1974 Boston Anti Busing Protestors / Future Trump Supporters?
I grew up in a funny situation. As I watch the 2016 election unfold, I can’t help but think that this funny situation is now playing out on a national scale. While I certainty don’t have all the answers, I feel like I have some perspective on what is going on and that I can hopefully add a couple of helpful ideas. See, while I am voting Democrat now, I grew up as a deplorable.
It didn’t start out that way. in fact, the opposite seemed true: my parents were classic white middle class liberals. We went to a Unitarian Church, attended no nuke rallies and voted Democrat. I was raised with glowing stories of how my grandfather was friends with Eleanor Roosevelt and helped her start the UN. We liked science, books and art. We often spent weekends in the city going to the Guggenheim or Whitney museums. I was told that I was one day going to go to college and be someone in the world.
What makes this situation funny (for me at least) is that I grew up in Yonkers NY- a suburb of NYC. Recently HBO made a mini series about all the craziness that happened in Yonkers when I was growing up (One clear sign that you have emotional baggage to deal with is when HBO decides to make a mini series about your childhood).
Tea Party Rally? Not Yet
I was born in 1974, the same year that court-ordered busing happened in Boston. The court ruled that the Boston school system was to be integrated. History.com says that integration “was met with massive protests, particularly in South Boston, the city’s main Irish-Catholic neighborhood.”
I was obviously too young to remember what my parents thought of the people in Boston but I would strongly suspect my parents thought that the Irish-Catholic white community in Boston was racist and deplorable. After all we were good (white) liberals.
Then in the mid 1980’s the NAACP won court-ordered desegregation of not only the schools but housing in Yonkers and all of the sudden my kindly white neighbors and my nice white liberal family were thrust in the role of national villains. We were seeing the world form the eyes of the deplorables and it was tough.
I am not going to argue that my neighbors were not racist (I’m sure they were) or that the NAACP was wrong (I’m sure they had a lot of valid points). I’m just saying that once one gets cast in the role of the villain it is hard to get out, especially if you are simple working class families without a team of lawyers or PR agents. I am simply arguing that I get it when I see headlines like this:
“Elites and media really hate Donald Trump voters”
nypost.com/…
“Donald Trump Supporters Mostly Uneducated, New Polls Find”
www.inquisitr.com/...
and even this
“Antiscience Beliefs Jeopardize U.S. Democracy”
www.scientificamerican.com/...
or this
“NASA Faked the Moon Landing—Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax”
pss.sagepub.com/...
To me, the answer is that it’s all about classism but I will explain how I came to this point of view...
Welcome to Yonkers. I know the guy who made that sign so I had to put it in. He is a cool guy,
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Welcome to Yonkers. I was 12 when everything changed for me.
The NY Times described the conflict as: www.nytimes.com/...
"In 1985, a federal judge ruled that the city of Yonkers, just north of the Bronx, had purposely segregated its citizens by deliberately cramming all public housing into one square mile. He ordered the city to integrate by building new housing for poor minority residents on the white, middle-class side of town, inciting a three-year, angry, sometimes violent fight that made headlines around the country and brought Yonkers to the brink of bankruptcy before it was finally forced to comply."
There is a decent 48 Hours episode on YouTube you can check out to hear real voices of those involved. It’s long so please don’t watch it unless you really want to.
That said, just a couple minutes in, Dan Rather frames the whole conflict in terms MLK’s dream of racial equality and then cuts to a city council hearing where a white resident says:
“We are the hard working
We are the bill paying
We are the tax paying
and yes we are the law abiding backbone of American society”
What does he mean by that? Was it racism? Juxtaposed next to the speech about MLK’s dream, the producers of 48 Hours clearly think that he is talking about the old racist narrative of hard working white people vs. lazy brown people.
In thinking about the role of racism in all of this, I prefer the words of the pro-integration mayor who eventually would kill himself due to the stress of the job:
“Certainly there is a component of racism to this on the part of some people but I think if we looked within ourselves we all have our own prejudices and imperfections and the people of Yonkers are no different.”
