Читать книгу Multicultural Psychology - Jennifer T. Pedrotti - Страница 36

The increased immigration of Europeans also signaled the need for increased labor sources. In those early years, a number of ways to meet the growing labor demands were explored—enslavement of Native Americans and Africans, the indentured service of Whites and Africans, and a wage labor force of landless Whites, Native Americans, and free and freed Africans. Before 1676, landless Whites and free or freed Africans married, had children, were friends and neighbors, and worked alongside each other as laborers. Part of the story of the “naturalness” of our racial divide is that it has always been with us, that it is an expected outcome of different people coming in contact with each other. Contrary to that narrative is the reality of our history. There were interracial communities of working-class folks, people who lived and loved and worked and rebelled together. Our nation’s history includes this time of racial integration. So what happened in 1676? Bacon’s Rebellion. It is difficult to fully capture the impact this period in US history has had on our class, gender, and racial present and the intersecting nature of those constructs.

Increased European populations and the profitability of tobacco created a land rush, but the elite, in places like Virginia, wanted to solidify and maintain their growing wealth and political power. Among their efforts, the elite passed laws increasing the length of indentured servanthood, which limited competition for land and increased sources of labor. Landless Whites became frustrated by their economic and political limitations and, joined by free Africans, they rebelled against unfair labor practices and legislative controls. Bacon’s Rebellion was born. Takaki writes, “A colonial official reported that Bacon had raised an army of soldiers ‘whose fortunes and inclinations’ were ‘desperate.’ Bacon had unleashed an armed interracial ‘giddy multitude’ that threatened the very foundations of social order in Virginia.” Ultimately stopped, the rebellion became known as the largest to take place before the Revolution (Takaki, 2008, pp. 59–60).

Following the rebellion, the elites enacted a series of new laws designed to disempower the working class and break up the “multitude.” They did so along racial lines, specifically through the deepening of the racial divide and the construction of Whiteness. If meaning and privilege could be given to the idea of Whiteness, then the laboring class would be divided, and thus pose less of a threat to the elite. The decision was made to concentrate on the African slave trade as the primary source of labor. “What the landed gentry systematically developed after the insurrection was a labor force based on caste” (Takaki, 2008, p. 61).

Slavery required a justification. We could not psychologically manage or ensure broader social buy-in for a system with the level of death, rape, and intentional destruction the peculiar institution of slavery held without making Africans other. Before the Constitution was written declaring that slaves would be considered three fifths human, we developed the ideas and enacted the policies that furthered the process of dehumanization. As we had seen with Native Americans before, Black maleness came to symbolize savagery and violence, and the construction of Black femaleness was formed around sexuality. Following Bacon’s Rebellion, new policy helped solidify these ideas into the minds of the populace and create stereotypes and structural divides that extend into today.

Harsher slave laws were enacted, denying slaves freedom of assembly and movement. Slave militia patrols were established to monitor slave quarters and plantations to prevent runaways or unlawful assembly. It became illegal for Blacks to be educated and for Blacks to carry any kind of weapon. Expansion of the definition of who was Black led to the “one drop rule,” and by 1723, “free property-owning blacks, mulattos, and native Americans … were denied the right to vote” (Buck, 2016, p. 22).

Simultaneously, Whiteness had to be defined and taught to Whites. (There will be more on Whiteness in Chapter 6). A 1691 law worsened the punishment for White women who married African or Indian men, and Buck writes,

A changing panoply of specific laws molded European behavior into patterns that made slave revolt and cross-race unity more and more difficult. These laws limited, for instance, the European right to teach slaves to read. Europeans couldn’t use slaves in skilled jobs, which were reserved for Europeans. Europeans had to administer prescribed punishment for slave “misbehavior” and were expected to participate in patrolling at night. They did not have the legal right to befriend Blacks. A White servant who ran away with a Black was subject to additional punishment beyond that for simply running away. European rights to free their slaves were also curtailed. (2016, p. 22)

Gender constructions and gender roles around class and race were also formed. Buck goes on to describe how, following Bacon’s Rebellion, the elites developed and spread the idea of White masculinity. The underlying concept was that White superiority could be seen by how well White men were able to provide for their families. White men should work, and their wives stay home, unlike Blacks and people in Native communities, where both genders (inside and outside of the slave system) worked. The narrative of the successful White man was formed, describing men who worked and were the heads of households where women stayed home and cared for the home and children. Married White women (especially Whites who were not recent immigrants) were discouraged from wage labor with claims that “true women served only their families” (Buck, 2016, p. 24). Working-class White men became slave patrollers and plantation overseers, and were given or allowed to buy small parcels of land.

The economic benefits connected to being White helped strengthen the racial divide, but the real psychosocial work of the construction came with what W. E. B. Dubois (1935) called the “psychological wage of Whiteness,” the idea that one’s Whiteness had meaning and value, that it alone made one superior to other races. This “wage,” along with the social, political, and economic privileges given to Whites, finally and fully disrupted the earlier interracial communities.

In 1776, the nation declared that only White male landowners could vote. By 1790, only Whites could be citizens. In 1862, the Homestead Act provided free land to anyone who improved that land within five years; the only other criterion was that one had to be a citizen, which limited this benefit to only Whites. So, whether you were from a family of wealthy plantation owners in Virginia or were a newly arrived poor immigrant, if you were White, you could own land. These race-based policies around voting, citizenship, and land ownership worked in concert to further racialize class inequality. Researchers at The Economic Policy Institute argue that the biggest factor in our increasing racial wealth gap today is housing inequality. That inequality can, in large part, be traced back to The Homestead Act as well as to the housing policies of the 1920s and 1930s (e.g., redlining—more on this in Chapter 6), and the GI Bill of World War II.

The GI Bill helped returning veterans buy homes by providing funds for down payments as well as government-backed 30-year low-cost mortgages. Of the nearly $120 billion in loans granted through the GI Bill, more than 98% went to Whites. That historically established racial wealth gap was expanded by the recent collapse of the housing market in the United States. Harper’s Magazine published a deposition from a Wells Fargo loan officer who described how the lender targeted members of the Black and Latino communities during the housing boom (Jacobson, 2009). As new customers to the housing market, these individuals’ lack of knowledge and experience with buying a home made them vulnerable. Instead of being given the 30-year flat-rate mortgages that most qualified for, they were often sold loan packages with adjustable rates and balloon payments. The selling of those loan packages meant a financial bonus for the loan officers, who knowingly increased the likelihood of foreclosure for their Black and brown clients.

Figure 2.2 African American Timeline

Attitudes, policies, and inequalities established in our past are still seen within today’s raced and gendered homeownership levels, home values, and wage inequity. A recent Institute for Policy Studies (2019) report found that between 1983 and 2013, the median wealth of a Black household declined 75% (from $6,800 to $1,700), and that the median Latino household wealth declined 50% (from $4,000 to $2,000). At the same time, wealth for the median White household increased 14% from $102,000 to $116,800.

The idea of race, what it means to be Black and what it means to be White, has been constructed, enacted, and entrenched. The concepts became part of our sense of self and others; thus, our attitudes and behaviors are impacted, but more than that, race has been embedded in our laws, policies, and economic and political systems. Far from “natural,” the path to race, race relations, and racial inequality in the United States was designed with purpose and intent. Understanding that sociohistorical context and the structural nature of race is key to understanding the psyches and individuals that it produces. A racial segregation timeline is given in Figure 2.2, and a table showing major events in African American history is shown in Figure 2.3.

Figure 2.3 African American Racial Segregation Timeline