American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise

by Eduardo Porter Narrated by Anthony Rey Perez, Eduardo Porter

Overview

A sweeping examination of how American racism has broken the country's social compact, eroded America's common goods, and damaged the lives of every American--and a heartfelt look at how these deep wounds might begin to heal.

Compared to other industrialized nations, the United States is losing ground across nearly every indicator of social health. Its race problem, argues Eduardo Porter, is largely to blame.

In American Poison, the New York Times veteran shows how racial animus has stunted the development of nearly every institution crucial for a healthy society, including organized labor, public education, and the social safety net. The consequences are profound and are only growing graver with time. Leading us through history and across America--from FDR's New Deal through Bill Clinton's welfare reform to Donald Trump's retrograde and divisive policies--Porter pieces together how racial hostility has blocked American social cohesion at every turn, producing a nation that fails not only its black and brown citizens but white Americans as well.

American Poison is at once a broad, rigorous argument, and a profound cri de coeur. Even as it uncovers our most tenacious national pathology, it points the way toward hope, illuminating the ways in which, as the nation becomes increasingly diverse, it may well be possible to construct a new understanding of racial identity--and a more cohesive society on top of it.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Michael Ignatieff

…a learned, well-written but relentless survey of social science studies on the racial polarization, animosity and social fragmentation of American life. A black or Hispanic American reader is likely to finish Porter's summary of the evidence and say, "So what else is new?" For a white liberal, the book leaves many an illusion in tatters.

Publishers Weekly

12/02/2019

New York Times journalist Porter (The Price of Everything) delivers an anguished and incisive treatise on how racism has contributed to 21st-century America’s economic and social decline. According to Porter, white working class voters have undermined their own opportunities for advancement by allowing the social safety net to erode under the false belief that minorities abuse it. He traces the problem to early 20th-century labor disputes, Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, and Ronald Reagan’s deployment of the “welfare queen” trope. Porter describes American communities that have been ravaged by unemployment, poverty, and lack of healthcare, yet elect representatives who attach work requirements to Medicaid and blame immigrants for job losses that were caused by automation. He points out that anti-immigration policies could leave Social Security underfunded just as baby boomers retire en masse, and without enough workers to handle such a large increase in the elderly population. Unless American society is able to heal racial divides and create “social trust,” working-class people of all races will continue to suffer, according to Porter. His pessimism (“I can’t imagine much boundary-breaking solidarity emerging from this America”) gives the book a bleak and mournful tone, and he doesn’t offer many concrete solutions. Nevertheless, his cogent presentation succeeds in making the problem of racial animus relevant to all Americans. Progressive readers will concur with this bracing sociological study. Agent: Zoe Pagnamenta, the Zoe Pagnamenta Agency. (Mar.)Correction: An earlier version of this review listed an incorrect subtitle.

From the Publisher

"American Poison is a devastating, brutally honest, wonderfully researched read. It is also necessary and incredibly timely. From its discussion of how racism affects everything to its invitation to African Americans and Hispanics to unite and battle it together, Porter has crafted a narrative that ultimately becomes a statement: What we've done so far is wrong, and it's time to change it."—Gabino Iglesias, NPR

"Powerful. . . A scathing analysis of misguided white antagonism toward social welfare programs. . . This book should find a place in libraries documenting America’s virulent racial history through the present."—Lewis M. Steel, Inequality.org

“With a scintillating rhythm and pointed language, the author exposes all the ways in which racism has infected everything from unions to welfare to education and immigration policy. . . The potency of Porter’s argument is bolstered by his impressive source list and straightforward prose. American Poison is a work for our times from a writer who has found his subject.”—Colleen Mondor, Booklist 

"Stirring. . . [Porter's] fast-moving chapters represent the best aspects of feature writing, driven by a clarity of purpose. When he details the scope of 'America’s entrenched poverty,' he evaluates it in terms of the damage done to the entire nation."—Ron Slate, On the Seawall 