What are the other components? If you look carefully, this episode of 48 Hours shows that there is ANOTHER conflict happening. It is a CLASS conflict. Not between poor and middle class. This class conflict is between wealthy and working class whites. Another related component is systematic racism. The overall drivers of the drug war, rejection of resumes with black names and bank redlining were never going to be addressed. Instead it was all going to be about the individual racist actions of working and middle class whites. The cost of social change was going to be pushed down by the elite to those with the least defenses.
Hero firefighter and Yonkers resident Micheal Fahy who died last month
The simple description by the NY Times of the residents of Yonkers as “middle class” paints a distorted picture. In news reports it was often called the "wealthier" side of town, which is literally true. The problem is that it suggests that this side of town is actually wealthy. It is not. It is working and lower middle class white folk.
These whites were mostly Irish, Italians and Jews. Some Albanians thrown in too. When one of the members of the gang Tanglewood Boys snitched, he helped convict members of the Lucchese crime family. At their best, the white residents of Yonkers were hard working cops and hero firefighters. Just last month, a Yonkers resident and NYC firefighter, Micheal Fahy, died on the job trying to make everyone safe. Micheal Fahy represents the same kind of good working people I knew from Yonkers.
Back to the late 1980’s, some quotes from white residents in the 48 Hours story that was supposed to be about racism and MLK’s dream but instead sound like clips from a Bernie Sanders rally:
“The rich get away with millions and millions in tax each year but the middle class working slob, the financial backbone of this country is being financially raped in regard to this matter…. it is a color issue, you know what the color is? Green. It’s not black and white.”
That sounds more like a class conflict than racism. And there is more….
“The constitution works for very rich people and very poor people. The people in the middle? We just pay for it.”
“We are the working middle class and you are the rich slobs.”
But to the outside world it was always about race. During the 48 hours documentary, the opposing sides go on TV to debate the issue. A lot of time is spent determining if the opposition was racist. In the control booth the TV producers say to each other:
“Producer #1: You know what’s very interesting about this, there is such subtle racism..
Producer #2: ….It’s not subtle...
Producer #1: ….but they wouldn’t agree to being racist”
A white Yonkers resident at the taping says:
“We do look racist. We get up there and we scream and yell. We are just so mad. We have to go out there and defend the fact that we are not”
“If the working class stick together we can beat these rich liberal SOBs”
Who are the rich liberal SOBs? Clearly this person is not describing the conflict as black vs. white. The conflict for this resident is “tax paying” working people vs. rich liberals.
The Bronx in the 1970’s and 80’s was a tough place.
To many of the white residents of Yonkers, they had their life savings tied up in their homes. Many fled the Bronx and the neglected poverty there. Now, they felt that all the problems of the Bronx were going to come to them and destroy the savings they built up over a lifetime of hard work.
Is there racism in that logic? Certainly. Is there also a real substantive issue? Certainly. Public housing had a long checkered past including the demolition of the famed Pruitt–Igoe housing projects in Missouri. Crack was rampant in the Bronx and devastated many lives.
In fact the Bronx was literally burning in the 70’s and 80’s.
Property owners who had waited too long to try to sell their buildings found that almost all of the property in the South Bronx had already been
redlined by the banks and insurance companies. Unable to sell their property at any price and facing
default on back property taxes and mortgages, landlords began to burn their buildings for their insurance value.
The threat of losing the value of all your life savings is an emotional issue. And a legitimate one. One that required someone to break down the issues and really discuss them. To see that there was legitimate grievance and some legitimate points on all sides. What happened instead? The residents of Yonkers were called ignorant and racist. Were they racist? Yes. Was it their entire argument? No
Is this a super tricky place to be? YES!!
And it was messy. Here is the perspective of the NAACP on the class issue:
'When the Governor of the state says it's not race, it's class, it only sanctions what these people are doing,'' said a county legislator, Herman Keith, who was president of the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter in 1980 when it and the Justice Department sued Yonkers for discrimination.
''When they get really mad, and they have to get really angry, then they'll say, 'I hate you because you're black.' ''
This is the problem with being a deplorable: you are caught in the middle. If you say what is 100% on your mind and express your anger that your community is being forced to change, what the world hears is your own racism. If you are high school educated, work in plumbing and have a frank personality, your faults are going to look pretty bad on national TV. You don’t have the codes and the dog whistles. You don’t even have the time to break down your own arguments into good and bad.
