Recently I was reading several articles about affirmative action and I thought of what preferences I or my own family might have received over the years. I also recalled circumstances where I 
perceived I or my family suffered discrimination. It was easy to come to terms with the advantages of being a male. Relations between the sexes has a sociology all of its own. But it is not so easy to think about the advantages of being white or of being a white Protestant. There is a lot of conflict between my take on the contemporary experience of being a white Protestant (a so-called Wasp) and how that relates to my position in society.
I trace back my family roots for many generations in this country, to pre-Revolutionary times. A few of those forebearers were successful but I didn’t inherit any family fortune. Like most people with modest inherited wealth, I tend to see my success as the result of my own hard work and abilities. My retirement accounts and the down-payment on my house were saved dollar-by-dollar out of my paychecks. I worked my way up to become a relatively high-salaried professional with through some difficulties. Couldn’t someone of any race have done the same?
The Not So Great Generation
To see all the effects of race requires looking back a few generations. I left college with no student loans. Why was my father able to pay for my college education? A high school dropout when he enlisted, he was able to use the college based diploma-to-degree programs for World War II-era veterans, attended college on the GI Bill (it paid for full education costs rather than the relatively paltry contributions of today) and got a subsidized mortgage from the Veterans Administration. These were all benefits from which most veterans of color were excluded from while these programs were lavishly funding. As a homeowner, he got the mortgage interest deduction, making our housing costs minimal. As a white male he had a number of opportunities that were definitely closed or very limited to others.
While he was fairly liberal, I rarely heard my father question the unjust state of affairs in any detail. He would state the obvious when such cases unavoidably presented themselves with such statements as “It’s really not fair”. There were a number of small things he would do concerning the few blacks that we would encounter who more often than not were in some capacity of service to my family. I learned that he made a number of efforts in his professional life, but none so active as to draw excessive ire or “to rock the boat”. I also remember the occasional racially or ethnically tinged remark, less so the former than the latter. He was a man of his times.
The Not So Great Society
A large portion of American Society was happy to benefit form the great social programs of the New Deal and Fair Deal with the paradoxical effect of increasing racial inequality. A view of debates and articles at the time shows that this was not an accidental byproduct but a quite deliberate effect of the way these programs were structured. My own childhood home had a covenant built into the deed that prohibited black buyers, and first right of refusal for our neighborhood association, as did so many homes. Americans by and large thought benefiting from and ignoring a racist society was just fine.
Looking back another generation, my grandparents had what were much more substantial Social Security benefits in the 1960s, relieving my father from the responsibility of supporting his parents. Agricultural and domestic workers were excluded from the original Social Security law in an effort to deliberately exclude minorities from benefits. Most colleges routinely discriminated against admitting minorities in any number and in this era, before government financial aid (brought about in the 1970’s), and minorities were excluded from most scholarship programs.
If I’d been born a person of color in 1966, the odds are highly likely that I’d be less well off today. The majority of white people are homeowners with retirement accounts, thanks to government policies that boosted our parents’, grandparents’ and ancestors’ assets. The financial benefits of affirmative action programs are dwarfed by the benefits in the post depression and post War era, not to mention, say the Homestead Acts of 1862, which dispossessed Native Americans and Mexicans , gave hundreds of millions of acres to white settlers, and which excluded people that helped build our nation’s economy.
From White Suburbs
I attended good schools in suburbs. Resources for physical infrastructure and social spending was taken en masse from inner cities and put into the new, exclusive suburban neighborhoods. My neighborhood had no minorities (of color) to speak of, largely because of redlining practices that the government used as policy through the 1960’s that banks still practice (though hopefully to a reduced degree). The value of my parents’ chief investment, their home went up in value dramatically over the years as did the value of businesses. This meant that the tax base went up, funding my schools at a much higher rate.
Between government mortgage guarantees and denial of federal homeownership programs and infrastructure building the government practiced apartheid. A half century after the post war boom inner cities have rebuilt themselves not by reapportioning spending to inner city residents and businesses but by encouraging well educated workers and large capital to enter in the most desirable parts of inner cities. And minorities of color were once again pushed out to the least desirable areas of the inner city or newly decaying suburbs.
My father upon his own retirement went to a village in a semi-rural, affluent community of retirees and academicians, removed from urban or suburban life. He felt that the “cultural changes” with poor and ethnic whites and minorities were removed from what he remembered as a more idyllic suburb of people like himself. He thus went to small community and purchased an expensive farmhouse in a college town where he and my mother could appreciate things as they were.
