
I was born white and male in the United States in 1968. Arguably the most privileged class of people in the history of the world, in the most privileged country, at around the apex of our privilege. That does not mean I was born rich, nor that everything I have was handed to me. What it means is that society was organized around helping people like me succeed, and it had been organized like that for centuries before me.
My family arrived in this country two generations before my birth. Their arrival came shortly before a pivotal moment in American history – the Great Depression. Before the Great Depression, the focus was on white male success just as it was after. But during, it looked as if those efforts were failing the exact class of people it was working to support. In response, we got the New Deal. And by we, by and large, I mean white men, as I was destined to eventually become.
The New Deal was a brand-new social contract that America made with its white, male citizens. For those who feel I am overstating white, male focus, I will stipulate that the New Deal helped some women and people of color, but I think it’s fair to say they were not the target constituency. And they were largely left out, and often purposely cut out, like the way red-lining cut out black people from mortgage assistance in the north, and farm work exceptions to benefits such as collective bargaining and child labor laws ensured southern blacks would remain exploitable for their labor.
It helped my family, though. It kept my grandparents from being overwhelmed by poverty and gave my parents the tools to climb into the middle class.
Around the time of my emerging adulthood, the social contract changed yet again. It was the 1980s and Ronald Reagan’s America decided that the wealth was distributed too broadly. The diagnosis was that broad prosperity shared by the “undeserving” was what led to inflation, unemployment, and a host of social ills such as unwed motherhood, and drug use.
This was largely a reaction to New Deal benefits being extended to formerly cut-out classes of people, most notably non-white people, under Lynden Johnson’s Great Society initiatives. To be sure, the expansion of benefits was developed within a system that was not able to fully conceive of non-whites as truly equal, so the benefits came with an overlay of paternalistic racism. As such, many of the programs were aimed at alleviating the worst effects of poverty rather than trying to help people climb the ladder of success. Food stamps, for instance, staved off starvation, and housing vouchers provided rent assistance. Whereas New Deal programs, aimed at helping white people, provided meaningful work and assistance in buying homes.
For the right wing in America, Johnson’s Great Society was a bridge too far. They felt it went against their mythical conception of America as a meritocracy, and they viewed non-whites as especially non-meritorious. They made it a mission to cut off benefits from the “underserving.”
Ronald Regan was the hero of the right that mainstreamed these ideas, but a parade of new leaders – Bush 1, Gingrich, Clinton, Bush 2 – pushed the same agenda with only minor tweaks. Their new social contract told Americans to study hard, go to college, and earn the rewards that would come their way if they did. They demanded personal investments in time, energy, and money to reap the rewards.
Once again, I happened to be in the class of people who this new social contract was custom made to benefit. I was white and male and middle class, with parents who believed so thoroughly in education, that they pushed me as a child to get the grades and went into debt to finance my education at a private engineering school. My part was to study, be obedient, and do the job I was trained for in college. I did my part, and society supplied the rewards.
But America is made up of hundreds of millions of people who all deserve opportunity. It shouldn’t matter what gender, race, or upbringing they received from their parents who may or may not have been doing their best with whatever they had available to them. Not everyone is going to go to college, nor should they. A society that needs everyone to go to college is one that is designed to fail a majority of its people – which is exactly what happened.
So now we have centuries of a social contract that unfairly, and cruelly cut out people of color, women, and indigenous peoples, and the new social contract, that started in the Regan Era, added non-college-bound white people to the list of societal outsiders, who are now wondering why they have been abandoned.
There are few remedies at this point. The historical wrongs done to all non-white and non-male members of society must be made right, and the failure of the current social contract for so many others must also be addressed. And this all must be done simultaneously. If we don’t address all of it, I fear for what the strain on our system will produce. Riots? Civil war? Fascism? All of the above?
Here’s the part that people who have received so much from our society don’t want to hear – solving these problems requires sacrifice from us. We must share some of our wealth. We cannot hold on to all of it. We cannot pass it on to our children to perpetuate the privilege.
How is the wealth collected from us? How much is collected? Over what period of time? Who does it go to? And how is it distributed to others? All are worthy questions, but a radical redistribution of wealth, of which racial reparations is only a part, has become necessary and urgent.
Such redistribution must be broad based and systematic. This cannot be voluntary or local. Wealthy people voluntarily giving up some of their own wealth to benefit others is charity, which is virtuous, but does not meet the scale or the spirit of what is required.
My preferred method of redistribution is through progressive taxation. The more you have the more you give. The less you have, the more you receive. Reparations stand aside from this a little, as all black Americans should receive reparations unlinked to their current wealth as they have been cheated out of generations of wealth, and wealthy African Americans should not be penalized for overcoming the injustice. However, reparations should also be considered wealth redistribution paid for through a progressive tax. The difference being on the receiving end, not the paying end.
I am also in favor of this redistribution being in cash, as opposed to in kind. Not food, or housing, or education – money. It is the most efficient means of redistribution, and besides, who are we to say how the money should be spent? Many people say they want to provide equality of opportunity, not outcome. Money provides the opportunity. Some may fail to thrive, despite the additional opportunities, but that is to be expected regardless of the form in which you give it.
If you are the type of person who says, “Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach him to fish, he eats for a lifetime,” I say, give him money and he can buy a fishing poll, and whatever other equipment he needs to catch fish, and he can enroll in a fishing course, if that is what he chooses to do with the opportunity provided by the money. Or he may choose some other way of feeding himself for life. I don’t know, and it’s not for me to say. And no matter how much you may think you have the right answer for how people need to behave in order to make a better life for themselves, it is not your place to say either.
So why should anyone listen to me about such things? After all, I’m speaking from a position of comfort and privilege. I have not experienced the injustice of society. Maybe I’m trying to open the pressure valve just enough to cut off the revolution before it happens so I can keep my privileged head on my privileged shoulders. I have no response that could possibly answer the charge. My motivation is beside the point anyway. I recognize that I am an imperfect messenger, but who isn’t? If you don’t have something to lose, you have something to gain, so no one is above bias. I have put my bias on the table, Do with that what you will.