How America Became a Bootstrap Culture that Refuses to Supply the Boots

(Unless you're an elite white male that's probably Christian)

It's all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.

- Martin Luther King, Jr., June 11, 1967

Oh, look. One of the most profound quotes by Martin Luther King, Jr. that most Americans won’t utilize to feed their performative activism egos when choosing an MLK quote to post on social media for MLK Day. Nope. Not that one. That’s too radical. Too honest. Those who are most likely to use a cliché MLK quote on MLK Day to pretend they have a shred of care about justice and equality are the ones wearing boots that their beloved America has supplied. So, they’ll use the typical '“content of his character” quote to push their agendas that are cloaked in white supremacy and say, “See, we got here because of the content of our character. Just like the great Martin Luther King, Jr.’s vision for America. The problem isn’t society — the problem is the content of your character.”

And that is the definition of America that Dr. King himself said was so cruel.

America: the country that will flaunt the land of opportunity in your face and tell you that it’s on you to seize that opportunity by pulling up your bootstraps while hiding the boots under lock and key from anyone who doesn’t look and act like a founding father.

Us: frantically searching for said boots while being gaslit when we yell from the top of our lungs that they cannot be found. 

Them: “You’re just not looking hard enough. You’re just not working hard enough. If you do everything right, you’ll find them.”

Us: Living in a constant state of burnout, nervous systems haywire, stuck in fight, flight, or freeze mode, passing out from exhaustion, begging for help. 

Them: “Try harder.” 

Don’t you just love it here? :) 

The question is, how did we get here? And will it ever be possible for our society to finally transform into one that prioritizes our humanity, and, at the very least, supplies the resources to make our own boots?

Here’s the thing: most of us know that America is a society that refuses to supply boots to most of its citizens. How each of us responds to that is a different story. However, what most of us won’t admit is that our bootless society is the result of white supremacy. Once again, that would be too honest. And it would expose those who only received their boots due to white supremacy and NOT the content of their character or their merit, as we all have been led to believe.

America has defined itself as a country based on a race-based hierarchy that, through almost every structure, law, ordinance, and standard set by elite white men, is reinforced by class, education, land ownership, gender, and even beauty. Desperate to maintain the supremacy of whiteness, (specifically male-dominated whiteness), America provided handouts to white men, restricted access to everyone else, and told the lie that the success the white men experienced was solely based on meritocracy. The mission was clear: write the narrative that white + male = merit and convince the rest of us that it is our fault that we do not possess said merit that would lead to that same “success.” Then, profit off of us spending a lifetime trying to either develop or prove our own merit while conveniently placing as many barriers to access in our way as possible, dependent, of course, on where we land on the race/gender/ability/faith hierarchy. 

And, we fell for it. We believe that it is our lack of merit, that happens to be our fault, and our inability to attain that merit by pulling ourselves up by our bootless bootstraps, that is hindering us from the success, value, and worth we are yearning to someday acquire. Without our belief in the system that tells us our worth is dependent on whether we attended an Ivy League University or community college, the title we hold at our jobs and our materialistic status symbols to show off, our gender identity and ability to deny any feminity that exists within us (regardless of gender identity and expression), and how perfectly toned our bodies are, America cannot function. 

In other words, America cannot operate unless we believe that it is only when we obsessively pull ourselves up by those bootless bootstraps that we are finally worthy.

This is not something that we necessarily have a conscious understanding of. You may even dispute this very idea that we willingly partake in this bootless bootstrapping, or that even such a phenomenon exists. When something has become a norm, or a standard, and you have nothing else to compare it to, it’s easy to deny its existence and/or its effect on you. It’s like nose-blindness. We may have a smell in our home that we are completely unaware of until a guest turns up their nose in disgust as soon as they walk into our homes. Typically, this is followed by complete humiliation on our end and a frenzied attempt to track down the smell as soon as our guests leave.

We have become nose blind to our bootless bootstrap culture. We have yet to have this toxic culture pointed out to us in such a way that there is no denying the grave problem that exists and the immediate need for its removal. Instead, we continue to partake in this culture, giving it permission to fester and grow beyond control. It has seeped into every area of society. You can’t escape it. Social media has quadrupled the existence and impact of bootstrap culture to the point where we have young girls believing they need expensive skincare and water bottles to believe they are worthy. It has gotten to the point where it’s not even about the original boots and bootstraps anymore, but the illusion of said bootstraps. In other words, the illusion of merit. The title you have, the brand of clothes on your back, the name of makeup you wear, and whether your house looks like a museum at all times. The dollars in your account (because we share that online now), the number of side hustles you have, how expensive the toys you bought for your kids are. These are just some examples. If I listed them all, I’d never stop typing. 

The mission of bootstrap culture has been successfully realized. We believe in the illusion of merit, and believe that we must exhaust ourselves until we perform at such a pace to chase what we believe to be real merit, all the while, chasing an illusion. We think we have boots to actually strap and pull up, but we don’t. Those are an illusion too. That’s why we’re so burned out. That’s why we keep thinking we will finally arrive at some ultimate merit status that deems us “worthy” in this society and we have yet to get there. All of it stems from the illusion that America created when it deemed the definition of merit as white, male, and elite while giving that definition of merit a handout to feed that tale.

And, now, here we are.

The problem is not the bootstraps. 

The problem is the fact that we refuse to supply the boots and we’ve turned that chase for the boots into a chase for an illusive version of merit that we now place our entire worth as human beings in achieving.

I refuse to believe that’s the version of freedom that the late Martin Luther King Jr. was fighting for.

The development of our society was based on the idea that Black a other non-white people were barbaric animals that must be contained, controlled, saved from themselves, and prevented from ever having equal access to the world that white people rightly dominate. However, it is in these racist practices that white supremacy became the enemey of the very people who created it and did everyrhing to protect it. White people raised the bar of humanity so hight that even they can no longer attain it. 

- Caroline J. Sumlin, We’ll All Be Free: How a Culture of White Supremacy Devalues Us and How We Can Reclaim Our True Worth