Pull yourself up by your bootstraps started as a joke. In 1834, a Tennessee newspaper mocked a man named Nimrod Murphree, who claimed he’d figured out perpetual motion, by saying he’d probably also worked out how to hand himself over a barnyard fence using the straps of his own boots. It was sarcasm. Americans laughing at something they all understood to be physically impossible, because you cannot lift your own body weight by pulling up on your own shoes. That was the entire point of the phrase for nearly a hundred years.
Somewhere along the way, America forgot it was a joke and turned it into a credo. And that’s the real pattern here, not just with bootstraps. Critical thinking has been shrinking a little more with every generation, and the result is a country that inherits slogans without ever asking where they came from or what they originally meant. Take the national anthem at a football game. Most people assume that’s pure patriotism, always been that way, nothing to see here. Except players didn’t even come out onto the field for the anthem until 2009, and a Senate investigation later found the Pentagon had spent 6.8 million taxpayer dollars paying pro sports leagues for those exact displays, in the Defense Department’s own words, as part of its recruitment campaigns. That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s a Senate report. Real patriotism doesn’t need an invoice. Ours had one.
So, here’s the part that should stop everybody cold. You cannot pull yourself up by boots you were never issued. And the history of white America is not a story of bootstraps at all. It is a story of government assistance, generational, massive, and specifically engineered to benefit one group while locking another out of the same room.
Let’s talk about it plainly. The GI Bill, one of the most celebrated pieces of legislation in American history, was written in a way that let it be administered locally, which meant Southern Democrats could hand it out however they wanted. In Mississippi, a survey of thirteen cities found only two out of 3,229 GI Bill home mortgages went to Black veterans. In New York and northern New Jersey, only 100 of 67,000 GI Bill-insured mortgages went to non-white families. Levittown, the most famous suburb built off that bill, refused to sell to Black families outright. That’s not opinion. That’s the historical record.
Then there’s redlining, the federal government’s own maps, drawn to mark which neighborhoods were safe to insure and which weren’t, with race as the deciding factor. The FHA required properties be in white-only neighborhoods before it would back a mortgage starting in 1934. White families got easy, government-backed loans into brand new subdivisions built specifically for them, on land turned into instant equity, while Black families were confined to the neighborhoods the government had already marked as risky, which of course made them harder to insure, harder to invest in, and harder to build wealth in. That’s not bad luck. That’s policy, on paper, with a name and a date.
And I want to be clear, redlining is not a historical footnote. It is still happening, just with better manners. I moved to South Carolina around 2003 and decided I wanted to live in Greenville proper, an older neighborhood with public schools that could rival anything in New Jersey. I found the house. I knew exactly what kind of neighborhood I was moving into, no Black folks for a mile, was the joke I’d tell friends, so I made sure nobody saw my face before closing. Only looked at houses with lockboxes. I got lucky, the property was owned by Fannie Mae, decision makers sitting in Chicago with no reason to ever see me in person. I had the mortgage. I had the will. I bought a house on an acre lot, thirteen houses in the subdivision, mine at the bottom of the cul-de-sac, backing up to a bird preserve.
On closing day, sitting in my lawyer’s office, the realtor handling the turnover refused to hand over the keys. Started making up reasons, on the spot, why the transaction couldn’t be completed. I knew exactly why I’d kept myself invisible until that moment, and I knew exactly what was happening in that room. But God. Hey now. Don’t get me to shoutin’, y’all. I turned to my lawyer and asked him straight- is the paperwork I just signed legal and binding? Yes ma’am. Have we legally executed the sale? Yes ma’am. I stood up, said my goodbyes, drove straight to Home Depot, and changed every lock on every door myself. She could keep her funky keys. I owned that house, and I’d call the police myself if she ever set foot on my property again.
Twenty-two years later, I’m still in that house. My neighbors still barely speak to me, and I’ve outlasted several sets of them by now. This is still an upper-middle-class area. It took a six-figure salary, an 800-credit score, and paperwork clean enough to survive a magnifying glass for me to get in here. In those same twenty-two years, houses in my subdivision have changed hands plenty of times, always to white folks, some of whom bought half-million dollar properties and still wear a badge to work every day. Huh. Like the lady said, white folks need to be happy all Black people want is equity, not revenge, because this bootstrap rhetoric is bull dookie.
And once those white neighborhoods were secured, the schools followed the money, because that’s how property-tax-funded education works. Excellent public schools grew up exactly where the redlining had already done its job, funded by the tax base of homes that never should have been that valuable that fast. Meanwhile the same system that built those schools made sure mediocrity could still climb higher and get paid more on the other side of town, because the whole point of segregation was never talent. It was access.
So, when somebody tells us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, I want to know which boots they mean. The ones we were never issued a mortgage for. The ones attached to schools our tax dollars didn’t get to build. The ones sitting in a subdivision I had to hide my own face to get into. I’m not bitter. I’m just telling you the truth, with the receipts attached, because that’s apparently still necessary in 2026.
What’s a phrase you were raised to repeat that you’ve since found out was never telling you the whole story? Tell me in the comments.