To the Rural South
Thirty years after southern "Massive Resistance" begin to erode, the popular mythology is to blame Dixiecrats, but for years congressmen from all parts of the country tended to support the racial discrimination built into policies that encouraged and enforced segregation.
Policies in the South did have a national implication. The vast majority of historically black colleges and universities were in the South. Support of land grant and public colleges as well as private colleges were concentrated on schools that had little to no minority enrollment while the black land-grant schools were almost entirely ignored by federal funding. Federal aid dispensed through universities still isn’t done per enrollment or cost but by a formula created years ago which lavished the most money on the wealthiest schools. (The formula has been adjusted but the wealthiest schools have lobbied to keep the basic form intact.) It is not surprising then that my professors and classmates at the highly respected university I attended were overwhelmingly white.
Farmers’ Home Administration, the Department of Agriculture loan disbursement agency admitted that it discriminated against minority farmers through to the 1980’s, causing thousands of Black farmers, especially in the South and Midwest to go bankrupt in an agricultural system that depended upon a yearly cycle of loans and subsidies. The Small Business Administration admitted it had discriminated as well. So too was massive discrimination practiced in the contract awarding system on multiple levels of government. This changed the economies of communities.
It could be that these programs are evidence that even when successful government programs have negative consequences. Or it could just be evidence that our social programs of the time were problematic. What is inescapable is that government policies have far reaching effects on prosperity and achievement.
Learning Environment and Opportunity
Legal and practical discrimination existed in northern cities prior to suburban flight. Nevertheless the integrated inner city, with integrated schools was a boon for Blacks. Blacks from the Northeast had higher incomes and received better education than whites in the South. When blacks were left in post industrial, inner city decay and whites in the South received federal support to revitalize their educational system the situation reversed. This is more evidence that reallocation can work, right or wrong.
When there is allocation there is always the question of basis- political, strategic, equitable, etc. On principle I disagree with certain forms of affirmative action for adults because I believe in merit. But in reality affirmative action is a very limited program and where it exists it is seldom the sole criteria for selection to a position.
When President Bush weighed in with the Supreme Court against the University of Michigan’s affirmative action policy, he was acting within this long tradition of the federal government promoting the advancement of white Americans. There has been no legal challenge to Michigan’s preference for “legacy” applicants or to the preference given to low-income white students. No one from Washington discussed whether it was correct to allow foreign students with lower language skills in. Students with connection to large donors where not reviewed to see if they were held up to the highest standards. No one demanded an end to "calls to well-placed friends", well-connected guidance counselors or associates that lobby admissions staff. And he did not address the root of inequality- in school funding, unequal community funding, etc. Only the boost to underrepresented qualified applicants was attacked.
Yet everywhere we see standards being set aside. There are students and professors who do not belong in colleges because of their lack of English proficiency or writing skills. (In fact, higher education may be the place where the full yardstick of merit is most often put aside.) Professional and informal habits and mindsets that characterized our social interaction are being replaced by something far less efficient or civil. There are incredibly incompetent, poorly skilled workers who are hired to government jobs as part of ethnic patronage in bureaucratic systems. The same holds true for much of government funded and contracted employment. With more ethnic based divisiveness and lack of a cohesive national culture we see discrimination and provincialism trumping merit throughout our nation.
White Guilt
“Slavery was a long time ago,” goes the argument against preferences for African Americans. And it is true that the best-known transfers of wealth from people of color to white people – most wholesale taking land from Native Americans and Mexicans, as well as slavery – is no longer in living memory of Americans today. Segregation and legal discrimination were outlawed with the Civil Rights Act in the 1960’s and corollary legislation (which was incidentally largely dismantled in the last two decades). But long after de jure racism was past, policies with de facto racially disparate impact continued and some of the worse problems have never been addressed (such as justice for Native Americans). White people still tend to get easier credit terms, more infrastructure funding, better schools, are given informal preferences in housing and jobs, have lower conviction rates and shorter prison sentences for the same crimes, and more and access to contracts than people of color. Am I to blame for benefiting from that? Can any individual “opt-out”?
Answers are not simple in history laden cross cultural relationships. Blacks are said to have flourished at small business during segregation. After decades of alleged policies of integration along with neighborhood and business smashing urban renewal, schools and neighborhoods are more segregated than ever but black businesses have all but disappeared. It is evidence that the policies were either poorly implemented, misguided or deliberately malicious.
