Racists I Have Known: the Unsystematic Bigotry of the White Underclass

The white, anti-black bigotry that I have encountered personally and scrutinized over the last 50 years is a phenomenon of the white underclass. Unsystematic, it is a symptom of the pathological "Under-Culture of Poverty" shared by all colors: economic poverty, broken marriage/family structure, father abandonment, drug addiction, gangs, violence, despair and so forth.

It is not institutionalized, but random and chaotic; is not an exercise of a power elite but an expression of powerlessness; not a protection of privilege but a groan of deprivation and marginalization. It may be helpful to compare it to the systematic racism of the past and the systematic anti-racism of the present.

Sixty years ago, especially in the South there was blatant, shameless systemic racism: seating in the back of the bus, separate schools, absolute prohibition of black access to white institutions. We know about this from history class and the movies.

As that system collapsed, in a split second, an alternate system of anti-racist policy and practices was implemented: busing, compulsive integration, racial quotas in higher education, targeted grants for minority businesses. A huge "diversity industry" emerged as global corporations outdid the government in inclusiveness. All institutions of power colluded in the crusade against white racism: Church, university, media, Hollywood, professional sports, and all levels of law and policy. Anti-racism in our society became, immediately,  systematic, pervasive, deliberate, and punitive to offenders.

Diversity and inclusion is our national religion, shared by all faiths and the faithless. Consider the powerful iconography of Martin Luther King that pervades education from elementary level, including Catholic schooling.  The Me-Too Movement has a problem: recent revelations by liberal-inclined history indicate that the violation of women by King and his closest collaborators was far more vicious than anyone knew. It may rival that of Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein. We can expect that reality, (if it is proved true), to be repressed as it will disrupt the reigning liberal narrative which aligns white power, racism, and violence to women and LGBTQs. Kevin Spacey can be expelled from the Hollywood All-Star Rostrum, but the veneration of Martin Luther King is invulnerable. It would not be an exaggeration to consider that anti-white-racism is the most widely accepted and sternly enforced moral principle of our time: in the cultures that dominate our society, it  it is systematic, passionate, and intolerant of non-compliance in the cultures. White racism, to the extent that it exists, it is despised, prohibited and shamed. The media obsession, protests and riots are all a ritual enactment of that faith.

Hard, cold, deep evil racism...like Nazism and the KKK...is not part of the world I have known. They both vanished  as systems (some residuals remain): the former just before my birth in 1947, the later in the two decades that followed. I know about them from history and the movies, not from personal experience. The closest in my world would be abortion of the unborn: about 2/3 of blacks conceived in NYC are aborted in the womb. This is systematic genocide of blacks. Across the globe, preference for males has destroyed (it is estimated) 130 million women who would be alive today if not for gender-specific abortion and infanticide. The gender imbalance is catastrophic in China for example. This is clearly systematic femicide. It is disguised in the standard liberal narrative with a blood mythology of "choice" and "reproductive rights" which aligns itself righteously with the high moral ground of aversion to racism, guns, homophobia and such.

White racism in USA 2020 by contrast, taboo and despised, is a symptom of the pathology of the white underclass: it expresses inferiority, powerlessness, emasculation, envy, exclusion, and hopelessness. It is related to addiction, unemployment, under-education, poor work ethic, criminal activity, violence, pornography/promiscuity, despair, and self-harm. There are many causes but the primary one: abandonment by father. It is NOT expressive of  power, privilege and status. By contrast, actual elites, affluent, comfortable and protected, salute themselves righteously as anti-white-racist-deplorables-who-cling-to-religion-and-guns.

