In Jane Elliot’s classic Blue-eye/Brown-eye Exercise, a classroom of third graders was told one morning that they would be separated into two groups. Children with blue eyes, Elliot told them, were superior, and would therefore get privileges like extra time at recess and extra helpings at lunch. Brown-eyed kids had to wear special collars and sit in the back of the classroom, and were told they weren’t as smart. Two strange things happened. (1) Throughout the course of the day, the blue-eyed kids took this and ran with it, and became bossy and mean, fully buying the idea that their privileges were not randomly selected but earned. The other strange thing is that the next day, when the kids came in, Elliot said she’d made a mistake, that it wasn’t blue-eyed kids who were superior but brown-eyed ones, and that the rules of privilege would be reversed, and that was when (2) the brown-eyed kids, even after having been treated like second-class citizens the day before, likewise ended up behaving as though their superiority was an absolute and total truth.
I cite this experiment because it’s the only explanation I can come up with anymore when I think about how we treat—“treat” here meaning assist, regard, or even think about—America’s poor. After all, the circumstances by which people are born into wealth or poverty are just as much a roll of the dice as what color your eyes will be. Both eye color and socioeconomic status have everything to do with who your parents are. The wealth gap is yawning wider and wider, the rich stay rich and get richer, the poor stay poor and get poorer—the classes are as fixed and unchangeable as the pigment in your iris. And yet there’s still this weird, prevailing, ugly idea that the wealthy are wealthy for a reason, that their embarrassment of riches should not be an embarrassment at all, because unlike the lazy poor, they’ve worked hard. They’ve earned it.
I think that prevailing idea gets less ugly when I recognize that there is a third kind of American, one who was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth nor born into poverty and stayed there. This third breed of American, though rarer and rarer these days, is the Self-Made Man. And the Self-Made Man’s story is supposed to inspire us all: look at him. He did it. All on his own. He had to struggle, he had to fight his way out, but there he is. The guy who grew up on TV dinners, sitting in Le Bernardin, eating filet mignon. Everyone loves a Cinderella story.
But have you ever actually conversed with a Self-Made Man? Because they kind of suck. (And, by the way, there’s a difference between a Self-Made Man and a self-made man. A self-made man simply and humbly worked his way up. The Self-Made Man is the guy I’m talking about in this next paragraph). The SMM tells his rags-to-riches story only so that his audience learns the following moral: When I was struggling, nobody helped me. The SMM refuses to let anyone increase his taxes, lest they be wasted on someone who is presently struggling and has the temerity to ask for help. The SMM cannot fathom why anyone supports welfare, or food stamps, or any government-funded program that assists the poor. The SMM, in short, is exactly like the brown-eyed students in (2) above: a once-spurned outcast who’s had to pay a huge price to be in a club with the cool kids, and resents the idea that anyone else might get in for free.
This SMMism is all over the place nowadays, especially since last year’s election pitted class against class as a cornerstone political talking point. You can see it in Craig T. Nelson, totally misunderstanding the way our government works, saying to Glenn Beck, “I’ve been on food stamps and welfare, did anyone ever help me out? No.” You can see it in Florida’s shockingly overt fuck-you to welfare recipients, mandating drug tests before they can receive any money, as though anyone who receives welfare must be a moocher druggie (p.s. only 2.6 percent of welfare recipients failed the test during trials). You can see it in Bill O’Reilly’s proclamation after Obama won last November: “Fifty percent of the voting public want ‘stuff.’ They want things. Twenty years ago, President Obama would have been roundly defeated by an establishment candidate like Mitt Romney. But the white establishment is now the minority. And today’s voters feel that the system is stacked against them and they want ‘stuff.’” You can see it in the standing ovation and cheers from the tea party during the primaries when Ron Paul suggested that society should let people without health insurance die. You can see it in the Heritage Foundation report that concluded “poor” people aren’t really all that poor, since 98.2% of them have refrigerators.
It always boggles my mind when I hear SMM speaking to me, personally, about their own pasts. When they say, “When I was struggling, nobody helped me,” as a defense against universal health care, or social programs, or under-funded schools, they always say this like it’s the end-all-be-all of arguments, like this common-sense I’ve-lived-through-it-so-fuck-you rhetorical strategy is a total clincher. I often wonder why not having been helped during struggle didn’t have the opposite effect. Like those brown-eyed kids who were harassed the day before, why do they only learn the hierarchy and not the compassion?
The worst part is that this SMMism is now leaking like a sieve into the impoverished class itself. My friend posted a meme that had been circulating Facebook the other day, wherein a Louisiana doctor named Starner Jones describes a patient with “an expensive shiny gold tooth…and whose brand new cellular telephone played a popular R&B song” (subtle, I know). He (the doctor) is incensed that this patient has Medicaid, and laments a society where people assume they can do and buy whatever they want because someone else will take care of them. Besides the fact that this is completely ignorant in about twelve ways, the truly astonishing thing that I found was that the people commenting on this post were other poor people, who were angry that someone else got Medicaid, using the same logic as the Self-(and, let’s face it, Family-)Made Men in the aforementioned news broadcasts.
(Not to also mention, of course, that to dismiss someone else’s spending practices and call them irresponsible is radically oversimplifying the argument, and does not in any way take into account the ideas of Power and Privilege, nor does it seem to understand the problem of Inherited Wealth, and totally assumes that every person in the country had the exact same moral upbringing and value systems instilled in them as you, and doesn’t even begin to acknowledge the sickening amount of advertising geared toward uneducated and disenfranchised citizens who’ve been demoralized into believing that looking wealthy by buying things like “cellular telephones”—what a fucking dork—they might actually seem wealthy and worthy, all of which points are true even though they come off as kind of ranty here, and all of which points are much, much better articulated by Kanye West’s “All Falls Down”).
Anyway. Again, I really do believe it all comes back to those blue- and brown-eyed kids in that third-grade classroom. Perhaps it’s easier to enact a bullyish type of revenge once we get the upper hand. The problem is, if we keep living like this, fucking over the poor, widening the wealth gap until we actually really are the 99%, there isn’t going to be an upper-hand left.
About Ted McLoof
Ted McLoof is a writer at Rookerville and teaches fiction at the University of Arizona. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Minnesota Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Gertrude, Monkeybicycle, Sonora Review, Hobart, DIAGRAM, The Associative Press, and elsewhere.He's recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award. He is very cool and very handsome and he'd like to buy you a drink.