I also see that some things I cannot fix. Some of the Black underclass in America have a whole group of social pathologies that resulted from cultural domination, injustices of the past and current economic conditions that is something most Blacks will readily admit to. I don’t see how I can address any of these situations adequately- beyond supporting what can be done for the entire underclass. Black on Black violence; distrust rather than manipulation of the economic, educational and political system; hyper consumerism; lack of self worth- how am I to deal with these things? Many Blacks sorely lack certain aspects of social capital from years of curbed hopes and marginalization. We are all Americans but those are internal struggles that primarily the Black community can resolve. If anything, the past seems to say that white, Jewish, etc. participation in these crucial areas only degrades into paternalism or opportunism (manipulation of Black/White hostility), compounding the circumstances.
And why should I solely bear the onus when I no longer am part of the elite that can effect the sort of political and economic changes necessary?
As Wendell Berry wrote, "We are the last hope of earth / for we have no excuses, / nobody to blame but ourselves." I am sure that there is a responsibility but that should not be all that defines the existence of white Protestants in America. My group and my culture continue to have something to offer society beyond being deposed-elite, whipping boys. Over half of Americans are, after all white and at least nominally Protestant and another quarter are Catholic (Christians). The irony is that when I (and I believe that this affects me personally) am not being blamed I am being buried.
There is an entire genre of studies are about the decline of white Protestants or "Wasps". I wonder at sociologist that make such facile depictions and joyous post-mortems. For my part I see a deterioration of America, a lack of community and healthy civic life, a lack of social responsibility. I also see decay in infrastructure and profound cultural decadence. And I do believe that some of this is due to the ways in which affirmative action have been enacted.
A Change That Came
Part of the problem is however, that times have changed. I see that with my own children and my nieces and nephews entering adulthood and I see it in broader society. It also plays a part in my own professional and personal life. The policies that gave a wide swath of white Americans opportunity are largely gone. Farm subsidies and loans, small business assistance, the relative value of housing guarantees- they are all diminished. A college education is no longer the ironclad guarantee of a job and a job is no guarantee of a future. Even with two incomes families there is a great challenge.
The decline of the industrial sector and rise of the service sector makes it hard to choose educational options that provide bankable skills. Higher education became a requirement and so did the debt of associated with sky-rocketing costs. Now the costs are doubling with graduate degrees becoming the new flaming hoop. Transient employment and part time employment have become fixed features in an unstable employment environment. Home ownership costs have reached new highs as a proportion of workers’ income. Benefits and pensions have little protection after deregulation and the evisceration of union protection. Social security is no longer a retirement option.
Does this widening grimness change startling statistics such as whites having an average net worth a dozen times that of Blacks? Of course not. It does mean that we should all be concerned about societal values and growing the pie for everyone as much as distributing it more equally and justly.
Fairness in a Multicultural Society
Perhaps I have become the bugaboo angry white man, that murky mammoth sized demographic that politicians appeal to for a moment in code language during national elections. As the system seems more and more like a zero-sum game, opened door for others look like shut doors for me. I know that there are neighborhoods that I can live in, jobs that I can obtain more easily because I am a white. I also know that I am increasingly being denied rights and privileges that should belong to every American. I have no way to preserve and protect those rights the way other groups can.
America has become a nation of peoples with group identities. Many groups have a near apocalyptic perspective on the need for solidarity, self determination and influence. Less and less is there the feeling of a national enterprise but group competition. And group identity has become an expected norm for people to act upon. In this way segments of the American economy and geography have been carved up.
I have no group identity if my rights are lessened or assailed. There are no respectable white (English-Huguenot-German-American?) Protestant associations who will help me appeal. Or if I do have a group identity to appeal to, it is one based on under-spoken racism rather than open parlance.
Clandestine acknowledgment of this code language means voicing my identity is tantamount to racism. I have made the accusation that minorities have played the role of professional victim and that others still have used ethnic unity to their benefit. This accusation is partially grounded in jealousy. I can neither acknowledge privately or publicly my identity and have its benefits without reproach internally or externally. And I am being left out of the "group game" which is used to compete in society. I am sure that I don’t want others to have less but I want my family to have enough and as much; and I don’t want to be further marginalized. I want to be able to to have a fair and productive stake in larger society.
Our income levels are less than many other groups including Armenians, Jews and some Asian groups. Urban government and bureaucracy is now firmly in the hands of minorities and "ethnic whites". Higher education, law, finance, media, entertainment are all dominated by ethnic whites, etc. Federal government is dominated by red-in-tooth-and-claw ethnic cliques and incestuous elite like George Bush that have nothing to do with me or my interests. Rather than being an insider I have through the years become an All-American outsider.
Middlemen Minorities in Ethnic Discrimination.