"Learned, well-written . . . Porter is at his strongest when he points out the tragic irony of a white working class, decimated by deindustrialization and wasted by substance abuse, focusing their hatreds on minorities and turning against the very social programs that might actually help them. . . A bracing wake-up call."—Michael Ignatieff, The New York Times Book Review  

"Fascinating . . . Porter is uniquely conversant and globally-minded on these issues."—Esquire,  "Best Books of 2020" 

"Timely and provocative."—Sandra Lilley, NBC Latino 

“An anguished and incisive treatise on how racism has contributed to 21st-century America’s economic and social decline. . . [Porter’s] cogent presentation succeeds in making the problem of racial animus relevant to all Americans. Progressive readers will concur with this bracing sociological study.”—Publishers Weekly

“[Porter] clearly delineates a wide variety of conundrums that face American citizens, exacerbating divisions and hurting everyone. . . [He] capably pulls the strands together to demonstrate one of the narrative's most important ideas: how the U.S. lacks a true safety net. . . Another solid addition to the necessarily growing literature on one of America's most intractable issues.”—Kirkus 

“An outstanding analysis of the central role that racial hostility has played throughout America’s history in shaping the institutions that rob so many Americans of the promises of its democracy.”—Clara Rodriguez, author of Changing Race 

“There are many problems that Americans deny, dismiss or blame on others, and racism is at the top of the list. This unflinching book confronts the stark reality of how racism continues to stand in the way of even the most obvious solutions to many of our national problems.”—Naomi Oreskes, author of Why Trust Science? 

“If you yearn for a really sophisticated discussion of the rise of Trumpism in America, you have to read American Poison. Couching his lucid arguments in both historical and cross-cultural contexts, and drawing upon the most careful social science research, Eduardo Porter illuminates how racial hostilities emerge from, and can be restrained by, changing social, economic, and political situations. This book is an eye-opener!”—William Julius Wilson, author of When Work Disappears 

“Eduardo Porter finds in the nation’s struggles with racism the will to move forward—not to a post-racial society, not yet, but to a multicultural, tolerant future. American Poison is a must read to understand the United States in this already turbulent century.”—Jorge Ramos, author, Stranger: The Challenge of a Latino Immigrant in the Trump Era

“With courage and clarity, Eduardo Porter reveals the underpinnings of race in America and the stark challenge of overcoming the divides that have fueled demagogues like Trump. He explains that finding a common national and cultural identity will require tackling the deeply ingrained tribal logic with which America has organized its world. Powerful, sobering, and essential.”—Robert B. Reich, author, The Common Good

“Seventy-six years ago, Gunnar Myrdal called it “The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy.”  Eduardo Porter provides  a much needed updating. In an incisive and alarming analysis, he shows how racial dissonance is incited by white Americans. His innovative insights explain so much.”—Andrew Hacker, author of Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal

Library Journal

02/01/2020

America's social contract is shattered, and there's likely no putting the pieces back together, according to this fierce, incisive analysis of why we are a deeply divided nation. New York Times journalist Porter (The Price of Everything) describes over a century of mounting resistance to government, and to the safety net it offers, on the part of working-class white citizens (whose own livelihoods would be greatly improved by a stronger welfare system), because of ingrained fear of the other and demographic change. Porter considers racial animus to be the primary driving force of our social dysfunction; the root cause of the polarization that has made bipartisanship and civil discourse all but impossible. Porter brings his own experience as a longtime observer of American economy and society to this sobering study, showing how fear and resentment have been driving forces in politics. In glimmers of hope, he notes that younger generations are accustomed to diversity, and that integrated neighborhoods and schools have proven beneficial to all. But, he notes, many young adults hold similar views as their elders, and several schools have re-segregated. VERDICT Bleak, but perhaps inspirational, this challenging critique is recommended for policymakers and readers concerned about civic engagement.—Janet Ingraham Dwyer, State Lib. of Ohio, Columbus

Kirkus Reviews

2019-11-24
An argument that racism as practiced by whites in the United States doesn't just hurt people of color.