In many ways, the black and the white sides of Yonkers really had more in common then they thought. They were both communities of people who worked in regular jobs. They both suffered when the economy went south. They both resented the rich. And yet, we were made to fight against each other for scarce resources. The rich certainly weren’t suffering. I knew this for a fact, because the elite were our neighbors.
The white side of Yonkers was a town of Irish, Italians, Jews, Albanians and others. They were not the WASPy wealth whites we think of when we think of who held power in America. Those rich WASPs lived literally next door.
While Firefighted Micheal Fahy died on the job for the FDNY last month, a resident of the wealthy town of Scarsdale bordering Yonkers was busted for tax fraud
Among the personal expenses categorized falsely as business expenses were $100,000 for golf and country club fees, about $53,000 in property taxes for his residence, a $4,300 placement fee for a nanny/housekeeper and $345 for a Mickey Mantle baseball card.
And I’d like to throw in this micro-aggression (am I using that right?) to add some color to the relationship of Yonkers to the “elite.” Sarah Lawrence College is an top $50,000 liberal arts private school that happens to be located in Yonkers. A super fancy school in the working class town of Yonkers. How does the academic elite think of Yonkers? Well, it tries to get away from it. On it’s website today, Sarah Lawrence says that it’s address is in the rich town of Bronxville simply because it can. It gets mail from the Bronxville post office so the school has the OPTION of saying Bronxville or Yonkers on its address.
Was that lost on anyone? No. It continues to be a FU to the working people of Yonkers. In 1997 the Mayor of Yonkers tried to get the school to come out of the closet and be proud of its Yonkers roots. Although he couldn’t say it that way, instead he had to try to be nice:
“We are changing our image. Yonkers has a bright future, and we would like Sarah Lawrence to be a part of it.''”
www.nytimes.com/…
Fortunately one Sarah Lawrenece student said it rather plainly:
“The college may say it is not a racist or prejudice thing, but I think it definitely is. Yonkers is predominantly black, and Bronxville is predominantly white. I think they should just claim Yonkers, if it's in Yonkers. If it were not an issue, then they wouldn't use Bronxville.''
The map below shows the county of Westchester. To find Yonkers look in the very light section in the lower left part. The super red sections where household incomes are $150,000+ are NOT Yonkers. Residents of Yonkers were very sensitive to being judged by these wealthy communities because it was literally true: the federal judge who ruled on the case lived in one those very red areas.
Yonkers in lower left.
articles.chicagotribune.com/...
In defending his vote against the plan, Councilman Nicholas Longo described Yonkers` predicament as ``a typical case of the rich and elitist looking down on those who must work for everything they have``-a pointed dig at Judge Sand, who has a weekend home in one of Westchester`s most exclusive enclaves.
Most of Westchester is so different from Yonkers that in a 2015 New York Times op-ed on Yonkers desegregation, the writer, a former NYT reporter and author the book about Yonkers on which the HBO mini series was based seems to not know that Yonkers is in Westchester!
www.nytimes.com/...
“...Westchester County, not far north of Yonkers...”
These exclusive enclaves had much better legal protection and lawyers. The whole system clearly said to the white people of Yonkers: We will protect the wealth of the rich but your life savings can be put at risk for social progress. The sacrifice for the racist / classist / capitalist system will be yours.
If one wanted to diversify Westchester, Yonkers in the lower left was not the place to start.
This was the message working white people in Yonkers lived with every day. And it made them very angry.
(BTW. Check out the documentary Spanish Lake to see another example. www.spanishlakefilm.com/...)
How angry? Well they voted in city council members that were willing to go to jail through their votes against the judges decree. They voted for politicians who led Yonkers into massive fines and to the point of bankruptcy. They would have voted for Trump if they could have just to stick it to the ”rich liberal SOB’s” (and also simple racism too)
Amazingly the housing that was being proposed was not even that big a deal.
articles.philly.com/...