It is not just a W.A.S.P. –Black American dichotomy anymore. There are all sorts of grays. And these grays, that sociologist term “middlemen minorities” have many advantages. The American habits of individuality in economics and inclusive, community oriented decision making in political life are foreign to many of these groups. (Cont. after picture.)
Eric Kaufman stated in his Rethinking Ethnicity “that by the late 1980’s Jews representing just two percent of the population comprised a larger share than (white Protestants) of the media elite while Jewish, Armenian, Italian and Greek Millionaires (representing no more than 10 per cent of the population) outnumbered white Protestants. Added to this the number of (White Protestant) corporate leadership and academia was cut in half in a generation.”
Middlemen minority groups have grown in recent decades, dramatically reconfiguring the landscape of American power. Obviously there are differences among these groups such as the ability to assume and cast off "majority" identity, access to capital from their homelands and ability to manipulate the American system to access resources. For more successful groups friendly policies provide support as immigrants transition into America. Government and community groups provide social programs and funding for community centers. Preferential policies are given in university admissions, scholarship are set aside for financial aid. Communities and businesses are given little scrutiny and are seldom pressed to conform to levies or standard practices. This all comes at a cost, and it has become more obvious to me that cost is often discrimination against white Protestants (and other groups as well).
There is a popular sociological theory to explain a phenomenon: many middlemen minorities come from fractured societies where a reliable system of equal justice does not exist, so they find clannishness particularly rational. They got nothing from government and what they got from larger society was through shrewdness, aggressiveness and risk; consequently they habitually give little to larger society without gain. Businessmen depend upon their extended families for protection and enforcement of contracts and negotiations of trust. So they are particularly loath to do serious business with people to whom they have no ties of blood or marriage. For white American Christians such exclusion is descried as racism and white supremacy.
Thus these middlemen minority groups have the benefit of anti-exclusionary policies that were aimed at redress to minorities like Blacks, who admittedly got a raw deal throughout American history; and now these groups have the benefit of being exclusionary themselves.
A realist might come to a disheartening (or bracing) conclusion. Seldom are people really trying to be equal. People create ethnic patronage systems and lobbies because they want more than the other guy is getting. As an illustration, property values are dictated more by the local school system and ethnic exclusion than by square feet because people want their children to have a leg up. That is to say, the current determinant of behavior is benefit and advantage.
This is why Blacks, with their desire to be equal and to integrate in the Civil Rights era were often seen as weak by some in dominant society. “Why don’t Blacks fight to take what they need and build their own communities?” seemed to be the pop sociological axiom of ethnic whites during the time of integration in big city America.
Of course those perspectives require forgetting that it was the Great Society programs that allowed so many ethnic whites, many of them recent immigrants to prosper. And I wonder if such seemingly laudable goals of those programs were simply weakness. The values that caused white Protestant men to upend their plutocracy for not being democratic enough have seemingly failed to resonate through society.
Exclusionary lobbies are formed to determine policies and to access government largess for ethnic groups here and abroad. The values of inclusiveness have provided a cover for those who appreciate my group’s useful customs, culture and institutions but would rather the actual group not be around.
A Loss to Society
It would be ethnocentric and an overstatement to attribute all decay in American life to the move away from white Protestant leadership, or even values. Samuel Huntington and others like him have achieved immense popularity by doing so. Any thinking person will condemn the overly simplistic views of such authors. Yet there has been a replacement of public values; the old: civic responsibility, traditionalism, national interest and local community building; replaced with: indulgence, selfish utilitarianism in civic affairs, and poor management and balkanization in political life.
A troubling feature of that balkanization to me is that every sort of exclusive ethnic organization is either celebrated or left to itself except those of white Protestants. The vast majority of private universities, social institutions, political institutions, etc. that are at the apex and core of America were once what today could be described as "ethnic" institutions- particular to a group and creed. That is a positive thing. What is troubling however is that for this one group alone, there is no longer any choice in the matter. In fact it seems that if there are too many white Protestants congregated into any organization or institution (private or public) a siren signal is given (often heard as the word “racism” or "intolerance") and the transgressive individuals and institutions are made clean by sacrifice to “multiculturalism” and an imposed agenda. I am in the only group who must not be over-represented, proportionally represented or exclusively represented in anything. This same argument might also be made about Protestants and Christians anywhere in America, regardless of race.
How does this relate to social and civic decay? At the heart of American culture are the Protestant values. And it impossible to separate the cultural and religious traditions that developed into the Protestant American values.
