by Robert Jensen
George W. Bush has been unfairly tagged with the label “racist” in the
aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
It’s true that the response of the government -- at all levels, but
especially the federal government and it’s feeble emergency agency --
was inadequate and incompetent, and that the poor suffered the most,
and that the poor of New Orleans are disproportionately black. It’s
also true that Bush displayed an appalling lack of basic human
compassion in his slow reaction to the suffering.
But our president is almost certainly not an overt racist. He’s just a
run-of-the-mill overly privileged American who appears to have no soul.
I’m reasonably sure he doesn’t harbor ill will for anyone based solely
on race. Instead -- like many people in similar positions and status --
he’s incapable of understanding how race and class structure life in
the United States. His privilege has not only coddled and protected him
his whole life, but also has left him with a drastically reduced
capacity for empathy, and without empathy one can’t be fully human.
This is not a partisan attack; such a soulless existence is not a
feature of membership in any particular political party. Nor is it
exclusive to men. Though we tend to assume women will be more caring,
this deficiency among the privileged crosses gender lines; probably the
most inhuman comment by a public figure after Katrina was made by the
president’s mother, Barbara Bush. After touring the Astrodome stadium
in Houston, where many who were displaced by the disaster were being
warehoused, she said, “And so many of the people in the arena here, you
know, were underprivileged anyway, so this -- this is working very well
for them.”
In our president all we see is an extreme version of a more general
problem in an affluent but highly unequal society, in which people on
the top have convinced themselves they are special and therefore
deserve their positions.
For his entire life, Bush has sat on the very top of the privilege
pile. He is white in a white-supremacist society; a heterosexual man in
a patriarchal culture; born into wealth in a capitalist economy; and a
U.S. citizen in a world dominated by his nation. In the identity game,
it’s hard to get a better roll of the dice.
The downside to all this for folks like Bush is that privilege doesn’t
guarantee intelligence, empathy, wisdom, diligence, or humanity.
Privilege allows people without those qualities to skate through life,
protected from the consequences of being dull-witted, lazy, arrogant,
and inhumane. The system of privilege allows failed people to pretend
to be something more.
And, unfortunately, that system often puts those failed people in
positions of power and forces everyone else to endure their
shortcomings.
That’s probably the most pressing race problem in the United States
today -- a de facto affirmative-action program for mediocre middle- and
upper-class white men that places a lot of undeserving people in
positions of power, where their delusions of grandeur can have profound
implications for others.
If the deficiencies of George Bush and people like him were simply
their problem, well, most would find it hard to muster much sympathy.
But they become our problem -- not just the United States’, but the
world’s problem -- when such folks run the world.
Let’s go back to Bush’s resume. Whatever one’s ideology or evaluation
of Bush policies, it’s impossible to ignore how race, gender, class,
and nation privilege have worked in his life. By his own admission,
Bush was a mediocre student, gaining access to two of the most
prestigious universities in the United States (Yale and Harvard)
through family connections, not merit. His lackluster and incomplete
service in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War was, to
say the least, not the stuff of legend that will be told and retold
around the family hearth.
After that he went into the oil business, where he also failed. He then
used money he had managed to take out of a failed oil endeavor to buy
into the Texas Rangers baseball team, his one great “success” in the
business world. From there, despite having no relevant experience, he
was molded by Republican Party operatives into a successful
gubernatorial candidate. After a thoroughly uninspired first term, he
was re-elected governor before moving on to the White House, where the
most successful public-relations team in U.S. political history has
kept him afloat despite two illegal and failed wars, a frightening rise
in the national debt, tax cuts for wealthy that have contributed to the
gutting of the already weak social safety net, and most recently the
criminally negligent response to Hurricane Katrina.
Welcome to the United States of Meritocracy. How is it that a society
can hold onto fantasies about level playing fields and equal
opportunity when every day we turn on the television sets and see
Smiling George the Frat Boy President?
The problem, of course, isn’t limited to Bush; he’s a fraud, but only
one of many. In my life I have worked in offices of the federal
government, non-profit organizations, for-profit corporations, and
universities. In each, I have seen mediocre white men rise to positions
of power for reasons that have more to do with the informal networks
based on identity than on merit. No doubt, as a white man, my own
career has been aided by this system. I also have seen women and
non-white people advance by playing a similar game, but far less often
and typically only when they internalize the value system of the
dominant culture.
That does not mean there are no white men who are talented and
hard-working or who do not deserve the success they have achieved. It
is only to recognize that this system of unearned privilege will
regularly put into positions of power people who are unfit for the
duties they take on.
That means -- independent of the strong moral argument for equality and
justice -- subverting a system of white supremacy and white privilege
is in all our interests. In fact, the fate of the world may depend on
it.
----------------------------
Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the
University of Texas at Austin, board member of the Third Coast Activist
Resource Center (http://thirdcoastactivist.org),
and the author of The Heart of
Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege
and Citizens of the Empire: The
Struggle to Claim Our
Humanity. He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.
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