by Ijeoma Oluo
CHAPTER 4
WE HAVE FAR TOO MANY NEGROES
White America’s Bitter Dependency on People of Color
Even the most virulent American racist has to wrestle with the fact that the United States would not exist were it not for people of color. The blood that soaked this soil so it could be called America came from Native people. The earliest agricultural techniques were taught to white colonizers by Native people. The farms were worked by people of color. The buildings, roads, and railroads were built by Black Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanic Americans. Every white supremacist who claims that the United States is a white country knows that white settlers would have frozen to death faster than you can say Pocahontas if it weren’t for Native people.
And a white man who loves the rock music Black musicians invented, who quotes Dave Chappelle at the watercooler even though he never understood the jokes’ nuances, who grabs Chinese takeout on his way home to watch football every Monday night will still fix his mouth to say that he would be better off without us.
The white man who emails me to tell me that my people are a drain on society wouldn’t have a computer without Black and Asian people—not the machine, the electrical components, or the math in its programming. Mathematics itself would not exist without the Middle East. The rubber on the bottom of his tennis shoes wouldn’t exist without Native people. His grandma would have died without the pacemaker invented by Black people. And when he emerges from his mom’s basement after a day of playing video games—on a system that wouldn’t exist without Asian people—to make himself a peanut butter sandwich, the fact that the spread wouldn’t exist without a Black man sticks in his throat a little.
I do not seek out these angry white men. I don’t know any people of color who do. Yet they find us. They send us online messages out of the blue letting us know that they think they are better than us. They scream from cars telling us to go back to where we came from. Most white Americans have exclusively white friendship circles; three-quarters of white Americans have less than one friend of color.1 In this racially segregated society, some white people seem more than eager to emerge from their normal circles to find people of color to yell at. I’m surprised at how those who claim they would be better off without us can’t seem to leave us alone.
White America does not need us merely for what we contribute to culture, science, or the arts. It needs us as an outlet for its rage. I have found that a segment of white men absolutely needs to be angry at me and others who look like me: men who cling to their identity of being both better than me and aggrieved by my existence. Why do these white men need to be angry at us? People of color—especially Black people, Hispanic people, Indigenous people, and people of Middle Eastern descent—are convenient scapegoats for white people who are disappointed by life’s outcomes. We are also the distraction that those in power point to when they want to avoid the blame for this country’s vast wealth and opportunity gaps.
The fear of Americans of color is almost wholly manufactured by the imaginations of white America. The average white American has always been more likely to be physically harmed by another white person than by a person of color. The average white American has always been more likely to lose their job to another white person than to a person of color. The average white American is more likely to lose a spot at their dream college to a white person than to a person of color. The messaging that claims the opposite has not been created by people like me.
In the internet age, this resentment is more easily manufactured and distributed through social media and disreputable news sources. A story of Black crime that may have riled up one white neighborhood can now be used as a warning against integration and diversity across the country. While these sensationalized news stories keep many white people in fear, they also reinforce an aggrieved identity that gives a sense of community and belonging. White supremacy is just good business. Manufactured fear is a cheaper and more reliable driver of clicks and media market share than nuanced and deeply reported news stories.
Many of us shake our heads at how quickly hate and misinformation are spread in this new digital world, but none of it is new. White American identity was built on its opposition to people of color, especially Black people. Long before the country’s first blockbuster movie, the 1915 film Birth of a Nation; before the infamous “Willie Horton ad,” which used the story of a Black murderer to scare white voters out of voting for a liberal candidate who would be “soft on crime”; before the demonization of Black people on cable news; before today’s racist memes and fake-news stories aimed at stoking anti-Black racism on social media—long before all these phenomena, the fictionalized story of Black brutality has for centuries provided many white Americans with terror, rage, entertainment, community, and profit. Even though stoking white Americans’ fear of Black Americans caused them anxiety, they wanted more. Even though this myth distracted white Americans from addressing issues that were actually harming them, they wanted more.
Due to the legacy of slavery and its continuation in the form of the prison-industrial complex, white America’s relationship with Blackness is unique. It is an active form of violent racism that started when white Americans began to depend on the forced, free labor of Black people to work their plantations and raise their kids, and it continues in the forced, free prison labor that earns white men and their investors healthy profits.
And thus whiteness in the United States has always been bitterly and unhealthily bonded to Blackness.
THE SOUTH’S SELF-DEFEAT
Politically speaking, there are far too many negroes, but from an industrial standpoint there is room for many more.
—Southern politician interviewed about the exodus of Black Southerners, early 1900s2
What happens when you are terrified of living alongside your neighbors, yet even more terrified of living without them? That was a dilemma white Southerners faced at the close of the Civil War.
Determined to help the devastated South recover as quickly and peacefully as possible, the US government invested heavily in rebuilding Southern infrastructure after the war. But along with the investment came efforts to ensure the enfranchisement of newly emancipated Black Americans. It was Southern whites’ worst nightmare and shame come true. “Nigger voting, holding office, and sitting in the jury box are all wrong,” declared the Columbus Democrat, a Mississippi paper.3 But it was a humiliation they would not have to endure for long. As the federal government quickly ran low on money, it also depleted its will to oversee the Reconstruction of the South, and so Washington handed over the reins to the states themselves.
And the states burned it all to the ground.
In what is now known as the post-Reconstruction South, whites went on a murderous rampage in order to restore the racial hierarchy they had previously enjoyed. Over twenty-four hundred Blacks were murdered by Southern whites between 1882 and 1930.4 Most Black Southerners had no connections in the North and no means to get there. As before, Black Americans were trapped. Until one day they weren’t.
Dear Sir: Now I am writing you to oblige me to put my application in the papers for me please. I am a body servant or nice house maid. My hair is Black and my eyes are Black and smooth skin and clear and brown, good teeth and strong and good health and my weight is 136 lb.
—Letter from a Black woman in Natchez, Mississippi, to the Chicago Defender, inquiring about work in the North, 1917 5
The nation found itself at war again, this time overseas. With millions of Americans away fighting in World War I and a slowdown of European immigration, the industrial North found itself short on labor when it needed it the most. The few Blacks who had fled to the North earlier out of desperation now found themselves in coveted factory positions, making six times the wages they could earn working the fields down South. They sent word to friends and family back home that there was a way out of the terror, devastation, and extreme poverty that they had felt trapped in.
Black Southerners
left in droves. Recruiters from the North accelerated the departures with promises of living wages, access to education, and an environment free of the racial terror of the post-Reconstruction South. Southern white community leaders panicked. Agriculture at the turn of the twentieth century was still very labor-intensive. The industry couldn’t survive without large numbers of cheap workers. And although the abolition of slavery meant that the labor of Black workers was no longer free, as the only financially and logistically viable option open to white plantation owners, they were still grossly underpaid.
Southern whites tried multiple tactics to get Blacks to stay. They cut the wages of Black workers so they couldn’t afford transportation north. They refused to cash paychecks for Black workers if they had a suspicion that the money would be used to finance travel north. Lawmakers made the recruitment of Black workers to the North illegal and started jailing recruiters who showed up in Southern cities. They printed horror stories of Black Northern life in local papers. They refused to sell bus and train tickets to Black travelers. They arrested Black people at bus stations on vagrancy charges. They started beating Blacks whom they caught leaving.6
None of this, unsurprisingly, was effective in convincing Blacks that they should stay in the South. They fled in record numbers. Between 1916 and 1930, more than one million Blacks moved north in the hopes of finding jobs, education, and safety. By the time Southern leaders changed tactics and decided to improve working and living conditions for Blacks instead of antagonizing them, it was too late. The Southern cotton industry was in shambles. Because the Southern elites had tied all their financial hopes to that single industry and had driven away the workforce that could have helped the region transition into new industries, the South would never be the model of prosperity it had once considered itself. And by the end of the Great Migration, more than six million people had left the South, which would be forever changed.
At the beginning of the Great Migration, 90 percent of Blacks in the United States lived in the rural South. By 1970, only 47 percent of Blacks lived in the South. Today, the legacy of slavery in the South is seen not only in the remaining plantations and Confederate flags. The South, with its insistence on avoiding most political or economic progress that would threaten white supremacist power by benefitting Blacks as well as whites, has cursed itself. Of the ten poorest states in America, eight of them—West Virginia, Kentucky, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina—are in the South.7 Of the ten states with the worst food insecurity and the most hunger in America, eight of them—West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and North Carolina—are in the South.8
Slavery and violent white supremacy are the story of the South’s past, its present, and, likely, its future. In 2017, when researchers from Harvard Business School looked at the socioeconomic histories of various regions of the United States to determine which factors supported economic growth and innovation, they found a lot of interesting patterns. They found that places that were more economically and socially open to diversity were more conducive to innovation in business and technology. They also found that having once been a slaveholding state was a good predictor of stagnant economic growth, based on past growth patterns.9
An overwhelmingly popular narrative states that the South’s great wound is the Civil War and the aggression of the North. Even recently, as I traveled through Southern states, I was struck by how wed we are to the idea that if it weren’t for the war, the South would have been so much more. But the system of slavery could not have been maintained forever—even the most racist white Southerner admits that it was untenable and couldn’t have survived much longer than it did. Still, if the South had managed to cling to chattel slavery until it could transition to some other industry, the region would have faced an impossible battle. The North was already far ahead in industrializing, and the moment a place existed that offered even slightly better conditions than the horrors of slavery, Blacks would have left. In the end, the Great Migration sealed the South’s fate more than the Lost Cause that it has glorified.
The South fought the Civil War because it could not envision life without Black labor. It was a cause worth sacrificing hundreds of thousands of white Southern lives to. There is irony in the fact that while the South could not envision itself without Black labor, it would suffer a second defeat—at its own hand—because it couldn’t imagine living with Black people.
THE OTHER MIGRATION
White men have an equality resulting from a presence of a lower caste, which cannot exist where white men fill the position here occupied by the servile race.
—Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America10
If you engage in debate with a proud white Southerner about racism and slavery in the South, there is a good chance they will point out that the majority of white Southerners were not slaveholders. They may say that many were poor and treated as second-class citizens by white elites, and that all white Southerners were looked down on by Northerners, regardless of class or slaveholding status. These points are often made to argue that perhaps there is no real history of deep-seated racism in the South, and perhaps even that the Civil War was not about slavery.
The initial points of the argument are true. The great majority of Southern whites did not own slaves. Black people, as slaves, were property. We were wealth. And like any other form of wealth in a capitalist system, we were hoarded by the elite few. Only 25 percent of Southern white households owned slaves (man, it is so weird to type that “only” 25 percent of a group of people owned another group of people), and the majority of slaves were held by the wealthiest 7 percent of white households.11
The average white Southerner was not a slaveholder. The average white Southerner was not rich, and the average white Southerner was often exploited by the same elites who enslaved Blacks. But just because all of this is true does not mean that the average poor white Southerner was against slavery. Quite the opposite. Yes, poor Southern whites were low on the socioeconomic ladder, exploited by elite whites as the underpaid muscle holding the whip. But it was a ladder they intended to climb, and the top rung always stretched just out of reach.
White supremacy is, and has always been, a pyramid scheme.
Among us the poor white laborer is respected as an equal. His family is treated with kindness, consideration and respect. He does not belong to the menial class. The negro is in no sense of the term his equal. He feels and knows this. He belongs to the only true aristocracy, the race of white men.
—James Henry Hammond, slaveholder, former governor, US senator, and US representative for South Carolina12
The poor, ignorant white Southern field managers for rich white slaveholders were looked upon by many in the North with contempt. Even Black slaves reserved for them a particular disgust and malice. In Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram Kendi reports that the term “white trash” may actually have been coined by enslaved Blacks to describe the poor whites doing the dirty work of wealthy slaveowners.13
Poor Southern whites had sold their souls for their sense of racial superiority, and for many, it was all they had. They would not let go easily.
The South fought to preserve race integrity. Did we lose that? We fought to maintain free white dominion. Did we lose that?
—Florida senator Duncan Fletcher, 193114
While much has been written about the Great Migration of Black Southerners to the North and West, it is important to note that it was not only Blacks who fled. Poor white Southerners had little reason to stay in an economically devastated South and every reason to leave for the same opportunities in Northern factories that Blacks were leaving for. The Great Migration changed the landscape of the United States in immediately visible ways as Black communities became established across the country for the first time in history, but the migration of Southern whites shaped the American landscape in ways that we are perhaps only beginning to understand. In the end, twi
ce as many Southern whites left as Blacks.
As poor whites left the South, they took their anger and bitterness with them. Defeated, embarrassed, and forced to leave their homes, poor Southern whites were further victimized by the cool welcome they often received from established Northern and Western whites. Many early reports of white migration show that Southern whites had difficulty adjusting to city life, their kids had trouble in more rigorous schools, and they felt mistreated by their new bosses. To add insult to injury, they often had to compete against Blacks for jobs and sometimes even had to work alongside them. The trials of the white Southern migrant were canonized in books like The Grapes of Wrath. The story of the suffering and abuse of Southern white men became part of the identity not only of those who stayed in the South but also of those who left.
But the story of the broken Okie was more often found in the imaginations of writers like Steinbeck than in real life. Yes, there were some greedy and unscrupulous farm and factory owners who sought to take advantage of desperate migrants. Yes, white Southerners did struggle to fit in with Northern and Western social norms. Initially. Yet studies show that white migrants integrated into their new communities rather quickly. Financially, the average white migrant almost immediately saw better wages and opportunities than they had in the South. Within a generation they were making wages that were practically the same as those earned by Northern- and Western-born whites; they were consistently chosen for higher-paid labor over Blacks.15
Southern or not, these migrants were, after all, white.
And in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