Racists I have known:

Barbara is high on my top-ten-worst-residents-list. Heavy alcoholic, vicious racist, and miserable human being, she would sit on the Church steps by our home, get drunk, and spit out vile racist epithets to passing black men. Our's being a violent, gang-infected area, I was convinced someone would pull her into an alley and shoot or stab her. She survived; we got rid of her somehow; but I would get a call from her every 12 to 18 months when she was desperate for a home. Of course I never had an vacancy when she called. My nurse-wife knew her well in the hospital as she would cycle through there regularly: boarding home to street to hospital to another boarding home to street... Time passed and I hadn't heard from her. Then she called.  Her tone was different. She didn't ask. She said calmly and sweetly:  "I called to tell you that things have changed for me. I met someone; I fell in love; he changed my life. I gave up drinking and let God into my life. I lost him a year ago but I see his daughter every day and she takes such good care of me. I called to thank you for what you did for me. And to ask you to forgive me for what I did. I am so sorry." I stopped in my steps; frozen with shock. I could not believe my ears. If there ever was a hopeless case, it was Barbara. If I didn't believe in miracles already, that phone call would have been my conversion.

Paul, came to work at UPS out of high school and was promoted at a young age to supervision. I was training him to drive a tractor trailer so he could train our drivers. For a few weeks we did nothing but drive around, one day in NYC another on country roads. It was such a sweet assignment: get our morning bagel and coffee, drive around and chat pleasantly all day. We had an easy, father-son kind of friendship. He had grown up in lily-white working class Lyndhurst and didn't know anyone that wasn't white. Well into our second week he was relaxed enough to tell me his racial philosophy. He hated Asians most because they were obviously far superior to us whites. At the bottom of his hierarchy were blacks. Between white and black was a scale of the brown-skinned: Latinos, Arabs, and such. The whiter the skin, the higher on the scale. I laughed when he told me this. "You are kidding. You can't believe this." He insisted he was sincere. I repeated, five or six times: "No you can't possibly believe this. It is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard." He persisted; he meant it. I was speechless. The belief seemed to defy any reasonable conversation. He was eventually promoted to manager, above my rank. He was the UPS kind of guy: virile, confident, decisive, aggressive, with considerable charm and affection. Not an intellectual. I lost touch with him. But knowing the world of UPS for 25 years, I can assure you that to survive and ascend in that world, he would need to discard his racist ideology. First of all, on a day to day basis you work with outstanding people of every race and ethnicity; the unreality of his viewpoint would be undeniable. But if he were pathologically bound to this racism, he would need to repress it, keep it "in the closet" because of the systemic anti-racism prevalent in the UPS managerial and labor cultures. If Human Resources knew what I knew, he would be fired immediately. A capable, competent and energetic guy in an environment that rewards just that, he would have shed his racism as he ascended the ladder of affluence, power, status and prestige. He would shed the pathetic pathology of his lower class background. He was moving into the upper class, which is systemically anti-racist.

Brendan's Brother was a shockingly, nauseatingly racist NYC policeman from the Queens. Brendan was my friend and classmate in Maryknoll Seminary, where we were studying to be missionary priests. Most of us were, to say the least, systemic in our anti-racism. Especially at the time: 1968, the race riots, post Vatican II, passionate Catholic concern for social and especially racial justice. I myself was one of the more passionate, righteous, indignant crusaders. Brendan was different: lighthearted, humorous, down-to-earth, entirely delightful and charming in a working-class Irish manner. A hard drinker, he went on to overcome his alcoholism, become a missionary priest in Korea, and die a premature death. When he told us about his racist brother; we were horrified. Here was racism at its worst; a real "pig" in the deepest, moral sense. We finally visited their home in Queens and drank beer and got to know him. He put on quite a performance: retrospectively, I suspect he was entertaining himself by shocking us. Brendan laughed heartily as we sat quiet, solemn, and contemptuous as he spilled out his hatred for blacks. Looking back over the years, I retain my aversion to racism; but I regret the righteous, shrill, moralistic position I shared at the time with the mainstream Catholic. Rightly we supported the civil rights movement. But we lacked empathy for working class, ethnic, low-class, uneducated whites who were often good Catholics and themselves struggling with poverty and the black violence of the 1960s. We enlightened liberals were part of an arrogant upper-class, disparaging the underclass in its bigotry and ignorance. Happily, I converted and am am now an ex-liberal-in-recovery.

