Oprah, Obama, and Cosby Say Blacks Should Just Work Harder, Isn't That

ESSAY 6 “Oprah, Obama, and Cosby Say Blacks Should Just Work Harder, Isn’t That distribute Right?” or The Myth of Meritocracy Paula Ioanidepost, Ithaca College Paula Ioanide is an assistant professor of comparative race and ethnicity studies in the Center for thecopy, Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity at Ithaca College in New York. Her research focuses on institutional forms of gendered racism in the post-civil rights era, including mass incarceration and policing, immigrant exclusion and detention, welfare reform, and warfare. Dr. Ioanide teaches courses about prisons, race and sexualnot politics, and social movements. Do ften, when we hear Black celebrities promote the American ideals of hard work, merit, and individualism, our tendency is to cast them as authorities O on “the Black experience” and racial realities in the United States, and thus we give their comments greater weight. Furthermore, iconic television sitcoms like The Cosby Show not only encourage Americans to believe that all dreams are 67 Copyright ©2015 by SAGE Publications, Inc. This work may not be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means without express written permission of the publisher. 68 PART II DEBUNKING INDIVIDUAL ATTITUDES achievable in U.S. society if a person simply works hard enough; they also popular- ize the notion that a person’s race, gender, and class status do not present significant obstacles to realizing those dreams. Rags-to-riches stories of celebrities like talk show host Oprah Winfrey or rapper Jay Z tend to make people believe that U.S. society now has a structure of equal access and opportunity. Similarly, the 2008 election of President Barack Obama seemed to conclusively confirm the notion that U.S. society offers fair access and opportunity to anyone willing to pursue his or her goals. While people concede that poor people, people of color, and women continue to face some obstacles in U.S. society, the dominant belief is that they generally have a fair chance to achieve their goals. The perception is that if the Huxtables, Oprah Winfrey, Jay-Z, and President Obama managed to do so, other people of color and women should also be able to succeed. Under this logic, those who fail to achieve their dreams presumably have only themselves to blame. Indeed, throughout its eight year run, The Cosby Show often advocated the values of hard work and personal responsibility. As a doctor and a lawyer, the Huxtables guided their children to do well in school, obtain a college degree, and establish themselves in professional careers in order to secure distributethe stability and status afforded by wealth and income. The Huxtables upheld values that are central to popular American narratives and culture. Stories of immigrants who came to Ellis Island penniless and managed to reach the “Americanor dream” because of their good work ethic and perseverance are prevalent. Whether that “American dream” involves owning a home, obtaining a well-paying job that provides for one’s family, or the ability to acquire other symbols of wealth and success, many Americans believe that individuals who take the “personal responsibility” to obtain success are likely to reach their goals. What’s more, people often assume that a person’s success is a direct reflection of how hardpost, that person worked to earn it. Like all good narratives, there is some truth to such notions of meritocracy, hard work, and opportunity. Certainly, people who put little or no effort in pursu- ing their goals in education, work, business, or creative projects rarely reach their objectives. Personal experiences of overcoming obstacles to achieve particular aspirations similarly give legitimacy to the idea that hard work produces good results that are well deserved. The accomplishments of individuals like President Obama andcopy, the changing conditions of U.S. society cannot be discounted given that only one or two generations ago, the possibility of a Black person being elected president seemed inconceivable. Indeed, due to their agency and perseverance, a growing number of Black people have pursued new opportunities in education and employment that only a few decades ago were primarily reserved for Whites. notSuch perseverance has led to some measurable gains in Black people’s class mobility (Lacy, 2007; Oliver & Shapiro, 1995). When considering U.S. institutional structures and systems, however, the dominant belief that people are rewarded primarily on the basis of merit and that we live Do in a society of equal opportunity turns out to be much more myth than fact. An extensive body of sociological facts and empirical evidence shows that a person’s life chances and opportunities in the United States—by which I mean people’s ability to access and obtain home ownership, employment, education, good health, and economic security—continue to be severely shaped by a person’s racial identity. Copyright ©2015 by SAGE Publications, Inc. This work may not be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means without express written permission of the publisher. Essay 6 “Oprah, Obama, and Cosby Say Blacks Should Just Work Harder” 69 To be sure, a person’s gender, class, sexual orientation, nationality, citizenship, religion, and other markers of identity intersect with a person’s racial identity to further complicate the ways a person’s life chances and opportunities are deter- mined. But the relationship between race and life chances in the United States deserves particular scrutiny. As George Lipsitz (2011) argues, “[M]ore than four decades after the civil rights activism of the 1960s, and nearly one hundred and fifty years after the abolition of slavery, race remains the most important single variable determining opportunities and life chances in the United States” (p. 15). This seems like a radical claim to make in an age that many have deemed “color- blind” or “post-racial.” People often use these discourses to claim that institutional forms of racial exclusion and discrimination have largely been eliminated in today’s society. To understand why this claim is unfounded and why life chances and opportunities are still severely skewed along racial lines, we must understand the historical connection between race and wealth in the United States. Specifically, we must consider how the wealth and inheritances of White Americans today origi- nate directly from unfair gains and unjust advantages made possible by past racial discrimination. distribute or Race and Wealth in the United States Wealth and inheritance play a critical role in American’s life chances. Sociologist Thomas Shapiro (2004) demonstrates that inheritance is more important than college degrees, number of children in the family, marital status, full-time employment, or household composition in givingpost, a person opportunities to succeed economically in U.S. society (Lipsitz, 2011). This is because wealth and inheritance allow people to get a head start in accessing opportunities that subsequently yield the potential to build more wealth. People use wealth and inheritance to pay for private schools and college, to be able to buy homes in well-to-do neighborhoods, and to start small businesses. All of these things require work and perseverance, but the initial capital to start such initiatives make it so that the hard work of people who already have wealthcopy, is much more likely to yield economic rewards than the hard work of people who must use their entire income simply to manage bills and expenses. Black and White people with similar incomes, work histories, and family structures nothave radically different relationships to wealth and inheritance. For example, “On the average, whites inherit $102,167 more than Blacks” (Lipsitz, 2011, p. 4). Because they tend to inherit significantly less money from their parents and grand- parents, Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, and other people of color are more likely to be asset poor. This means that they don’t have savings to fall back on in Dothe event a family member loses a job, experiences the onset of an illness or dis- ability, or has to stop working in order to take care of children. According to Lipsitz (2011), “Only 26 percent of white children grow up in asset-poor households, but 52 percent of blacks and 54 percent of Latinos grow up in these economically fragile households” (p. 4). Copyright ©2015 by SAGE Publications, Inc. This work may not be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means without express written permission of the publisher. 70 PART II DEBUNKING INDIVIDUAL ATTITUDES Why are White Americans today much more likely to inherit wealth than Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, and other people of color? The answer to this question has much less to do with White Americans’ good work ethic than with policies and practices that purposefully and exclusively gave Whites opportunities to gain wealth in the past. Indeed, for most of U.S. history, racially discriminatory policies and practices did not simply produce disadvantages for Blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans; they also produced calculable advantages for Whites. For example, 46 million Americans today can trace the origins of their family wealth to the 1862 Homestead Act, a federal policy that gave away farmland (typically of 160 acres) west of the Mississippi River to those who applied. Because the Homestead Act had restrictions that were expressly designed to exclude Black people, this land was overwhelmingly allocated to Whites, essentially producing intergenerational wealth advantages for millions of White Americans (Lipsitz, 2006). Such exclusive opportunities for White wealth accumulation were also facili- tated by federal and state policies that dispossessed and forcibly removed Native Americans onto reservations west of the Mississippi, allowing White settlers to overtake and develop land in the northeast (Rogin, 1991). distribute White Americans today can also trace the origins of their wealth and inheritance to the trillions of dollars accumulated through the appreciation of home values that were secured through federally insured loans grantedor between 1932 and 1968.

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