White Like Me
In the film White Like Me, Tim Wise talks about how American society is centered around race and racism. He explains that white people do not think about being white because they are the majority, and they have developed policies and institutions that benefit them and not minorities. This is where the concept of white privilege comes from. Beginning with the Constitution, the white male founders of the United States included privileges for white people that other people who also lived in the country did not have. Since then, racism and racial identity has played a major role in the way American society has developed. Now the racial biases that are built into American society are so common that white people do not even realize how they affect people of color.
Laws and policies that were made after the early days of the United States becoming an independent nation continued to favor white people, and still do to this day. Even in the twentieth century when some of the issues were being worked out, there was racial bias in government policies. The policies that pulled the United States out of the Great Depression were only made laws because white Southern politicians voted for them and to get them to vote, there had to be a racist element to these laws. For instance, agricultural workers and domestic workers could not get unemployment benefits like other workers could. The majority of agricultural and domestic workers were black. The National Housing Act was another law that benefited mostly white people, so did the G.I. bill for veterans. Black veterans qualified but their privilege was not protected (Morris, 2013). Because white people benefited from these programs, they were able to accumulate wealth that black people could not.
Beyond economic issues, white people do not have to worry about being racially profiled or being stigmatized as ignorant or unintelligent. White families have twenty times more wealth than black and eighteen times more than Hispanics. Schools that are majority black also have high levels of poverty, and white job applicants with a criminal record are more likely to be called for an interview than a black candidate without a criminal record (Morris, 2013). Healthcare was often denied black people because they were too poor to afford it, and now when they can get it through the Affordable Care Act, white privileged people like the current administration represents want to take it away.
White people are oblivious to the privileges they have and to the bias against people of color in themselves and in many of the government institutions and customs of society. Some thought that when Barack Obama was elected president that it meant racism was over, but it did not mean that. He is just one black man in a population of 40 million who did an extraordinary thing (Morris, 2013). There is still a lot of injustice toward black people today nearly three years after the end of President Obama’s second term in office ended.
One of the worst injustices is that there are more black people in prison now than were enslaved in 1850. This is a form of racial control (Morris, 2013). When the drug wars were being waged in the 1970s and 1980s, black people were locked up for decades for non-violent drug crimes, but white people were not even though both groups use and sell drugs in equal numbers. Black people with criminal records once incarcerated are branded and cannot vote, serve on a jury, get welfare or have access to public housing. It is the racial caste system of the past only redesigned through the prison system.
Some white people think that the efforts to limit discrimination and prejudice are out of control and have become detrimental to whites. Some believe that racism is greater against white people than black people. Some want American society to be colorblind, which just means that white people could continue with the same privileges but no one would point out that they were the ones who benefited and people of color did not. Many conservative policies are racial policies in disguise. For instance, tax cuts for the wealthy means that rich people do not have to pay as many taxes as poor and middle class Americans do. This comes about because white, wealthy people are in office and do not want their tax dollars to fund programs to help poor people. There are just as many white poor people as black, but poverty has been framed as being a problem of people of color. Even poor white people will vote against policies that would benefit them because they also benefit people of color (Morris, 2013). That is how pervasive racism is in the United States.
Code Switching
Code switching occurs when a person speaks to one group of people, usually those they are most familiar with like their family and friends, one way and to people the work with or others not as familiar in society in another way. Wise talks about this in White Like Me when he mentions Lee Atwater, a conservative politician, who created a political strategy of speaking in code words that were abstract. These words had racism implicit in them, but unless one really thought about them, they may not detect it. Since white people are not concerned with racism, they did not think about these terms. When social welfare programs are presented as benefiting black people, they are easy to vote against if one is a white person who sees no benefit in it for them. Really social welfare is just as much for poor white people as for black, but when it is coded for black, it gets defeated (Morris, 2013). This is now a conservative political tactic.
Code switching takes place in other ways too, but it is frequently found in bilingual communities or immigrant communities where one language is spoken at home and in the community but English is spoken in school and at work or other places outside of the community according to Esen (2019) of Owlcation. Code switching is done for several reasons too. For instance, if a person does not know the word for the concept he or she is trying to discuss in their second language, they may revert to their first language to find the word for it (Esen, 2019). A good example of this is the many words from other languages found in the English language because English has no word for the concept that those words represent. The words from other languages were taught to English speakers by people who spoke that language.
Another reason for code switching to show commonality with another person (Esen, 2019). For instance, young people speak slang that their parents cannot understand among themselves and do not usually define the words for their parents because they want them to remain unknown. This then leads to another way code switching is used, to exclude others. This is often done in public when two people speak common languages and they assume a third person (or more) in the vicinity will not know what they are talking about if they speak a language besides the common language of the society (Esen, 2019). For instance, I and my cousin will often speak a different language when we are out in public because we want to criticize something like products in a store or somebody’s weird way of dressing. We figure that if others cannot understand us, then they will not be offended by us. I have also encountered people who were speaking in a language I could not understand, and I assumed they did it because they did not want me to understand.
Conclusion
Racial inequality is still present in the United States. It will remain so until people in power realize that there must be conversations among ourselves, which means all Americans, about race. They will be difficult conversations for some, but we have to come to the point where we all accept and love one another for who we are rather than what stereotype has been created about us. Then the United States will be able to put away some of the racism that is now very obvious in society.
References
Esen, S. (2019, January 2). Code Switching: Definition, Types, and Examples. Retrieved October 28, 2019, from Owlcation: https://owlcation.com/humaniti...
Morris, S. (Director). (2013). White Like Me [Motion Picture]. Retrieved October 28, 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
