{"id":24323,"date":"2021-02-18T01:50:00","date_gmt":"2021-02-18T01:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=24323"},"modified":"2021-02-19T15:57:55","modified_gmt":"2021-02-19T15:57:55","slug":"i-interviewed-48-bankrupt-americans-heres-who-they-blame-for-their-financial-troubles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/i-interviewed-48-bankrupt-americans-heres-who-they-blame-for-their-financial-troubles\/","title":{"rendered":"I interviewed 48 bankrupt Americans \u2013 here’s who they blame for their financial troubles"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Tess Wise<\/a>, Amherst College<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The people arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection had an 18% bankruptcy rate \u2013 twice as high as the national average<\/a> \u2013 according to a Washington Post investigation. A quarter of the rioters had been sued by a creditor, and 1 in 5 faced losing their home to foreclosure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a scholar of American political economy who focuses on middle-class economic precarity<\/a>, I found this discovery unsurprising.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since 2017 I have interviewed 48 Americans going through Chapter 13 personal bankruptcy<\/a> \u2013 the kind of bankruptcy primarily filed by people making above-median income or trying to save a home from foreclosure \u2013 and watched about 500 bankruptcy court proceedings. When talking about their bankruptcies with my research participants, I also touched on their life histories and politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most did not blame the government or America\u2019s lack of social safety net for their troubles. Instead, they blamed the \u201centitlement\u201d of others for ruining things for \u201chardworking Americans.\u201d More often than not, I found, the \u201centitled\u201d Americans they had in mind were members of minority groups<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who\u2019s on welfare? Not me<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

This kind of racialized blame was most explicit among white, middle-aged Trump supporters, who comprised about one-third of my research participants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2017, I interviewed a white mechanic and father of three from Utah who had filed personal bankruptcy after taking out payday loans to get treatment for his suicidal teenage son. His insurance covered only group therapy, so he paid US$5,000 out of pocket to send his son to a specialized treatment facility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After listening to his story, I asked the mechanic \u2013 I\u2019ll call him Greg \u2013 what he saw as the biggest challenges facing America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat drives me crazy is these people saying they need reparations from the Civil War,\u201d Greg said, asserting that slavery was generations past and criticizing the idea that anyone today could feel entitled to compensation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThat\u2019s the problem with today\u2019s society, kids especially: entitlement,\u201d he concluded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A<\/a>
A personal bankruptcy form. JJ Gouin\/iStock via Getty Images<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I heard a similar sentiment from \u201cAmy,\u201d a white retail manager and mother of two from eastern Massachusetts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Speaking of the shoplifters at her job, she said, \u201cI tend to find that it\u2019s the young welfare moms who do\u201d it most, asserting that \u201cmost of the time they\u2019re of the Black and Puerto Rican ethnicity.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amy told me she had previously relied on rent subsidies and other social services. But she didn\u2019t seem to consider herself a \u201cwelfare mom.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAll the time that I\u2019ve worked and accomplished stuff in my life \u2026 and I can\u2019t get assistance when I need it,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While white Trump supporters were more likely to identify people of color as undeserving recipients of government welfare, they weren\u2019t the only ones. Some people of color in bankruptcy also invoked racial stereotypes about people who manipulate the system to gain an unfair advantage, albeit in a subtler fashion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019ve never been on welfare, I have no illegitimate kids, I\u2019ve never collected some food stamps. Why don\u2019t I get rewarded for behaving better?\u201d said a woman I\u2019ll call Jennifer, a Black administrative assistant who was filing personal bankruptcy to save her condo in central Massachusetts from foreclosure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All in the family<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

More than 250,000 people undergo Chapter 13 bankruptcy every year in the United States<\/a>. Scholars find that debt is anxiety-provoking<\/a> but that undergoing bankruptcy does not seem to create awareness of middle-class precarity or calls for a more robust American safety net.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But personal bankruptcy is actually part of America\u2019s patchwork public-private safety net.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each year, Americans get rid of more than $100 billion<\/a> in debt by filing for bankruptcy because the federal government says they do not have to pay it back. Research shows this debt-relief system disproportionately benefits white Americans<\/a>, contributing to the increasing wealth gap between Black and white people<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My research participants would likely bristle at the idea they were receiving a handout. They saw themselves as hardworking people who\u2019d unfairly fallen on hard times while everyone else \u2013 particularly women, minorities and millennials \u2013 got an undeserved handout.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These narratives are part of something I call the Archie-Edith dynamic, referencing the 1970s sitcom \u201cAll in the Family<\/a>.\u201d The protagonist of the show was a \u201clovable bigot,\u201d Archie Bunker<\/a>, who railed against social change and political correctness. https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/sOnTZipv03M?wmode=transparent&start=0 Archie Bunker is openly racist in this clip from \u2018All in the Family.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I started looking into Archie Bunker after interviewing a white manager at a logistics company in eastern Massachusetts who actually called himself \u201cArchie Bunker\u201d in our conversation. This \u201cArchie\u201d partly attributed his bankruptcy to being overlooked at work because \u201cfemales and minorities\u201d were being promoted instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the TV show \u201cAll in the Family,\u201d Archie often succeeds in steamrolling the more moderate views of his wife, Edith. In real life, I found that the financially precarious Archie Bunker types often persuade others to go along with, or at least give credence to, their racialized explanation of economic strife.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, when I asked \u201cPatty,\u201d a white medical transcriptionist in bankruptcy, whether she felt social programs in the U.S. were abused, she said she hadn\u2019t \u201cbeen around people that have abused the system.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But then \u201cPatty\u201d brought up her husband, a general contractor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHe\u2019s worked with some Hispanics who are not legal, but somehow they are able to pull off and collect money from the system,\u201d she said, with agitation. \u201cThat\u2019s a form of entitlement to me! You know?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tess Wise<\/a>, Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Amherst College<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tess Wise, Amherst College The people arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection had an 18% bankruptcy rate \u2013 twice as high as the national average \u2013 according to a Washington Post investigation. A quarter of the rioters had been sued by a creditor, and 1 in 5 faced losing their home to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":24324,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[689,692,6028,5271,378,9480,1538,2240,2824],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24323"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24323"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24323\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24326,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24323\/revisions\/24326"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}