could earn slightly favored treatment as a result of their specialty.

And if they dreamed big, they could become Household Servants.

As onerous as we would find the working conditions of Household Servants today, it sure as hell beat chopping cotton.

From the accounts the plantation owners left behind and other documentation, we know they spoke of Household Servants as beloved members of their own extended families.

Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima deliberately play off that trope.

The conceit being that Household Servants were part of the ruling elite, that while there might be some minor physical differences between them and the plantation owners, they were actual kin, and as such, something special, something better than the poor Field Hands.

While the Field Hands sure knew where they stood in the scheme of things, among the Household Servants there was occasionally some confusion.

Many -- perhaps most -- were smart enough to recognize how precarious their positions were and carefully walked that tightrope, knowing they could slip and fall in the blink of an eye.

More than a few recognized their true position re the plantation owners yet still gloated over their less fortunate brothers and sisters and cousins in the fields. The expression “cotton-pickin’ hands” came from that divide, the sassy Household Servant looking down with disdain on the lowly Field Worker’s coarse and calloused hands.

But a few Household Servants -- arguably the saddest and most pathetic of that lot -- actually believed they were part of the plantation owners’ extended families.

That was delusional thinking, of course.

Bullshit of the most odiferous kind.

The plantation owners would sell a Household Servant down river in the blink of an eye if it suited them, and while there might be a few perks and privileges associated with being a Household Servant, heaven help any who dared act as if they were entitled to anything.

Especially if that entitlement was actually being an official part of the plantation owners’ families.

(Elsewhere, in the Latin American portion of the Western Hemisphere, grandees ruled over peons in a similar arrangement, the key difference being that like the Roman and Ottoman Empires, there was some provision for peons to rise in class; not much, but some.)

Now, like a satellite view of the Earth, let’s pull back one order of magnitude and look at the situation more clearly.

Every ruling class needs a middle class to act as a buffer between it and the lower class.

Sometimes that buffer is a privileged member of the lower class -- a factory foreman on first name basis with the CEO -- but typically it’s a management class set in place to take the onerous task of actually running an enterprise off the hands of the owners.

In the Ol’ South, that was every white person who didn’t own their own plantation.

The plantation owners knew full well what they were doing.

Those who actually lived on the plantations they owned kept their Household Servants close to cater to their whims, but they hired white overseers to handle the dirty business of actually running the plantation.

A dirty business of blood and sweat and tears.

Those not hired directly by the plantation owners found indirect employment with them.

They ran the trade in enslaved labor, they served in patrols and militias that enforced white rule, they wrote for the laws that benefited the plantation owners and voted for the politicians who passed them.

And those not directly or indirectly employed fought the plantation owners’ battles at great cost to themselves, they provided millions of eyes and ears looking out for any sign of uprising, they gleefully joined the lynch mobs that terrorized those Field Hands “uppity” enough to demand the same basic human dignity as the lowest, meanest (in every sense of the word) white person.

What the white people in the Ol’ South never realized was they were no better off than the Household Servants.

Oh, they had their delusions of equality, they loved to think of themselves in the words of John Steinbeck as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”, they all believed that someday -- someday!!! -- they would be rubbing elbows with all the high class plantation owners, sipping mint juleps, watching their thoroughbreds race at the Kentucky derby, etc., etc., and of course, etc.

And if their specific aspirations didn’t reach that high, they took solace in the idea that no matter how lowly their position, the plantation owners and other elites saw them as equals.

There’s a verse from the musical Oklahoma! That epitomizes this perfectly:

“I ain’t sayin’ I’m better than anybody else
But I’ll be danged if I ain’t just as good!”

This is where America’s myth of the classless society began, because if one denies class exists, one can pretend to be the equal of those at the very top especially if the upper class rewards you by agreeing you are better than all others not like you.

A purportedly classless society can only discriminate and reward a select group while oppressing all others by claiming such discrimination is based on something other than class, such as race / gender / orientation.

We claimed to be classless -- yet our foundational laws excluded women and native peoples and African-Americans and men who didn’t own property.

By definition, that’s a class based society.

But we do possess the mechanisms to create a more perfect union, and however hesitantly, however tentatively, we’ve been taking steps in that direction.

The main obstacle to that has been white America, which by and large is pretty much in the same camp as the delusional Household Servants who thought they actually were a part of the plantation owners’ families.

By and large, whites in America have eagerly bought into this idea, sacrificing enormous advantages they have, enormous rewards they could reap in exchange for a mocking fictitious promise: ”Hey, you may be poor, but at least you aren’t black!”

This is where American racism set back the country for white and minorities for centuries.

To recognize that they were genuinely to better off that African-Americans, native peoples, or Latin / Hispanic Americans would require white Americans to surrender the one thing they thought they possessed that could never be taken from them: Inherent superiority.

That was a phantasm, of course. A lie perpetrated on the gullible for the benefit of the 1% at the very top.

The African-American and Latin / Hispanic American communities suffered a lot, but at least they never had the belief of inherent superiority promoted on their behalf by the wealthy upper class.

Indeed, while they cover a diverse range of the political and social spectrum, by and large those communities never succumbed to the illusion they lived in a classless society.

Oh, no; far from it.

As a result, come 2048 -- when whites in America will drop to 49% of the population, the largest minority in a nation of minorities but a minority nonetheless -- they will find themselves bulldozed by the far more vigorous and politically astute African-American, Latin / Hispanic, and other minority communities.

It’s a day too long in coming, and it can’t get here fast enough to suit me.

When it arrives the former white majority will at long last be forced to recognize they ain’t “family” but Household Servants, and Household Servants ain’t no better than Field Hands.

I’ll close with another euphemism, a Firesign Theatre paraphrase of Buddy Holly’s infamous but wholly accurate and trenchant observation: