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On Unemployed, College Educated, White Men

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When I saw that the Wisconsin governor was openly attacking White working class folks last month in Wisconsin I was floored.

Why?

Because the White working class, historically, has exercised significant official political power in the US. Read Richard Pearlstein’s Nixonland for more on this. (Rob do you know of any other contextual pieces on the history of the White working class?)

Labor or Work is organized by gender and race, so this means that your gender and race shapes, constrains and structures the kinds of jobs that are available to you.

This is why most African American women were domestics until the 1970’s, this is why many of the IT folks in the Bay Area Indian, this is also why the chief executives of most Fortune 500 hundred companies are White men.

This morning reading the New York Times my antenna were zapped when I read an op ed article about young  kids who are both college educated and under and unemployed.

In a society organized by and for men, this is significant.
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24 year old Matthew Klein writes in The New York Times,

The cost of youth unemployment is not only financial, but also emotional. Having a job is supposed to be the reward for hours of SAT prep, evenings spent on homework instead of with friends and countless all-nighters writing papers. The millions of young people who cannot get jobs or who take work that does not require a college education are in danger of losing their faith in the future. They are indefinitely postponing the life they wanted and prepared for; all that matters is finding rent money. Even if the job market becomes as robust as it was in 2007 — something economists say could take more than a decade — my generation will have lost years of career-building experience.

We are not talking about  the  lazy negro men or women narrative, nor the undocumented Latino men and women narrative, which are both popular narratives around work and unemployment in mainstream media. We are talking about a narrative from a young white man.

If the young people in this country began to connect their plight to the plights of young unemployed people, in other parts of the world, we may arguably see a change, that only those us of us who walk by faith and not by sight, have sensed would occur since 2007.

Do you think that it is significant when young White men and women question a system that historically has favored many of them?

What does this mean to young people of color?

Isn’t this opposite of the narrative of apathy that we often see used to describe young people?

Is your rent paid?

20 Things I Learned from Reading #Nixonland

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1. On The Great Society

During his presidency, Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society Initiatives included creating the? Department of Housing and Urban Development, the High Way beautification act, a Water Quality, a Clean Air act….The Republican national committee could barely raised the $200K each month necessary to keep its office open. (p.13)

2. New Deal Liberals created the middle class then turned around and started criticizing the middle classes consumption of cheap products. (p.42). Fascinating. How could this possibly been productive? Talk down to the people who believed in you and your policies?

3. JFK on the Democratic party in a debate with Nixon.

I come out of the Democratic party, which in this century has produced Woodrow Wilson…..Nixon comes out of the Republican party. He was nominated by it….for the last of these twenty five years, the Republican leadership has opposed federal aid for education, medical care for the aged, development of the Tennessee Valley, development of our natural resources (p.56).

4. Joe Kennedy fixed it so that JFK’s book, Profiles in Courage won the Pulitzer prize (p. 59). #Joewasgully.

5. In 1965 Democrats made up most of registered voters. Nixon NEEDED Democrats to win (p. 69).

6. 1966 Civil Rights Act? was introduced by President LBJ, and at its center was Title IV to outlaw housing discrimination (p.77). White folks were not having this shit.

To those who claimed? it was unconstitutional for the federal government to interfere with the private housing market, the bill’s supporters pointed out how deeply the federal government subsidized the private housing market.

White folks faught this tooth and nail writing to their congressmen’s mailboxes saying,

This takes away a person’s rights. We are people and need someone to protect us.

Freedom for all- including the white race, please! (p.77).

7. Nixon had William Safire on retainer to write his speeches. #ummhmm

8. Perlstein called Strom Thurmond a racist gargoyle. Shit made me laugh.

9. In 1962, lying about Vietnam was now a Washington way of life. (p.99). As soon as I read this I thought, to what extent are we being lied to about Afghanistan and Iraq.

10. On Chicago’s awful housing for Black folks.

In the late 1940’s Chicago, when the postwar housing shortage was at its peak, you could find ten Black families living living in a basement, sharing a single stove but not a single flush toilet, in “apartments” subdivided by cardboard. One racial bombing or arson happen every three weeks. The job of the mayors Commission on Human Relations was to see that none of these incidents made it into one of the city’s six daily papers. (p.106).

11.? SPONGE (Society for the Prevention of Negros Getting Everything). A gang of Italian kids in Summer of 1966 in Brooklyn who were ready to go at it in the name of a race war (p.109).

Featured is off-stage footage of the four band members on the road and in their recommended for you cheapest cialis hotel rooms as they sample American culture and clown around. Pauciarticular juvenile rheumatoid arthritis or oligoarthritis catches 4 or less than 4 joints and free viagra tablet is caused due to stress and anxiety. He is the top sexologist in Delhi who can diagnose your condition and propose you a proper levitra prescription on line medicine. These medicines have the similar mechanism of engagement, that is to relax the muscle tissues and generic sales viagra expand the love making time considerably by recommending these effective herbal pills. The name of this organization reminds me of White fear that Black folks gone take everything, if they got the chance. Yes it is irrational, but it is hella real and needs to be acknowledge. Isn’t this a Tea Party talking point as well?

12. MLK on Chicago ” I think the people of Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate.” (p.119)

13.When a Black man tried to move in the Chicago community of Cicero in 1951 the ensuing white riot was so big it made news around the world (p.123).

According to Wiki,

“Between July 10 and 12, 1951, approximately two to five thousand white Cicero residents attacked an apartment building housing a single black family.”

16. On White Flight from DC to the Suburbs.

From my work on the Oakland + Crack project, I know that where white white people go, government funding for houses, roads, schools follows.

18. On the Republicans and Whites.

The Republicans were only following the lead of the public. Millions of voters were newly equation Republicanism with preserving their homes, and voting Democratic with surrendering them. In California, people who’d voted Democrat their entire adult lives were pledging fealty to Ronald Reagan(p.126).

This is huge, and one of the main reasons why I wanted to read this book in the first place.

19. There is a difference between policy + law and a budget and the political will to enforce it. The fight over school integration speaks to this.

20. On Guns and Butter.

The notion that the nation could afford both Vietnam ad the Great Society – “Guns and Butter”- was a central organizing principal of his presidency (p.139).

Its incredible that he thought we could afford wars and a society that invested in keeping people alive, educated and working. Its 2010, how does Guns and Butter play now?

What was the most surprising thing you have read in Nixonland?

Did you know his mom was a pacifist?

Would our country had been different, racially + politically without a Nixon?

#Nixonland: Selection of New Model Minority Book Club

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My fascination with 60’s era politcs stems back from a class in high school titled American history from 1960 to the Present. Thank you Mr. Lee.? Heady stuff for a 16 year old.

Ta-Nehisi recommended that I read Nixonland as a way to wrap my head around how the modern Republican party became the party of both business and of? working class angry whites who vote. And how the Democratic party came to be the party of Black folks, of unions and education.

Because I am also interested in what happened to Black people in urban settings in the 1980’s I realized that learning more about Nixon and the ’60’s would help me understand how we got to 1985.

Get Nixonland and lets read it together. A few of you have already started(@tkoed @skippcoon) and that is hella fresh.
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The author @rickperlstein has reached out to me/us via twitter which is hella fresh.

If you have discussion questions about the book leave them in the comment section.

In addition, I am getting ready to post “20 Things I Learned from Reading Nixonland.”

#ummhmm.