in the head by an Oxycontin addict hired for the hit by the other man running for sheriff. My mother’s across-the-street neighbor: shot in the face over cocaine. My wife’s brother, who swears his Bible tells him blacks are “a cursed people”: shot in the stomach by rival meth dealers. Yet we scared ourselves away from big-city crime. They’ll steal the Nikes right off your feet out there. They’ll pull you right out of your car. I listened to rappers sound the alarm about police violence before I ever saw four white cops beat Rodney King on the streets of LA, but my classmates were more moved by the riots that took place after the cops were acquitted. My classmates, with their truck-driver dads, watched four black men pull Reginald Denny from the cab of his semi truck and beat him nearly to death in the street. By God, that could have been me, they thought, but they couldn’t see themselves in King. They justified the cops beating King because of the fact that he was drunk, high, and driving erratically, then they headed home to drink beer, smoke weed, and crash their cars into farmers’ fences. My neighbors watched South Central Los Angeles burn and congratulated themselves on living in South Central Kentucky and passing on to their kids a mentality that didn’t encourage them to expand their horizons so much as ask why would anyone want to.
Here’s the conundrum: I made it out of a place so insular and sure of itself because I was sure I was better than the people who thought that way. I thought I was too good to go to the community college a few miles from the house I grew up in. I wanted to leave Kentucky in my rearview mirror and go to college in New York or Boston, but my mother, who’d told me since preschool that I was going to college, begged me to stay close to home.
When I decided to leave home to attend college two hours away in “the big city” of Louisville, my older cousin, the long-haul trucker, shared a piece of worldly advice: “Just make sure you don’t get caught out in Niggertown.”
“Are you sure you want to live up there in Louisville,” asked a friend’s older sister. I asked what she meant and she huffed and then said, in a tone like she was speaking the name of a disease I might catch, “Niggers.”
Black people had congregated in cities like Louisville, of course, because they’d been run out of rural Kentucky by white people. Once black Kentuckians could no longer be used for free labor on farms, white Kentuckians began to lynch them for offenses as minor as “bad character,” “insulted white woman,” “criticized mob,” and the ever-popular “unknown.”4 These lynchings were a campaign of terrorism meant to run the rest of the black people out of town. The rural white Kentuckians had scared themselves to death of the black Kentuckians, so they’d chased them away from the farmland and into the city. But in the process of scaring black people into leaving town, they’d scared themselves into staying put.
I grew up less than two miles away from the farms where my parents grew up, but I broke the cycle by convincing myself I was destined for bigger and better things. I made it out by teaching hip-hop culture and creative writing to young people who will come out of college stuck with nearly one hundred thousand dollars in student loans. I teach the legacy of bootstraps and rags-to-riches, the story of America as a place where we start out one thing and end up another. They are in college to do just that, but so much tells them it is no longer possible. I was told the same thing twenty years earlier: well-meaning uncles told me I would never make money writing books or teaching college, not in this economy; one of my English professors told me I would never have a job like his.
Yet today I am an English professor teaching a class on American success stories, from Ben Franklin to 2 Chainz in sixteen weeks. I don’t teach only the stories, but the ways we use the stories against each other. If you succeed, some say Look what America made possible for you, but if you fail it’s your own fault. Others of us are taught the inverse: to see success as one person’s triumph over a system designed to keep us down, and our individual setbacks as America working the way it was designed to work. Thus, the rap music of my youth showed me the toe-tagged Uncle Sam on the cover of Ice Cube’s Death Certificate and Uncle Sam as the (white) devil in Paris’s “The Devil Made me Do It” video.
It was a short walk from Johnny Paycheck’s “Take this job and shove it” to Ice Cube’s “Take this job and stick it, bigot.” Before I ever heard rap, I saw country music artists sell songs about working hard but not ending up with much. I mulled over this message as I swept cigarette butts from the floor of my dad’s body shop, his radio too high to reach and tuned to the country station. Daddy was determined to be his own boss, so he’d quit school in eighth grade to learn to paint cars. Mom believed college was the key to success: the longer you spent listening and learning, the better you’d do. I watched her re-enroll in college and finish her bachelor’s degree, our car’s floorboards littered with her textbooks and papers. Daddy restored antique cars from the rusted shells he found in the woods, but Mom drove a dirt-brown, dented Corolla. She studied in that car, windows iced over in winter—with three kids in the house, it was the only place she could find any peace. I came to see college as a welcome inevitability; I was going, Mom said, even if she had to scrub floors to pay my tuition. But when it came down to it, I paid with student loans, same as she’d done before me.
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When the conversation turns to race, white people tend to start talking about money, as if growing up with less wealth makes a person less white. As if growing up with less of an inheritance than the richest white Americans is a sign of solidarity with the black Americans whose ancestors were owned as property. Wealth accrues across generations, so I resent my friends who inherited a family business or whose parents were well-off enough to give them the down payment on their first house; imagine the difference between having a great-grandmother who owned a farm she could pass down to her children and having a great-great-grandmother who was herself passed down to the master’s kids when he died. As of 2018, the US Census Bureau lists the median net worth of white families at $132,000, while Latino families have less than one-tenth of that wealth ($12,000), and the median for black families is a mere $9,000. Slaves owned nothing for their kids to inherit, so after slavery ended, the next generation had to start from square one. Local police departments came up with new schemes to put the freed slaves back into chains, but even the ones who remained free were kept out of the best jobs and schools and terrorized into fleeing the South and then staying in their own neighborhoods in the North lest they give white people the impression that black people might expect them to share.
There is no logic to racism, but there certainly is a design. No matter how hard the freed slaves and their children worked, they still didn’t end up with much to leave to the next generation, so their descendants ended up going to the same failing and underfunded schools their parents had attended, and working the same kinds of jobs. America shrugged off the idea of reparations and instead, gradually, grudgingly, told schools they had to start letting in students of all colors; the country encouraged employers, in situations where all qualifications were equal, to hire the minority candidate first. When white Americans came to realize they were doing worse than their parents (the antithesis of the American Dream), they didn’t blame the billionaires whose share of the wealth was increasing to a percentage never before seen in history; they blamed desegregation and Affirmative Action. White politicians ran for office on a platform of reclaiming a gone and lost greatness from an earlier era. What white Americans may have missed most was their claim to the bootstraps stories this country was founded upon. There was the lingering resentment that white people were at a distinct disadvantage when it came to American Dream stories: no matter how poor a white man was, he would never be black.
In a country obsessed with the dream of the individual clawing his way to the top, white Americans began to resent that the humblest beginnings went to black Americans. Being born with white skin gave them an undeniable head start they sought to reject. Jerry Heller, the white, Jewish manager of Niggaz With Attitudes, prefaced his memoir with the bold statement, “I wanted to call this book Nigga 4 Life, but the fucking corporate gangstas who’ve taken over the bookselling dodge in this country wouldn’t support it if I did.”5 N.W.A. were early icons in
