Why do racists argue that "lack of homogeneity" is an acceptable excuse for not having universal healthcare and other safety nets in the United States?

The BBQ Pit
1

And this is just one study that shows this tendency: Study: telling white people they’ll be outnumbered makes them hate welfare more - Vox

It’s such a cop-out excuse. The only thing that should matter is funds per capita. A “lack of homogeneity” is an abhorrent excuse and one I hope fewer and fewer will accept as times go on.

It shouldn’t matter what the color of the skin is of someone receiving welfare. That subtle racists getting their fee fees hurt because of minorities being empowered, is an acceptable justification to continue denying healthcare and other basic needs to people in a country that has no shortage of funding available to do so, is pathetic.

2

Is it an excuse, or just an explanation as to why we don’t have those safety nets? America has a racism problem and that racism makes it difficult to pass programs that help everyone.

3

Yea, I see it more as an explanation. Freakonomics had a whole episode on social trust and its affects. If there are different groups of people that don’t see each other as all part of the same group (due to racial divide, socioeconomic divide, geographic divide), pooling resources will be more difficult. Essentially, “Why should I share my money with those people over there? I am sure they won’t use it well…”

4

There are 2 ways to interpret that statement.

  1. (original, good articles) social programs depend on mutual trust, which is harder in a multiethnic society
  2. (bad, racist edgelords) social programs depend on good-faith actors who won’t abuse the system, which is harder with cough cough certain ethnicities.

I know the idea was originally advanced with the former, but I’ve seen the latter (racist) interpretation even more than I’ve seen the good-faith interpretation, even on this message board.

5

I do wonder if we still had segregation if we would have “universal” healthcare.

Just with “separate but equal” systems.

I’m certainly not advocating for that world, just wondering how much of the pushback against universal healthcare comes from a place of racism.

6

As others said, it’s not excusing it, it’s an explanation. People - consciously or subconsciously - tend to look out for their own race much more than they look out for others. So in nations like Taiwan or Scandinavian single-payer nations, etc., where almost everyone is of similar racial appearance, there’s not much pushback against single-payer healthcare since it’s perceived as “for me” just as much as “for others.” But if you have people of other races, then it could begin to be perceived as “we’re giving free healthcare to them” - especially if some inflammatory news report starts to come out, e.g., “Pakistanis in London are consuming a lot more free healthcare than the average Briton” or something like that; just the spark needed to start the tinder flame of resentment and division.

This isn’t to say it can’t be done; the UK and Canada are both racially diverse and both have run single-payer programs. But then again you could say they aren’t as bitterly racially divided as the USA.

7

It’s explaining the excuses.

You are not wrong that we have bitter racial divisions, but that it the fault of the racists, who are given a free pass.

8

Why do racists do this?

Because they’re racists. And they want to blame everything on someone else’s race.

“We could have that nice stuff if is wasn’t for them (insert racial epithet here).”

In fact, it is a complete bullshit argument, because there are plenty of countries that are more culturally and racially diverse than the USA, but have forms of universal healthcare.
Canada is more culturally diverse using different methods of measuring this - ethnic fractionalization index and cultural diversity index.

So this excuse is just bullshit and racisim.

9

Essentially, the “argument” boils down to “We have black people in the US, and we don’t want to have them benefit in our society. So we will deny ourselves a reasonable system in order to prevent those people from having it too.”

10

Every time I’ve seen that claimed, it is a response to “why does universal health care work in other countries but not the US?”

The right used to deny that universal health care (or any other social program) worked at all in any country. Now they need a reason why it won’t work in the US in spite of working in other countries. It’s already a fall-back position.

11

A lot of it, but not all of it. A big part of the Republican zeitgeist is the terrible fear that someone, somewhere might get something for nothing, something that they don’t “deserve”. All value must be earned by personal initiative, according to the rules of the Republican dogma. Thus, the poor family in the bad part of town doesn’t deserve health care, and if some of them die for lack of it, it’s their own damn fault. Whereas, say, Jeff Bezos fully “deserves” the $400 billion or whatever the hell it is that he’s currently worth, because he “earned” it according to the rules of the game. And so does Trump, even if he stole most of it, and is also entitled to keep his net worth a secret. There is no morality whatsoever in Republican dogma. (There is “family values”, of course, but that’s just a dog whistle for blatant misogyny.)

This ties neatly into racism being another pillar of Republican dogma, because African Americans are disproportionately in lower income brackets, and thus automatically less deserving and more likely to benefit from UHC and other social programs, which Republicans are always cutting and ideally would love to eliminate altogether. The fact that many Republicans also believe that black people are inherently inferior is just the icing on the cake – that’s the part that they’re not supposed to say out loud.

12

Just to add to the above, it’s almost impossible to understate how deeply ingrained the concept of “deserving” and “earning through personal initiative” is within the Republican dogma. They would rather pay through the nose and be screwed on health care themselves than support a universal system that is far more efficient, because the latter would give the “undeserving” (a great many of whom are black) free health care, and that’s just intolerable. The fact that many of them are also convinced by relentless propaganda that UHC systems don’t work well is a different and separate issue. It doesn’t take a lot of research to disprove it, but they’re not interested because of that first factor.