"It's really not all that drastic of a plan," said Michael Sussman, a NAACP attorney who has spearheaded the case. "We're talking about units that would amount to less than one percent of the city's housing stock. But it's become a symbol."
"At this point, it's a matter of principle," Councilman Longo said. ''(Judge Sand) is not the Pope as far as I'm concerned."
The first year that forced busing happened in Yonkers I went to 7th grade at Emerson Junior High School. It was a tough school in a poor part of Yonkers I was never supposed to go under the old rules. It was a terrible school — mostly because the students were treated like morons. For math class, instead of learning geometry we were taught how to write numbers on a check. We were all treated like idiots- it didn’t seem to matter the color of our skin. I remember sitting in math class thinking “I need to get out of here. I want to go to college.”
My main take away was that I was treated like an idiot not because of race but just because I went to the school on the poor side of town.
Below is a video the includes a student of color from Yonkers High on the poor side who transferred to a new school on the wealthier side and had the opposite experience…
“In Yonkers High {on the poor side of town], you know I would ask teachers about college and stuff but they didn’t really, you know, tell you that much. Like the guidance counselor would be the same thing. ‘Well you only need this to graduate don’t worry about getting extra credits and stuff. Over here it’s different.’”
Imagine the education that rich kids in Scarsdale and Bronxville got? I only know that when we had track meets at their high schools they would have fancy things like green grass and they didn’t have to worry about tripping over holes while running a 100 meter dash.
So is it any wonder everyone was fighting? Of course black residents wanted to send their kids to the better schools. And, of course, white residents would not want their kids going to the worse schools. It’s a tough situation for everyone. And the conflict is going to seem like it’s two sides battling each other, while in reality, it, in many ways, is just two groups of parents who want to send their kids to good schools.
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Thanks to Yonkers, I think about issues differently. For example, take the Black Lives Matter movement. To me, it seems like the BLM movement and police can unite in a plan to have cops trained and paid more. Why should therapists go the school for 7+ years and make decent incomes while this job that involves a gun take 19 weeks or training and be considered thankless? Why should being a cop be a fallback job? Why not have an alliance of poor and working class?
I see this Yonkers dynamic even more with the issue of immigration. White people in America & Europe often can’t discuss immigration without making it an issue of whether or not someone is racist. Take these recent reports from Europe:
“‘I’ve Become a Racist’: Migrant Wave Unleashes Danish Tensions Over Identity”
www.nytimes.com/…
“Is it racist to complain about EU migration?”
www.cnn.com/...
“There is a tendency to say ‘those people are racist’, which is just outrageous, absolutely outrageous. “
-Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby
scroll.in/…
I have been trying to find the language to express my discomfort with the presumption that anyone who does not welcome very large numbers of refugees into Europe with widely opened arms is somehow resurrecting the ghost of Hitler.
www.huffingtonpost.com/...
When immigration happens, the wealthy elite will not suffer much. Instead it will be the Yonkers situation all around the country: working people who are often white and lack a college degree will make the sacrifices. When they speak up, they will fail to articulate their grievances well. They won’t use the right code words. They won’t have the words to talk about the big picture. They will fail and they will look deplorable.
www.chicagotribune.com/...
Here a Trump supporter tried to call out classism when he said:
"You're white, you're male, you're the least considered," he says. "As far as white privilege, I see it. I would think it was there if I went to Princeton or Yale or if my name was Hillary or Clinton. As far as me, no."
Classist?
From the point of view of Yonkers it seems like instead of seeing that social progress and successful immigration policies requires sacrifice from the wealthy most of all, they would rather call a poor white person a stupid racist and go about their day.
Just because you drive a Prius are you better than these people?
It isn’t hard to find examples of this. Google “Stupid Trump Supporters” quickly gave me lots of examples.
(Just for the record, my 9 year old daughter says that “stupid” is not allowed in her school because it is a mean word.)
How do we approach a dialogue between working class whites and the “elites”? Probably humility is a good place to start.
(Just for the record I fully recognize that “elite” is often code for “Jew”. Again this is tricky territory)
In a good post on gracesmuggler notes about being a “good” white person:
reneeroederer.com/...