Born in Phoenix to a white American father and a darker-skinned Mexican mother, New York Times economics reporter Porter (The Price of Everything: Solving the Mystery of Why We Pay What We Do, 2011) writes from his personal experience as a perceived nonwhite and his professional perspective as a skilled journalist who has worked in Mexico City, Tokyo, London, São Paulo, and Los Angeles. The author clearly delineates a wide variety of conundrums that face American citizens, exacerbating divisions and hurting everyone. These include poorly funded public schools, many of them segregated by race and ethnicity; massive prison populations with no meaningful rehabilitation services for the inmates; untrammeled gun ownership leading to a form of violence unmatched anywhere else in the world; the criminalization of drugs without adequate recognition that addiction is often a curable disease rather than a reason to lock someone up; and housing discrimination, which leads to massive income inequality as well as other persistent societal ills. The author capably pulls the strands together to demonstrate one of the narrative's most important ideas: how the U.S. lacks a true safety net, not just for people of color, but also for lower-income whites. Some of Porter's examples fall outside conventional narratives about racism. For example, when labor unions exclude people of color as members in order to protect well-paid white laborers, worker solidarity becomes fractured, social unrest increases, and everybody loses as the funds for adequate health care drain community resources. When assistance to truly needy people of color is denied with the rationale of "welfare abuse," low-income whites are left to drift as well. And as the author makes clear, none of this is new. "Trump's election may have exposed America's ethnic divisions to the unforgiving glare of the klieg lights," he writes, but these problems "have been lying in America's underbrush for a long time." In a final chapter about the future, Porter finds little reason for optimism about reduced racism.

Another solid addition to the necessarily growing literature on one of America's most intractable issues.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177290454
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	03/17/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1
 
American Poison
 
In the early summer of 2015, I could not imagine that immigration had the power to deliver somebody to the White House. Just 7 percent of Americans believed immigration was the nation’s most critical challenge, according to Gallup. Three in four thought it was good for the country. Only a third said we should admit fewer immigrants. This was half the share who thought so in the mid-1990s, when California’s governor, Pete Wilson, ran for reelection by whipping up fears of an illegal alien invasion. Indeed, it was the lowest share since the 1960s.
 
Illegal immigration was, after all, pretty contained. There were 1.2 million fewer unauthorized immigrants in the United States in 2015 than there had been in 2007, when the implosion of the housing bubble wiped out the construction jobs that many of them relied on. The economy was growing briskly, after its painful slog out of the Great Recession, and the unemployment rate was falling fast, reducing what competition there might have been between immigrants and American workers for available jobs.
 
Then Donald Trump decided to run for president. He promised to protect the homeland from the rapist thugs streaming illegally into the United States from Mexico. He pledged to build a wall, to once and for all bring America’s sieve-like southern border under control. All of a sudden the fear of immigrants that was lying dormant in America’s subconscious propelled Trump to the presidency. It may change the United States for good.
 
There’s a public park in Brooklyn a few blocks from where my son, Mateo, used to go to school. It’s named, in true Brooklyn style, after a Beastie Boy: Adam Yauch. In the days after the election, somebody painted swastikas on the playground equipment, alongside an exhortation: “Go Trump.”
 
I was born of a Mexican mother and an American father and grew up mostly in Mexico. I consider myself both Mexican and American. At home I speak mainly Spanish, hoping it will encourage Mateo to embrace his Mexican side too. On the day after the election, we were riding the subway when he leaned into my ear and whispered, “Dad, perhaps we shouldn’t speak Spanish in public anymore?”
 
One might read this moment in American history as an aberration brought about by a uniquely racist political entrepreneur, or explain it as the product of specific economic circumstances. You’ve heard the argument: working-class voters frustrated by decades of wage stagnation lashed out at the cosmopolitan class that ignored their plight for so long.
 
There is some truth to this. Many of Trump’s voters are among the losers of America’s economic transformations. He won white voters without a bachelor’s degree by a thirty-nine percentage point margin over Hillary Clinton. The 2,584 counties that Trump won in 2016 generated only 36 percent of the nation’s GDP, according to research by Mark Muro and Sifan Liu of the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program. They include most of rural and small-town America—depopulated, aging, in seemingly terminal decline. The 472 counties that voted for Hillary Clinton, by contrast, accounted for 64 percent of America’s economic output. This lopsided pattern can be made to fit the view that the “us” who were left behind by progress voted the smug beneficiaries of America’s prosperity out of power.
 