13

If I had to guess, a lot of it is class derived, and by extension, class-related behaviors that drive a lot of the hate.

I mean, what I’ve heard is more that people (white, middle class) don’t like the idea of paying for other groups’ illegitimate children, don’t like paying for people who smoke like chimneys, or use drugs/drink to excess, or who eat ridiculously unhealthy diets, etc…

Of course, there’s a LOT of overlap between those behaviors and socio-economic class, and unfortunately race. The gotcha is that most of these things they are so theoretically averse to paying for in a single payer system are things that we ARE paying for in our current system. I mean, if a poor person eats poorly, smokes and gets diabetes, they’re getting cared for on the government nickel one way or the other, and it’s often worse care, and more expensive than a single-payer system would provide.

But that would run afoul of a certain punitive mentality in the American middle class. There’s a real mentality that people who don’t follow ‘the rules’ (as defined by how a white, middle class person should behave) should be punished- by having shit jobs, shit housing, shit healthcare, etc… The problem here is that in many cases, the poor culture is not one that knows about ‘the rules’, or if they do, they don’t feel like they apply in their corner of Appalachia/inner city/barrio/rural small town/etc… where there is little opportunity, little money, and lots of drugs and poor food. So because they didn’t study in high school/got pregnant early/eat poorly/abuse drugs/whatever, there’s a strong mentality that they deserve what they get, and there shouldn’t be efforts made to cushion that fall, because that’s “encouraging” it.

Now I’m not saying there’s not racism, but in my experience what I’ve seen is more the overlap of race with these other things. I haven’t heard anyone say that they’re against single-payer healthcare because it would mean that blacks and hispanics would get it. They’re almost always against “coddling” or “encouraging” what they perceive to be bad behavior.

There’s also a big personal-choice argument that’s made by the more politically aware ones, that runs something like “I shouldn’t be compelled to participate in the healthcare system by the government”, regardless of whether it’s a good idea or not, or what have you. It’s the same dumb-assedness that is cropping up with regard to masks right now.

14

I believe I’ve seen this same argument brought up when talking about gun violence and the supposed impossibility of reducing it in the United States through gun control or other means.

15

Only if this is what they’re taught. No one understands “race”, including their own race, without being taught. There’s nothing special about skin color – it’s just how our society has divided itself (in many ways, at least). If our society divided itself by height, then we’d be having all these conversations about how people, consciously or unconsciously, look out for their own height group much more than other height groups. We’d be talking about tall privilege (which probably exists to some degree already), tall supremacism, tallness, etc. But these things are taught, sometimes by parents and peers and sometimes by broader society as a whole. And kids can be taught about race and racism in a way that doesn’t reinforce bigotry and bias in society.

16

Never mind, of course, that Jesus quite clearly and unambiguously spoke out against that mindset in Matthew 20:1-16.

And when I’ve heard the argument the OP refers to, it’s always been in response to the claim that we should have universal health care. It’s usually set up as “We shouldn’t have it because it wouldn’t work, and it wouldn’t work because we’re diverse”, but the conclusion is still always “we shouldn’t have it”.

17

Obviously, I meant to say “it’s almost impossible to overstate …”. It is deeply ingrained indeed.

Maybe I should change my username to “Needs_coffee2”. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

18

@Velocity While I wish it was just an explanation rather than an excuse, you can tell it isn’t in this case. As an explanation, it would be something to try and fix. But, when this is brought out, it always something that’s “just the way it is.” Nevermind, as you pointed out, that other diverse societies pull it off.

Plus racists use diversity as an excuse for other things where you’re supposed to just accept that it causes certain things without any evidence that such is true. It’s why Sweden can have socialism but we can’t. It’s just accepted that there being a lot of people of the same ethnicity is why those cultures are the way they are, and why we can’t do it here.

We’re all Americans. While we have our own diverse cultures, we also have a shared culture. There’s no reason we couldn’t draw on what makes us similar instead of what makes us different, IM(ns)HO.

19

Which is an absurd argument because universal health care works very well in the US. Medicare and medicaid cover 130 million people and those are both single payer systems (medicaid has some issues with low reimbursement though, medicare too to a lesser degree).

Either way, when you look at the states, racial homogeneity doesn’t seem to be a factor. California is very racially diverse and they’d happily accept UHC. Vermont is racially homogeneous and they’d happily accept it too. Meanwhile Mississippi is diverse while Idaho is homogeneous and neither state would accept it anytime soon.

Its not the racial diversity thats the issue, its the racism. A state that is 98% white but has a lot of racism will reject UHC on the state level despite very few black people benefiting. A state that is 55% non-white like CA would accept it because people there are less racist.

20

Assuming that this study out of Berkeley by people (who are convinced that racism has been increasing in the U.S. since 2008) is correct:

Where does it conclude (and if so, on what basis) that Americans reject universal healthcare and “other safety nets” altogether?

What I saw in that article is that when a group is supposedly “primed” to think that it’s going to become a shrinking minority and that other groups will get benefits from government programs, the presumptive minority group would be in favor of cutting back those programs - not eliminating them.
An element of racism in that case, sure. Also the human condition.