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For a bulletproof analysis of how a certain kind of white defensiveness actually stems from a deep-set dependency upon people
of color, read activist and commentator Tim Wise's ZNet piece on "Breaking the Cycle of White Dependence."
Wise argues, I think rightly, that white Americans who bitterly complain about the "dependency" of minorities on government
and social supports are actually projecting their own underlying anxiety about whites' centuries-long dependence upon people
of color. In other words, resentful whites, in angrily accusing minorities of failing to solve their own problems, are actually
expressing a subliminal white anxiety over the fact that whites have depended utterly upon people of color
for virtually all the essentials of white Western life, including identity, for the past 500 years.
To support this proposition, Wise churns methodically through a historical laundry list of examples of white dependency: the
slave trade's underpinning of the modern American economy; the Naturalization Act of 1790 (which granted superior rights to
European immigrants on the backs of American-born people of color); the effectively whites-only Homestead Act giveaway of
real estate (much of which, let us not forget, was previously occupied until its owners were evicted or exterminated); the
GI Bill (which was consciously tailored to exclude most blacks, as historian Ira Katznelson has chronicled in detail and as I write about in my new book); the colonization of large portions of Africa, Asia and Latin America for resources (an extractive dependency that created,
and still sustains, Western industrialism); and more, including white American identity itself, which depends more upon its
privileged relation to "the other" than it does upon any intrinsic quality of whiteness.
Deep stuff. Wise's entire essay is worth a read. For my part, I have long believed that certain angry American white males,
in particular, constitute the biggest and neediest pack of crybabies on the planet. Without the centuries-old economic wet
nurse of black and brown sacrifice, plenty of today's white dittoheads might still be in serfdom to landowning noblemen. Of
course, many are, in a way. But that's another blog.
Thanks to Karla Scott for calling attention to Wise's piece.
(Posted 4/15/07 by Bruce A. Jacobs)
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