But that is hardly the whole story. It would be a historic mistake to gloss over the critical, defining role of xenophobia in America’s choice. It was not a freak event, not a bug in the system. The mix of contempt and resentment across frontiers of religion, race, ethnicity, and citizenship that anchored Trump’s seduction of sixty-three million voters has distorted American politics since the birth of the nation. It defines who we are.
 
You may call our condition racial hostility or simply racism. From America’s slaveholder past through the Civil War and beyond, in the form of legal segregation across the Jim Crow South and de facto segregation across the urban North, the poll tax deployed to keep blacks from the polls, and campaigns against imagined voter fraud to purge blacks from the rolls, “ethnic divisions”—to give them a tamer name—have conditioned every turn in the development of the American state. Standing in the way of social trust, blocking solidarity, they have made us decidedly poorer. Upon those injustices we have built the most exceptional country, one in which the most extreme wealth coexists comfortably with deprivation that has no place in the industrialized world.
 
Trump’s election might have exposed America’s ethnic divisions to the unforgiving glare of the klieg lights, but the uncomfortable questions raised by a president who likens immigrants to rapists ready to come for our women, who blocks Muslims from entering the country, who offers understanding to white supremacists marching torches in hand, coiled at the ready for a Nazi salute, have been lying in America’s political underbrush for a long time.
 
The very image of the United States as a melting pot—forged by the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry James to evoke an exceptional culture, built of a multiplicity of immigrant experiences bound into a national American identity—was ultimately a blinkered concept. Emerson might have dreamed of America as an “asylum of all nations,” where Africans and Polynesians contributed to create a new race, a new religion, and a new literature to replace the old Eurocentric paradigm. In fact, the crucible smelted only Americans of European stock.
 
The term “melting pot” made its way into the American vernacular through Israel Zangwill’s homonymous play, which opened at the Columbia in Washington, D.C., on October 5, 1908. It’s an ersatz Romeo and Juliet in which a Jewish Russian immigrant and a Christian Russian immigrant, in New York, overcome the vast historical and cultural chasm between them. “Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the crucible with you all!” trumpets the main character, David Quixano. “God is making the American.” At the premiere, President Theodore Roosevelt, to whom Zangwill had dedicated the drama, is said to have shouted, “That’s a great play.”
 
The indigenous communities living in the United States before all those Europeans arrived were not invited into the pot, though. Nor were the descendants of African slaves or the brown Catholic Mexicans from whom the United States had acquired about a third of its territory sixty years before. The American alloy certainly had no place for Chinese immigrants, who were prohibited from gaining American citizenship under the Chinese Exclusion Act. In 1924, sixteen years after the debut of The Melting-Pot, Congress passed restrictions limiting legal immigration from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. They would remain on the books until 1965.

Over the last half a century or so, however, these disparate peoples once excluded from the crucible have come to define the de facto American. As a response, all those Americans of European stock who melted over the years into the contemporary concept of non-Hispanic white ditched the crucible metaphor and replaced it with a different organizing principle: to each his own. For years they circled the wagons, hoping to bar the nonwhite from the benefits of citizenship. When the Civil Rights Act stripped them of this ability, they set out to sabotage the collective American project. Donald Trump is merely a natural step in this progression.

One of the most notable features of President Trump’s victory was its whiteness. Sixty-two percent of white men chose him, compared with 32 percent who voted for Clinton. He won a plurality of white women, beating the first female presidential candidate from a major party in history by a margin of 47 to 45 percent. He opened a new divide in American politics, a split between the mostly white homogeneous culture of small-town America in slow but steady economic decline and the messy mix of the nation’s vast urban hubs.

The urban-rural cleavage is just an old wound in a new place. In 2016 rural whites voted in lockstep to preserve what privilege they could despite their demographic stagnation. Their choice was an extension of whites’ long-standing effort to preserve for themselves what America has to offer.

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