Much of White America Clings to the Myth of a Level Playing Field

“The American Negro has the great advantage of never having believed that collection of myths to which white America clings.” 

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time.        

The preface of my book opens with this incisive quote from Baldwin. In a single sentence, he calls out the White people who believe a wide-ranging set of myths about Black people, our national origin story, and why race does or doesn’t continue to matter in America.

The opening paragraphs of my Preface continue, in which I write:

“As a White man, I am embarrassed to say that it has taken me nearly six decades to understand fully the legacy of our nation’s White supremacist founding and the consequences of our ongoing, systemic racism. My initial awakening occurred upon meeting and marrying an African American woman twenty-plus years ago and parenting two biracial kids in a time of increased White racist threats, yet even that awakening was insufficient.

I grew up at a time in America—in the 1960s and 1970s—when it was very easy as a White person to absorb, mostly unconsciously, the message that Whites were better, Whites were superior, Whites should be on top, and that only Whites had the intellect and ability to lead and to manage, no matter what the industry, the field, the position.

This same belief system surely held true for White Americans from my parents’ generation and, perhaps with a little less potency, from the Gen X generation that succeeded my Boomer generation. White was the standard, the model, the centerpiece around which everything else in our society revolved. It, essentially, still does.”        

And you may find yourself ready to argue, “But we’re not the same nation as we were when you were growing up and coming of age in America, Steve.”

And you’d be right; our nation has changed to a degree. We have made progress, albeit painfully incremental, in most arenas.

Three years after I was born, Jim Crow laws across the land were finally terminated, although to the great disappointment, if not ire, of many Whites. America was a profoundly segregated nation at that juncture: in our schools, in our towns, in our politics, in our economy. Changing the laws didn’t automatically pull African Americans out of 2nd or 3rd class citizenship. Nor did changing policies automatically change the condition of Black neighborhoods, Black schools, or Black economic prospects.

Given how profoundly our White-dominated nation had tyrannized, oppressed, and discriminated against African Americans since our inception in 1776, what should have been called for was not new laws and policies that effectively rearranged pieces on a chessboard. No, at that moment, we needed to enact a Marshall Plan for Negro Americans (how African Americans were still referred to in the 1960s).

For those who don’t remember, America enacted the Marshall Plan after World War II to “rehabilitate the economies of 17 western and southern European countries in order to create stable conditions in which democratic institutions could survive.” (Marshall Plan)

The U.S. government dispatched $13 billion ($169 billion in today’s dollars) in economic aid to the likes of Germany, Austria, the U.K., Portugal, and France (among others) over four years to restore industrial production and ensure financial stability. All these Western European nations experienced an enormous rise in gross national product in those four years, rapidly renewing their collective industrial bases. $13 billion was more than 1/3 of the federal budget at that time; over four years, we spent more than 8% of the federal budget on rehabilitating more than a dozen European nations.

Alas, we did no such thing. ?

We dallied along for several years, and then, in the aftermath of the racial protests and uprisings from 1965 to 1968, our nation cracked down on Black neighborhoods while urban-based manufacturers continued to leave American cities in droves, moving to the suburbs, where only White folks lived, leaving behind a greater economic and social mess than was there before.

Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, instead of listening to the collective wisdom of the 1968 Kerner Commission (officially, the National Advisory Commission on Violence and Civil Disorders) after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., shunned the advice and embarked on a course that led not to the restoration and rehabilitation of Black neighborhoods and communities but to an effective ‘business as usual’ pathway and consequence.

What did the Kerner Commission propose?

• “To mount programs on a scale equal to the dimension of the problems:
• To aim these programs for high impact in the immediate future in order to close the gap between promise and performance;
• To undertake new initiatives and experiments that can change the system of failure and frustration that now dominates the ghetto and weakens our society.”

They wrote: “[t]hese programs will require unprecedented levels of funding and performance, but they neither probe deeper nor demand more than the problems which called them forth. There can be no higher priority for national action and no higher claim on the nation's conscience.” (Kerner Commission Full Report)?

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Our nation would have charted a dramatically different trajectory had we embraced this declaration.

