HOW WHITE PRIVILEGE WORKS - EVEN WHEN YOU DON’T REALIZE IT

Jonathan V. Last had an interesting post today in his Bulwark newsletter (yes, they’re conservatives - the kind of conservative I thought was extinct - and yes, you should read them even when you disagree with them) on how White Privilege works even when one might be opposed to it. He had a link to an article from last year during the George Floyd protests, about how Elmhurst, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago could be both supportive of the Black Lives Matter movement and one of the most segregated of the segregated Chicago suburbs - almost like going back in time to 1950.

I checked it out, it was well worth reading (https://www.politicalorphans.com/why-is-elmhurst-white/). The author rang my bell with this::

“Imagine that nasty, bigoted racists built a machine designed to sort people by skin color, extracting value from black and brown people and redistributing it to whites. Further, suppose that generations later, white people decided that the bigoted attitudes which inspired the machine were dumb and counter-productive, and rejected that racism. Great. Now, what if they failed to unplug the machine? What if they forgot it even existed?

“What you’d see is ever greater expressions of non-racism or even anti-racism from white people, while people of color continued to experience disproportionately negative outcomes and whites accumulated ever more power, wealth and privilege at their expense.”

That set me to thinking about all the ways that works in my own life. And I’m proud to be someone who’s actually put himself on the line over the issue of civil rights during the past 50-odd years.

Elmhurst isn’t the only place like that. I live in Encino Park, here in the San Fernando Valley, and it’s like that. It’s a community that began in 1949, according to the date in the concrete slab in the sidewalk out in front of this house. These were GI Bill homes back then - 800-1,000 square feet, two smallish bedrooms, a single car garage because who needed more than one car back then? Cheap, not built to last, a good way for a developer to make money from the government, creating “affordable housing.” In fact, the World War II GI Bill is what created the modern American family dwelling in the modern American neighborhood. It’s what I call a “Leave It To Beaver” neighborhood. It’s nice and quiet - if it wasn’t for the coyotes who moved in over the past few years and ate all the community cats, I might let the Thundering Feline Herd into the back yard, without a thought of them getting out to the street and getting run over. There’s no traffic. The place is utterly boring, and nowadays, Boring. Is. Good. It’s a community that is designed to be cut off from the surrounding world - there are a total of seven streets counting all four sides of the square that open to the surrounding avenues - the sides being about half a mile on a side. You see people walking their dogs even in the evening, there are young families with children, and they go to the elementary school that is literally at the center of the neighborhood,; it’s now a privately-run “Charter School” rather than the public school it started as 70 years ago. If I want to take a stroll, it’s 10-15 minute walk to the nearest Trader Joe’s.

It’s also a neighborhood where I have seen exactly three African-Americans in the nearly-seven years we’ve lived here. It was a hard neighborhood for us to move into - being a self-employed writer, I don’t meet the usual standards of proof I am a Good Middle Class Person that landlords are using nowadays in the tight tight tight Los Angeles rental market to decide if one is a possible tenant they will take a risk on. We’d lived 12 years at our previous location here in the west San Fernando Valley, until the landlord died and her nephew decided to participate in the new fad of gentrification sweeping that neighborhood and announced to us he was tearing it down. We were unaware of the major changes that had happened for renters since the 2008 crisis.

You might not be aware of this, but when you see one of those signs nailed to a telephone pole “We pay cash for your home!” that is usually a local real estate agent shilling for a hedgefund that plans to turn that house they paid cash for into a rental. Hedgefunds now own over 50 percent of the rental housing in the United States, and probably more in cities like Los Angeles - at least in the “desirable” neighborhoods. They don’t rent to you because they take a liking to you - they say yes when your answers on the application fit their algorithm of financial solidity. After four months of looking and discovering there were no longer any “inexpensive neighborhoods,” we found this place and were lucky to find it owned by a landlady who liked the fact I’m an author who could show her actual books with my name on the cover. And we still only got in because SWMBO cashed some of that Disney stock in the 401-k the Mouse gave her when they bought ABC and fired half the technical staff. (When she hit 65 and found out what the account was worth - and it only keeps getting more worthy, the Mouse being the Mouse - she nearly fainted) and we were able to pony up six months rent in advance, cash accepted.