A Kid In My Class  1965 Senior retreat at the Jesuit Retreat House in Morristown NJ: the priest was telling us sternly of the gravity of racism as a community sin. I had no problem with that: son of a union organizer who attended the I-Have-A-Dream speech, I read America and NY Times weekly. An Italian classmate from Newark raised his hand: "I get where you are going Father. Ok! But wait a minute: my father is a barber in an Italian neighborhood of Newark. He is a good Catholic. He is not a racist. But he couldn't cut the hair of a black man: he would lose his business. He would have no way to support us, his family!" The priest was shrill, unrelenting: "That is exactly what I am talking about: systematic racism. It is evil. It is inexcusable!" The boy: "Are you calling my father racist. He is not racist. I resent that. It is a lie." Well, the conflict built; it was an ugly scene; if it wasn't a priest, the kid would have clocked him for disrespecting his father! Even at the time I felt an empathy for the boy; a respect for his father; and a regret that the priest was so lacking in compassion, so righteous and judgmental in his (correct) ideology of anti-racism.

Light Rail Station was quiet when I heard vile, racist remarks from some youths. I looked at them and realized I knew them and their family from neighborhood and parish: I had instructed one of them for the sacraments. They later became drug-addicts and are probably now in prison. I froze because I didn't really want to confront them but I had to. My discomfort was short-lived: a stern, clear, articulate male voice forcefully, confidently but properly reprimanded them. Wow! I thought: that was fantastic. I could not have done as well! I turned to see a 30-something black man, well-dressed in business-professional attire. The boys meekly and correctly apologized. I hid my presence as I was embarrassed for them. But I wanted to give the anonymous stranger a medal. This was a prototypical correction of under-class delinquency by an over-class, or certainly upwardly mobile,  man of character, gravitas and authority. White under-class, black over-class!

My Story I was about 13 years old, skinny, timid and uncoordinated and I dutifully walked, even though I hated it, every week to the YMCA in Orange NJ where my parents wanted me to learn to swim. Rough area, I was surrounded by about 14 black boys. They were a little smaller than me and that made it worse. One, quite a bit smaller, stepped into the circle and was bouncing and weaving to take me on. I was terrified. They sense that and mocked me. I had to keep turning around as they would sneak up and smack me in the back of the head. I think I sensed that my physical safety was not at risk. But I was humiliated and shamed by their ridicule; the small stature of my opponent magnified my shame. I think that I have retained, throughout my life, a residual fear of the black male as menacing. I am not racist.

My Sons Where we still live, my sons were on numerous occasions mugged and beat up by groups of blacks. My sons are not racists. They grew up also with lower-class whites, who also fought and grew up to become, classically, Irish and Italian police and firefighters.  Some of them may carry racial resentment. When we moved here, our parish parking lot was the hangout for Bones: Beat On Nigger Every Saturday. I taught some of them. It was low class whites who fought with the black gangs from the nearby housing projects.  We are talking here about West Side Story , inter-ethnic juvenile delinquency: adolescent male insecurity and aggression festering in conditions of economic vulnerability. This is not white power, affluence, privilege. To the extent that those youths are able to climb the ladder of affluence and status they will adapt, as part of the paraphernalia of power, a systematic and ostentatious anti-racism.

To conclude: the narrative of systematic, powerful, white racism is a myth, a fabrication, a fallacy. It is itself a righteous posturing of a privileged and protected over-class, white and black, that endlessly congratulates itself on its moral superiority as anti-racist, pro-gay, and militant about "woman's rights."  To the extent that white racism exists, it is a symptom of an under-class, white as well as black, afflicted by a cascade of calamities, first of which is abandonment by fathers. The privileged class, white and black alike, are unabashed in their contempt for these "deplorables." Personally, I like them! Hate the sin (racism); love the sinner (racist)!