They're going to get hate mail for the title alone

But Pouty White People by Gregory Rodriguez is so on point…

One reason for California's post-World War II success was the willingness of government and civic institutions to invest in the aspirations and hard work of newcomers to the state. California built an extraordinary infrastructure — aqueducts, roads, universities and schools — to enable largely Anglo migrants to realize their dreams. Taxpayers gladly footed the cost because their future depended on the improvements. Because the electorate had an optimistic vision, they were willing to bear the sacrifices. California's leading social, political and cultural institutions echoed this sentiment and articulated the goals of the ascendant Anglo population. The editorial visions of the state's leading newspapers resonated with the energy and outlook of a hopeful, striving population.

Whites still make up a disproportionate share of the electorate. They dominate the state's business, intellectual and cultural elites. They remain the principal authors of the California story. And they have become the most pessimistic of any group in the state, according to an August survey of the Public Policy Institute of California. Fully 57% felt that the state would be a worse place to live in two decades. At 49%, blacks were the second most pessimistic group. Latinos (39%) and Asians (34%) were significantly less downbeat.

Mr. Rodriguez goes into reasons white folks in California are pouty (a lot of Black folks are too, but for different reasons), and gives one that strikes me as valid nationwide:

One explanation for what is happening is what journalist David Whitman calls the "I'm OK, you're not" phenomenon. Anglos have less faith in the future of today's immigrants than the immigrants have for themselves. Over a generation, immigrants from Asia and particularly Latin America have changed not only the cultural landscape but also the state's image of itself.

The newcomers have punctured the idea of California as a middle-class utopia. They are associated with high rates of poverty, density, diversity and social ills reminiscent of New York City and Chicago at the turn of the 20th century. Whites don't easily identify with the aspirations of these emergent groups.

Posted by Prometheus 6 on September 26, 2004 - 12:26pm :: Race and Identity
 
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As a native Californian (born on California Street in a town that a late local gossip columnist labeled "Bagdhad-by-the-Bay") and until 11 years ago a resident of more than 40 years, I can assure you that the poutiness of its white residents is most decidely not an attitude of recent duration or one generated by recent demographic changes. H.L. Mencken opined in a column written more than 70 years ago in which he referred to Mississippi as "one vast outhouse" declared that California was the worst state in the Union. What had raised his ire, among other things, was the arrest of the writer Upton Sinclair for reading the U.S. Constitution aloud on the steps of the Santa Monica courthouse.

While it is true that Californians, under the leadership of governors like Republican Earl Warren and Democrat Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, began forging a progressive consensus that resulted in the development of an institutional and concrete infrastructure that for decades was the envy of every state in the nation, the election of Ronald Reagan as governor signaled an end to this compact and the reemergence of California's nativist and xenophobic traits and attitudes. The election of a Republican governor was not the issue. Prior to Pat Brown's election, California had only had one Democratic governor, the ill-fated Culbert Olsen who served for one term during the early years of the Great Depression.

What Reagan represented par excellence was the ascendancy of a wing of the California Republican Party that had increduously never bought into the political and economic compact advanced by Warren, Brown and their political and business allies. The unrelenting attempts to break and neuter the University of California was the most public sign of their disaffection and alienation from what had been the prevaling consensus for three decades. This tendency probably reached its highest and lowest points simultaneously when California's voters decided several years ago to outlaw affirmative action.

The writer Joan Didion, who herself is a native California, in her recent book "The Place Where I'm From" attributed what Rodriguez terms as "poutiness" to the myth that many, many white Californians, including some of her own family, share about the origins of California's settlement and development. They cling tenanciously to the myth of California being the result of hardy, rugged pioneers who built the Golden State by the sweat of the brows and sacrifice. What is simply overlooked or conveniently forgotten, according to Didion, is the major role that the federal government has played for more than a century and half in making California into what too many of its current residents believe they made all by themselves.

Posted by  PTCruiser on September 28, 2004 - 9:04am.

The whole American self-image is that of the hardy pioneer...and is as wrong as the specifically Californian self image.

But I think Rodriguez is saying California has reached a tipping point. He's saying white Californians no longer feel in control because they see more people they can't identify with than they do people they can identify with.

Posted by  Prometheus 6 on September 28, 2004 - 9:36pm.

While it may be true today that many more white Californians are more apt to express their unease with the state's burgeoning minority populations than in past years, it is important to keep in mind that this feeling of discomfort is not new. It existed prior to the documented recent explosive growth of Hispanic and Asian residents. The writer Jack London, for example, and a labor organizer and leader named Dennis Kearney made speeches in San Francisco's Portsmouth Square in the late 1800's warning whites of the so-called "Yellow Peril" from Asia and demanding that Chinese and Japanese immigrants be forcefully repatriated. My late mother, who was fairly apolitical and was born and raised in California's San Joaquin Valley, went to her grave believing that the internment of the Japanese, which she witnessed first hand as a high schooler, was little more than a scam run by the government to allow "Okies" and other poor whites an opportunity to grab up farms and businesses owned by Japanese-Americans families. There is nothing substantially wrong with Rodriguez's asessment but, again, these attitudes on the part of some, although not all or, perhaps, most, white Californians are not of recent origin. They are as much a part of California's landscape as redwood trees or earthquakes.

Posted by  PTCruiser on September 29, 2004 - 10:55am.

I'm not going to argue with that. It's even more in keeping with my view that it speaks to all America's issues, not just California's.

Posted by  Prometheus 6 on September 29, 2004 - 11:10am.