The Wages of Whiteness

Let us leave Seattle and visit Arkansas. The governor of this deep red state is, of course, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. She ran a tight ship as a conservative: pro-life, pro-business, pro-white Christian nationalism, pro-tax cuts (four in a row). She even rolled back “a number of child labor protections across the state.” No one could doubt her red credentials. She was the real deal, top to bottom. And her bid for a second term in office was pretty much a matter of course.

Then she made one big blunder. Sanders produced a campaign ad that attacked welfare recipients as lazy, as people who could work but chose not to. She declared, like the voice of God from a cloud: “If you’re young, healthy, and get government assistance, you should work, go to school, or volunteer.” Well and good. The problem is this: Her model of a welfare recipient was a young white man playing video games with a VR headset, throwing puffy orange snacks into the void of his mouth, and his body swallowed by a well-worn bean bag in a room that has not seen sunlight in ages.

Her base erupted. What the fuck was she thinking: a white man as a welfare queen? They had enough of this sort of thing, this relentless hating on white males. They’re not lazy. They work hard and are worth far more to society than you know who. All of this is on X. One comment after another: “This is blood libel and should be retracted with a full apology,” “I don’t care if her opponent is Stalin, I would vote for that over this insufferable b*tch,” “…what racial group uses the most public assistance per capita?” “It so fucked up that Dems literally  want to kill White men and Republicans run [ads] like this.” One post even has a graph showing the net value of ethnic groups in terms of federal tax revenue: whites: + $1 trillion; Blacks: – 600 billion. And because it’s X, the n-word is used with complete abandon. What a shit show.

But all of this gives us an opportunity to ask an important question: What is this rage really about? Sure, one can say it’s a few racists doing their thing, but it’s much more than that. The Republican Party is, after all, America’s white party. In fact, 66 percent of whites with no advanced education voted for Trump. Meaning, a class of people who would only get a few crumbs–if that–from the golden table of the self-centered billionaire decided he was their savior. How is this possible? The answer is the “psychological wage.”

We owe this curious expression to one of the greatest Black American thinkers of the 20th century, W. E. B. Du Bois. In his exhaustive 1935 book, Black Reconstruction in America, he asks how is it possible that working-class Blacks and whites, a group that has more in common than those in the classes above them, “are kept so far apart that neither sees anything of common interest”? His answer: the psychological wage.

Du Bois writes: “It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely [to various restricted amenities and milieu] with all classes of white people. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them.”

What Du Bois is getting here is of great importance. There’s the wage that everyone gets if they have a job. But there’s this other phantom thing called the psychological wage, which, in the US, is only handed to poor and working whites. This second wage makes all the difference. It diminishes the value of the first wage to such an extent that it barely needs to rise. It can remain low as long as a white person is proud to be white, as long as they see themselves represented in houses of power, on corporate boards, in the top ranks of the army, in statues on statehouse lawns. And most important of all, if others, particularly Black people, are seen to suffer in some way because of their color. Those in power must always perform this function: make a display of humiliating, belittling, denigrating Black and brown people. This is why Trump is back in the White House.

This is also why so many in Sanders’s base are furious at her. The campaign ads’ depiction of a lazy white man violated the agreement between them and their white betters. Furthermore, she diminished the value of the psychological wage at a time when they really need it, at a time when real wages are not only very low but, as inflation and, consequently, the cost of living rises, are also falling in value. 

A person on X had this to say, after reading the comments to Sanders’s ad: “LOL. how do you all turn something that wasn’t racist into something racist?” Du Bois gave us the answer nearly 100 years ago.

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