Instead, the trajectory we have pursued has led to a continuous 2.5 steps forward, two steps back course that, in many cases, has done little to erase even a semblance of racial gaps and disparities we saw in the 1960s.

The premise of my book – It’s Never Been a Level Playing Field – is that we have fooled ourselves into believing we are a far more equal society where everyone now suits up and plays on a roughly even playing field. Or they argue, as Chapter 1 in my book lays out, in favor of the “overarching myth”: America provides an equal playing field for all. Yet, this is a mirage, a profound myth. Don’t believe me?

Just consider a single table from Chapter 1 (pp. 7-9) that encapsulates how Whites continue to dominate in just about every sphere six decades after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Law.

As I researched these stats, I was stunned.

How could all these industries still be so dominated by Whites? Some might want to argue that it just demonstrates White superiority and excellence. Despite tilting the playing field from a 45-degree angle to flat, Whites still somehow stayed on top, right?

Or, as we will learn in the months to come, is it that the systems, structures, and conditions that enabled the profoundly unlevel playing field of the 1960s were hardly altered at all?

Even before I explore how the profoundly unlevel playing field continues—in our neighborhoods, schools, economy, health systems, and policing and court systems—a scan of the chart above must undoubtedly indicate that something is still overwhelmingly wrong with our playing field. No?

As much as many of us would like to believe in the myth of a level playing field, the reality is more like the image below that I created for the book (p. 12).

Here are some of the relevant endnotes for the table above.

Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018), p. 31.

Teresa Wiltz, “Why State Legislatures Are Still Pretty White,” Governing, December 9, 2015, https://www.governing.com/archive/legislative-boundaries-lack-of-connections-lead-to-few-minority-lawmakers.html.

Eric R. Hansen and Christopher J. Clark, “Diversity in Party Leadership in State Legislatures,” State Politics & Policy Quarterly, 20:1, (2019), p. 86, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1532440019885378.

Amanda Powers and Alicia Bannon, “State Supreme Court Diversity – May 2023 Update,” Brennan Center for Justice, May 15, 2023, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/state-supreme-court-diversity-may-2023-update.

Helene Cooper, “African Americans Are Highly Visible in the Military, but Almost Invisible at the Top,” The New York Times, May 25, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/25/us/politics/military-minorities-leadership.html.

“The Black P&L Leader: Insights and Lessons from Senior Black P&L Leaders in Corporate America,” Korn Ferry, p. 6.

Colette Coleman, “?‘Excuse After Excuse’: Black and Latino Developers Face Barriers to Success,” The New York Times, March 3, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/03/realestate/real-estate-developers-black-latino.html.

Phil Buchanan and Jen Cole, “African American Foundation CEOs: A Look at the Leadership of the Largest Foundations,” The Center for Effective Philanthropy, 2014, https://cep.org/african-american-foundation-ceos-a-look-at-the-leadership-of-the-largest-foundations/.

“Leading with Intent: 2017 National Index of Nonprofit Board Practices,” BoardSource, 2017, p. 10, https://leadingwithintent.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/LWI-2017.pdf?utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fleadingwithintent.org%2F.

Antonio Moore, “Black Media Ownership Matters,” Inequality.org, February 3, 2016, https://inequality.org/research/black-media-ownership-matters-oscar/.

“There are 15,330 U.S. Radio Stations, But How Many Matter?” HypeBot: Music-Technology-Business, https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2013/10/there-are-15330-us-radio-stations-how-many-of-the-matter-to-you.html.

“Black Owned Radio Stations: Ownership and Revenue Report,” National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters and BIA Advisory Services, pp. 3–6, https://s3.amazonaws.com/media.mediapost.com/uploads/BIA_NABOB_Black_Owned_Radio.pdf.

“How Many Radio Stations Are There in the United States?” Radioworld, April 11, 2014, https://www.radioworld.com/news-and-business/how-many-radio-stations-are-there-in-the-united-states#.

Richard Jean So and Gus Wezerek, “Just How White Is the Book Industry?” The New York Times, December 11, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/11/opinion/culture/diversity-publishing-industry.html.

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