...we easily become obsessed with trying to get it right and say the right things. We are afraid of making mistakes, so we want to look enlightened and ‘woke.’
But we’re still in denial and afraid.
We stumble over ourselves to make sure people see our concerns in Facebook comments
We need the humility to know that racism is systematic and taught. We need to know it’s not about individual virtue. It’s not about being good. Liberals remember that “pick yourself up by your bootstraps” is bullshit when talking about economics. But we believe it with race.
We need the humility to face the fact that most (all?) White Americans have racism. People of color in America often (always?) have internalized racism. Racism is taught in our movies, schools, workplaces and lives. This black doll test is a heart breaking example of internalized racism:
Without this humility everyone but especially rich liberals end up acting arrogant and playing into the #1 escape valve for Donald Trump: Political correctness
For many Trump supporters, they hate that they can't speak their mind.
Weekly Sift blog notes
weeklysift.com/...
To college-educated liberals, one of the most mysterious aspects of right-wing discourse is the rage against political correctness, as if it were a problem on the scale of illegal drugs or the lack of good jobs. To liberals, PC is just a way of talking that shows respect for people and groups that have traditionally been disrespected. So if adult females in the workplace want to be called women rather than girls, or if I have to learn how to use words like cisgender and transgender, it doesn’t seem like that big a sacrifice. I grew up saying that hard bargainers jew people down, but decades ago I learned that Jews don’t like that expression, so I dropped it. It just didn’t seem like that much to ask of me.
The problem is, as Weekly Sift points out, that this isn’t what Trump supporters see as the problem:
So when a working-class person talks politics, professional-class people tacitly assume the discussion should happen in their language and be judged by their standards. And the worker’s “mistakes” are often slapped down hard: Either he is an idiot who should shut up and let smarter people talk, or his ignorance of the currently approved vocabulary shows that he is some kind of reprehensible person: a racist, a sexist, a homophobe.
So it should be no surprise that a lot of working-class whites (or even professional-class whites whose degree is in a technical field rather than a liberal art) cheer when Donald Trump bullies and insults the people they feel have bullied and insulted them.
So who then will the white working class want to lead them? They want to hear from the people who the elite says are morons and stupid. Coming across as smart and well educated is simply a sign that you can’t be trusted.
or as WeeklySift points out
I suspect that what most annoys a Trump voter isn’t the black or woman or immigrant who asks for better treatment; it’s the fellow white or man or native speaker of English who is holier-than-thou because of his newly discovered PC superiority to the unwashed masses who still use the bigoted old words.
It takes someone who is willing to have a frank understanding of human nature to understand what is happening. It takes someone who is willing to live in the world of deplorables and come up with some uncomfortable truths about the nature of the whole system.
Marxist writer Slavoj Zizek presents a model for how to do this in his analysis of the refugee crisis in Europe:
Those who advocate open borders are the greater hypocrites: Secretly, they know very well this will never happen, since it would trigger an instant populist revolt in Europe. They play the Beautiful Soul which feels superior to the corrupted world while secretly participating in it.
inthesetimes.com/…
To me, practical liberals should look at the lives of the working white communities that are undergoing change and try to think about how to make that change palatable. Let's even acknowledge that change forced by immigration of Latino cultures can be hard (even if it bring delicious taco trucks). If we walk away and leave them to deal with social change on their own, the blowback will be real and harsh. Back to Zizek:
One of the great Left taboos will have to be broken here: the notion that the protection of one’s specific way of life is in itself a proto-Fascist or racist category. If we don’t abandon this notion, we open up the way for the anti-immigrant wave which thrives all around Europe.
And the answer is really in the big picture: Let’s all join the struggle to make things work for everyone!
The ultimate cause of refugees is today’s global capitalism itself and its geopolitical games, and if we do not transform it radically, immigrants from Greece and other European countries will soon join African refugees
It will take soul searching and some real thinking. Or you can just watch this beautifully conceived SNL skit and laugh:
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PS- Yonkers was in the news again recently. One article was entitled “A Nation Gone Yonkers.” This time it was not because of desegregation but because Yonkers, like many communities in America, is going bankrupt providing good jobs to its public servants. The struggle continues!
nypost.com/…
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