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 the fight for the right for rappers to say whatever the fuck they wanted, and decades later—after the group split up and accused Heller of stealing their money and Ice Cube shouted, “Fuck Jerry Heller and the white superpowers”6—Heller railed against the timidity of corporate publishing. No one, he argued, should be able to stop a white man from calling himself black:
“I was a nigga on the streets of Cleveland when I was growing up, only they pronounced it ‘kike’ back then. I was a nigga in the late fifties at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, when my first college roommate asked me if Jews were allowed to vote. After that I was a nigga on the campus of the University of Southern California, when WASP bullyboys spray-painted anti-Semitic graffiti on the walls of ZBT—the Jewish frat house where I roomed.”7
Jews certainly heard their share of slurs. Thirty years after Heller saw that anti-Semitic graffiti, such hateful notions persisted. In 1989, Heller was making money managing Niggaz With Attitudes when Public Enemy’s Professor Griff proclaimed, “The Jews are wicked. And we can prove this.”8 But Heller suggested that being Jewish entitled him to claim a slur that had been designed to hurt black people, so that having been called a “kike” entitled him to call himself a “nigga,” even though he was a white record executive working in an industry built on the exploitation of black musicians, and even though his own black musicians accused him of keeping more than his share of their money.
America made being born powerless, hated, and poor such a compelling start to our stories that everyone wanted in, regardless of skin color. America was born out of rebellion, so my white Kentucky classmates felt like rebels listening to Public Enemy’s great call to action “Fight the Power” just one year after we felt like rebels listening to Hank Williams Jr’s revisionist daydream “If the South Woulda Won.” As much as Hank had preached self-reliance and living off the land in his earlier anthem “A Country Boy Can Survive,” he still pined for the good old days when slaves would have cooked him his pancakes. Two decades later, in 201l, the South still hadn’t risen again. Hank didn’t like our black president one bit and he wasn’t shy about sharing his views. ESPN parted ways with Hank after he compared President Obama to Hitler; America had become so oppositional, said Hank, that the Republican speaker of the house playing golf with the Democrat president was like Israel’s prime minister playing golf with Hitler. “Working-class people are hurting,” said Hank, who was worth $45 million, “and it doesn’t seem like anybody cares. When both sides are high-fiving it on the ninth hole when