Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary defines the word whitewash as,
to gloss over or cover up (as vices or crimes), or
to exonerate by means of a perfunctory investigation or through biased presentation of data.
I’m here tonight to talk about hard-working people: people who get up early, stay up late, cook dinner and help out with homework; people who can be counted on to help their kids, their parents, their neighbors, and the lady down the street whose car broke down; people who work their hearts out but are up against a hard truth—the game is rigged against them. It wasn’t always this way….
…I grew up in an America that invested in its kids and built a strong middle class; that allowed millions of children to rise from poverty and establish secure lives. An America that created Social Security and Medicare so that seniors could live with dignity; an America in which each generation built something solid so that the next generation could build something better..
You and I both know that not everyone was able to participate equally in those programs and opportunities. But to hear Warren and other leaders of both parties talk about this rose colored past, approximately the period from 1934 to the mid 1960s, you’d think fairness was the cardinal American value of the time.
But of course they do know better. Elizabeth Warren was born in 1949. That means she was about 16 years old when Jim Crow laws were finally defeated.
Jim Crow laws, for those unfamiliar, started being established just 11 years after the end of the Civil War. They were created for the purpose of upholding white supremacy and, following the logic of slavery, ensuring a ready pool of Black workers who were cheap to hire because they were denied access to government assistance and unprotected by the law.
Elizabeth Warren was also born in Oklahoma, a state that kept its public schools segregated until 1955, when Warren would have been about 6.
Oklahoma was also the final destination for Native Americans subject to forced relocation as a result of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The path by which Native Americans were forced to relocate is known as the Trail of Tears, in part because so many died along the way, including 4,000 members of the Cherokee Nation, a group I assume Warren knows something about.
The game, as Warren refers to it, was always rigged, and to the advantage of white people, especially white men. The great middle class she speaks of is largely a white phenomena, created in part via benefits of the GI Bill, a program that helped provide educations and home ownership opportunities to veterans, but that discriminated against some veterans by race.
Home ownership was a great boon to the white middle class, but even those GIs of color who were able to get mortgage assistance through the Bill faced red lining and restrictive covenants that limited opportunities to buy homes to the poorest neighborhoods. Education is a key to social mobility, but educational opportunity was denied to many vets of color, in spite of their service, and those that did go to school were often forced into separate and unequal institutions.
Social programs like Mothers’ Aid, established in the 1930s (and that eventually evolved into welfare as we now know it) helped many poor women and children rise out of poverty. But many women of color, especially in the South, were denied benefits under this program and its later iterations because they were considered valuable only as workers, not as mothers.
And these are just a few examples. The legacy of racial exclusion from these opportunities continues to this day. It’s time for those of us left out of this grand history of America to speak up. If we don’t, we may in fact return to that whitewashed past.