And while renters were about half the population of the neighborhood seven years ago, we’re probably under 20 percent now. All those GIs who bought these little houses and then stayed in them, have died off (the last two original owners on our street passed two years ago), and their kids have taken the houses - houses that originally cost $5-7,000 - and upgraded them: doubled the square footage, updated everything inside, and now they sell for anywhere from $900K-$1.3 million. The houses on either side of our modest little dwelling went through that within the past four years, and each has sold multiple times as their “owners” play Monopoly with them. (If you wonder why I’m still a renter, let me say that while a successful writer’s life is good, and even though by income I am in the top ten percent of American writers, that’s still not enough to buy a house here - and it’s a lot less money than it sounds like the way I described it, since the average pay for writers in America is really awful)

With all that, do you now see why I only saw three African-American residents here, and none - other than a couple who bought a house down the street just before the pandemic - in the past 3 years? There’s no need of restrictive housing covenants, or red-lining, or any of those things that were in place 60 years ago to keep Encino Park white. I’m absolutely certain from talking with people here while out on the daily constitutional that the place is as close to No Trumpers Here as a neighborhood gets. Nobody pays attention (or at least no one says so) to the African-American family down the street. But the neighborhood is still 99 percent white. It’s that way because of the hoops I had to jump through to rent here, or what a bank wants to see in down payment percentage for anyone buying a home here. Yes, anyone who can qualify can live here, but who qualifies?

Do I like living in a 99 percent white neighborhood? Not particularly. In the 40-odd years I have lived in the City of Lost Angles, I’ve mostly lived in multi-racial, multi-ethnic neighborhoods and thought I was lucky to do so, if only for the good neighborhood restaurants. But right now, at our age, like I said - Boring. Is. Good. I’m fine with not having to carry a child’s baseball bat slid up my sleeve for self-defense (I did do that in a nice “hip” neighborhood over on the East Side 30 years ago).

When I read the article, one other recent event really stood out to me as exemplary of how White Privilege works here. The other week when I was putting the trash cans out for pickup one evening, a car stopped across the street and the driver - a kid around 16 or 17 - leaned out and asked if I was who I am, to which I replied in the affirmative. He got out of the car and quickly identified himself as being vaccinated (“I wouldn’t want to concern you, sir”). The upshot was, he had discovered from reading posts on Next Door that I am not only an author, but am also guilty of having been a produced screenwriter. He’d thought of trying to contact me, but there was the pandemic and all, but now, here I was and here he was and he wanted to ask a huge favor: would I look at the screenplay he was trying to write and tell him what he could do better? I’ve long had a policy where if an aspiring writer can track me down (which takes some effort) and isn’t afraid to approach me in a “professional” manner, that I’ll say yes to such a request. The writer who taught me how to be a screenwriter had been in the business then about as long as I have now, and he pointed out to me early on that almost everybody in Duh Biz got there because at some point someone higher on the ladder gave them a hand up. It’s a gift you can’t pay back; if you’re the kind of person who understands the gift, it can only be paid forward.

So after we talked, he asked for my e-mail and later than evening his name showed up in my in-box and there was a PDF of the screenplay attached. Long story short, I read it, he demonstrated mastery of the basics, and was willing to listen to a critique of what wasn’t there, and at some point he may or may not show me his revised draft.

That’s an “only in Los Angeles story” since there aren’t many neighborhoods elsewhere outside of some precincts of New York City where you’re going to find your neighbor has a produced screenwriter living in it. But it’s also a story of White Privilege operating when nobody’s even thinking of it, because there aren’t that many neighborhoods here where that situation exists: a young person of color dreaming of being a screenwriter is unlikely to find someone like me in that neighborhood to approach. And that part about “someone higher on the ladder giving them a hand up”? That happens when both parties feel at ease enough, equal enough, to take that first step of meeting.

My story here is a small one, but multiply it around the country, and you get a small inkling of just how much effort it’s going to take to ever get to that place Reverend King spoke of 58 years ago this summer, where “we are judged by the content of our character rather than the color of our skin.”

Presented for your consideration.