How’s Being White Working Out for You?

Florida

Copyright © 2019 Joseph Florida.

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This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

ISBN: 978-1-6847-1319-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6847-1318-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6847-1317-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019918051

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Scriptures taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 12/20/2019

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If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better

than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re

picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look

down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.

—Lyndon B. Johnson

Preface

First and foremost, this book isn’t an attack on all white people, and it isn’t my intent to alienate white people. I am profoundly aware of the fact there have always existed white people who have done the right thing with the purest of intentions. Not to acknowledge this would be to spit on the graves of the white people who sacrificed and gave their lives during the efforts of the Underground Railroad, the civil rights movement, and lesser-known events throughout history. Those individuals could have either participated in violent racial oppression or, at the very least, passively allowed it to continue. However, they didn’t, and even though I cannot speak on behalf of every black person, I will always be eternally grateful.

In fact, John Brown is one of my personal heroes. During my K–12 classes in the Deep South, I took issue with how he was always depicted as some mentally deranged revolutionary (John Brown). Before anyone tries to label John Brown as a radical due to his belief that slavery could be ended only through violence, let me pose this question to you: Was he wrong? John Brown wasn’t one of those selfish abolitionists who wanted black people to be freed only in order to strip plantation owners of free labor privileges. Nor was he one of those hypocritical Christians, like Jefferson Davis, who preached about the Good Book yet obviously had no respect for the Golden Rule. John Brown witnessed a disgusting system of oppression that went against his moral compass. Consequently, he opted to do something about it, which ultimately cost him his very life.

However, I still have found it difficult at times to remember historical truths such as John Brown’s sacrifice and the sacrifices of so many other white people due to the vast amounts of discrimination I’ve had to endure during my life. Because of this discrimination, I actually spent much of my life despising white America as a whole. The disdain I felt toward whites wasn’t founded in the pseudo-scientific notion that I was somehow superior; rather, it came into existence as a result of my being worn down after a lifetime of unequal treatment. Yet I believe it was my love for history and truth that left me receptive to change. I’ll be the first person to admit that none of the unfair treatment I had to endure justified my previously held resentment; however, I hope you can, at the very least, appreciate my transparency.

It is also necessary to mention that when I refer to white America in a negative context throughout this book, I’m referring to white nationalists and mindless individuals who blindly follow our current political establishment. It isn’t my intention to bash decent and hardworking white people. In actuality, the message of this book is directed toward all of those white Americans who are putting in work daily but who are frustrated because they can’t seem to make any noticeable progress, no matter how much effort they exert. I’m relaying this information not in an effort to mock, but rather to educate people on where they need to appropriately direct their discontentment.

Now that I’ve established that all white Americans aren’t bloodthirsty monsters, we also need to address the fact we have a class clown in the White House, and this is thanks to the fact white nationalists and snake-oil salesmen were able to capitalize on the lackadaisical performance of our current political establishment in order to convince a sufficient number of white voters to give President Trump a try. Also, it’s critical to point out that many white Trump voters within crucial swing states during the 2016 election were most likely attracted to his phony populist message as opposed to his racist dog-whistling because many of these same white voters had also voted for former President Obama twice. (Unfortunately, many of these white voters were unaware that by voting for Trump, they were just worsening their situation, simply stepping deeper into a proverbial quagmire of financial asphyxiation and political trickery.)

Many Americans had welcomed Obama as a breath of fresh air because he had run a campaign centered around a firm desire to implement large-scale, systemic change. Many Americans, including me, looked forward to the possibility of exiting countless military conflicts and bearing witness to the spread of true social reform. Sadly, this isn’t what occurred, seeing that we are still involved in various military conflicts and the incremental changes that were implemented by Obama were ultimately incapable of remedying issues such as wage stagnation, the systemic proliferation of debt, and rapidly disappearing jobs. However, everything has become simply unbearable under the Trump administration, and he obviously never had any intention of following through with his supposedly populist promises. Our current president is a con man who has run his entire platform off bigotry and has turned the White House into a circus, and the only people of color he has ever wanted in his presence have been sycophantic props like Kanye West and Ben Carson. Step back and take an objective look at who he is and what people he surrounds himself with, and you’ll soon arrive at the realization that neither he nor anybody he has permitted to remain a part of his entourage has any redeeming qualities.

Also, a relatively recent phenomenon that is arguably more damaging than the Trump presidency is the increase in toxic right-wing media. Fox News is a propaganda machine that doesn’t even concern itself with being objective (HuffPost. History Won’t Forget How Obama Was Treated). The reason Fox News is unquestionably more dangerous than our current president is that the duration of time Trump will be permitted to screw things up is ultimately finite. Conversely, Fox News will continue to spout misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic, and racist nonsense for as long as we—and more importantly to the network, its advertisers—allow. Therefore, it’s only a matter of time before a new Trump-like figure takes advantage of that propaganda machine in order to facilitate his or her rise to power. It’s clear that Fox News is toxic because not only does it not make any attempts to distance itself from poisonous individuals, but on the contrary, it embraces them.

This perspective is substantiated by how Fox News has always been willing to let individuals such as Megyn Kelly, Bill O’Reilly, Jeanine Pirro, Tucker Carlson, and countless others spew hatred from their news desks for years without consequence (Powers; HuffPost. A Brief History of Bill O’Reilly’s Insensitive Racial, Sexual and Religious Comments; NowThis News. Fox News Host Jeanine Pirro’s Islamophobia at Ilhan Omar Condemned; MSNBC Chris Discusses Exclusive New Audio of Fox News Host Tucker Carlson). In fact, the network doesn’t even care about its own viewers because apparently, as long as your life isn’t in immediate danger, Fox doesn’t believe health care is a basic right (The Damage Report). Even worse, it’s filled with a bunch of wealthy hypocrites who have been berating you with nonsense—like the notion of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps—yet they allow spoiled heiresses such as Ivanka to sit on their program and lecture you about how you shouldn’t feel entitled to receive a livable wage in return for your labor (The Humanist Report).

I realize that not every conservative white person is racist, and having voted for Trump in 2016 or watching Fox News doesn’t automatically make you a terrible human being either. Evidently, financial desperation can cause people to make irrational decisions, especially when they’re being forced to decide between two terrible options (e.g., Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump). However, there comes a time when it’s necessary to wake up—and now is that time! Say you’ve remained a loyal viewer of Fox News for years now, and you gave Trump a try in 2016. Where has it landed you? People, Trump is a professional trickster, and it’s a travesty that Fox News is still considered a news network. Fox News consistently pushed the message that the wall was going to be built and that Trump was the populist messiah who was going to bring back all the factory jobs. So much for that. The wall was never going to be erected, and the manufacturing jobs were never coming back. Automation—duh. People, you were sold what appears to be a heaping helping of garbage. If it looks like garbage, smells like garbage, and rots like garbage, then it’s probably garbage. Do you know what you do with garbage? You throw it in the trash can.

It wouldn’t be fair for me to express criticism of white America without discussing my own racial bias. As I stated earlier, for the longest time, I didn’t want anything to do with white people. After years of negative experiences, I had determined it was best to avoid them, and this obviously wasn’t the right decision. I am sure I avoided a decent number of what would have been negative encounters by avoiding whites; however, I probably cheated myself out of some potentially wonderful experiences as well. It wasn’t fair for me to be immediately critical of all whites simply because I’d had some terrible experiences. Every experience is unique, and every person should be judged with a fresh set of eyes. When I had this epiphany, I became capable of being objective and no longer had