These values favor local community building; civic responsibility; social, spiritual and aesthetic values as well as commerce; protections for small, localized business over cosmopolitan, rootless conglomeration; overarching (rather than clannish) national interest; small, efficient and localized government; respect for our nation’s history and traditions; respect for the majority as well as minorities and special interests; and cross community conversations based on these core values. Underlying Protestant values that inform these positions- good works, hard work, discipline, grass roots community and salvation-based faith- are the root of what has been good in America.
Saving My Identity from the Past
Like all cultures I have my values, my culture, my way of life. Has my people’s history been an entirely good one? Of course not, but is has also not been entirely bad. Wrote neo-conservative journalist Rich Brookheiser:
“They burned witches, built railroads and wrote the Bill of Rights. They also fought wars -- against Indians, Mexicans, George III and (in the Civil War) each other. But now they are a desiccated remnant, trailing clouds of glory only in the Social Register, while the country cousins, mostly Southern, have energy without class. From George Washington to George W. Bush, from Walt Whitman to Elvis (dead or alive): such is the decline…”
I understand that few will pity white Protestants. For so many years many of us have had every advantage and every opportunity. Yet times change. It has come to pass that my group is also a minority group. We are no longer the wealthiest, the most powerful. White shoe law firms and investment houses filled with young men in the Social Register have by far and large been supplanted. We are no longer arbiters of culture- New England has long ago been replaced by Hollywood. The cultural and political contribution of my people is now one of a legacy. As a contemporary influence we are another minority group and a largely sidelined one at that.
I am not desirous of pity and I think most middle class, white Protestants are not. What I am desirous of is the chance to be just like other groups, to experience a mass identity, a commensurate voice and to choose my own group’s leadership. At this juncture in history white Christian populism is as much part of the past as Huey Long. As a white Protestant Christian is Jerry Falwell or Pat Rob
ertson suppose to speak for me? Has David Duke cornered the market for my group identity? Are there any legitimate organizational expressions of my identity?
Perhaps white Protestants do have in common what Columnist Russell Baker called a "case of majority inferiority." Or perhaps it is majority suppression. In the strictest sense a white-male-Protestant I am cognizant that I represent just over a quarter of the population. No small number, but enough that I am reminded on a daily basis that I am a minority, especially in the large metropolitan area that I live.
Edward Shils, professor of social thought at the University of Chicago, announced four decades ago: "The Wasp has abdicated, and his place has been taken by ants and fleas. The Wasp, once aggressive, is less rough and far more permissive. He lacks self-confidence and feels lost."
I am not sure that I don’t lack self confidence but Shils may be more right than ever when speaking about how I feel in society.
Epilogue: Jewish novelist Norman Mailer indicated during an interview that “Of a Fire on the Moon”, ostensibly about the Apollo 11 moonshot was really about (White Protestants). The apparent hymenopterist, Mailer, who has called white Protestants or "WASP's" "the most Faustian, barbaric, draconian, progress-oriented and root-destroying people on earth," added that he has "reached some mysterious and half-spooky conclusion that the real mission of the ‘Wasp’ in history was not, say, to create capitalism, or to disseminate Christianity into backward countries. It was to get the U.S. to the moon."
"The mind of the (white Protestant) bears more resemblance to the laser than the mind of any other ethnic group," said Mailer. "To wit, he can project himself extraordinary distances through a narrow path. He's disciplined, stoical, ritualistic, able to become the instrument of his own will, has extraordinary boldness and daring together with a resolute lack of imagination. He's profoundly nihilistic. And this nihilism found its perfect expression in the odyssey to the moon—because we went there without knowing why we went."
It was an interesting conversation as usual, despite our disagreements. I will link to some of the people and articles he mentioned when I get a chance. I wanted to add that old Times article paragraph in editing but couldn't fit it in. Maybe you or x can find a spot put in up in comments. It mentioned some organizations we discussed. See paragraph below. x
Even successful, hard working and community minded white Protestants are long been held with contempt. Wrote Time magazine in 1969: "Jews, for instance, constitute about 25% of Ivy League student bodies... Scarcely a single Wasp is a culture hero to today's youth. The banker who made Skull and Bones is no model for undergraduates', writes Sociologist Nathan Glazer, "Indeed, often the snobberies run the other way—the white Protestant, generally from a small town or an older... suburb, is likely to envy the big-city and culturally sophisticated Jewish students." "Such is the hostility to the Veiled Prophet parade, an annual Wasp event in St. Louis, that the queen and her maids of honor last year had to be covered with a plastic sheet to protect them from missiles tossed from the crowd."