Five Big Ideas About Race and Racism
I’ve been doing a lot of reading and thinking about racial issues over the past two months, like I assume many of you. I wanted to share five ideas from authors/scholars/writers that have really resonated with me recently. Some of them are new ideas, but others are older ideas that are clearer and more compelling to me than when I first heard about them. (This is a Bluegrass-centered newsletter but our racial problems are not particularly unique so these ideas apply to Louisville and Kentucky as much as any other city or state.)
Idea: America effectively has a caste system that is linked to/based on race
Author: Isabel Wilkerson, writer of “The Warmth of Other Suns”
“In the United States, racism and casteism frequently occur at the same time, or overlap or figure into the same scenario. Casteism is about positioning and restricting those positions, vis-à-vis others. What race and its precursor, racism, do extraordinarily well is to confuse and distract from the underlying structural and more powerful Sith lord of caste. Like the cast on a broken arm, like the cast in a play, a caste system holds everyone in a fixed place.”
“For this reason, many people — including those we might see as good and kind people — could be casteist, meaning invested in keeping the hierarchy as it is or content to do nothing to change it, but not racist in the classical sense, not active and openly hateful of this or that group. Actual racists, actual haters, would by definition be casteist, as their hatred demands that those they perceive as beneath them know and keep their place in the hierarchy.”
“In everyday terms, it is not racism that prompts a white shopper in a clothing store to go up to a random Black or brown person who is also shopping and to ask for a sweater in a different size, or for a white guest at a party to ask a Black or brown person who is also a guest to fetch a drink, as happened to Barack Obama as a state senator, or even perhaps a judge to sentence a subordinate-caste person for an offense for which a dominant-caste person might not even be charged. It is caste or rather the policing of and adherence to the caste system. It’s the autonomic, unconscious, reflexive response to expectations from a thousand imaging inputs and neurological societal downloads that affix people to certain roles based upon what they look like and what they historically have been assigned to or the characteristics and stereotypes by which they have been categorized. No ethnic or racial category is immune to the messaging we all receive about the hierarchy, and thus no one escapes its consequences.” Wilkerson, the New York Times, July 2020
This concept may seem a bit obvious. I found it intuitive but also clarifying. I recommend you read the whole essay.
Idea: Americans tend to overstate the amount of progress we have made in reducing racial inequality and vastly underestimate remaining racial disparities
Author: Nikole Hannah-Jones, New York Times reporter and writer
“Most Americans are in an almost pathological denial about the depth of black financial struggle. That 2019 Yale University study, called “The Misperception of Racial Economic Inequality,” found that Americans believe that black households hold $90 in wealth for every $100 held by white households. The actual amount is $10.” Hannah-Jones, the New York Times, June 2020
It’s worth reading Hannah-Jones full “What is Owed” essay. It is basically a detailed rejection of essentially every explanation of racial inequality that you have ever heard that centers on the behavior or faults of black people. It is also a very, very detailed recitation of basically every place where our society has racial inequality. If this does not sound fun to read, you are correct. But I learned some details and I think you will as well.
3. Idea: Getting detailed about reparations
Authors: Duke University professor William Darity, writer A. Kirsten Mullen
Darity and Mullen have a new book out called, “From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century.” I will confess I didn’t read the whole book, much of which is a detailed case for why black Americans deserve reparations that I think will be familiar ground for me and anyone who has read the Hannah-Jones essay. (But I didn’t read those sections, so I don’t know!) The final chapter lays out some actual detailed proposals for how reparations might work.
I won’t list all of the ideas and details here. (This link is a decent guide if you don’t want to read the book.) But the book did help me understand the broader concept of reparations and its implications. What Darity and Mullen do is define who would be eligible for reparations, in their view. It would be 1. U.S. citizens 2. Who can establish that they had at least one ancestor who was “enslaved in the United States after the formation of the republic” and 3. Self-identified as “black,” “Negro,” “African-American,” or “Afro-American,” at least 12 years before the enactment of a federal reparations program.
Darity and Mullen then discussed some reparations proposals themselves. I am going to focus on just one of those proposals, because it was the simplest for me to understand. Black Americans are about 13 percent of the nation’s population but have only about 3 percent of the nation’s wealth. The authors argue that disparity is largely because of the nation’s legacy of slavery and anti-black discrimation. So to eliminate that wealth difference would require an average outlay of $267,000 per person to the 40 million black Americans that they estimate are descendants of slaves.
I am not predicting that policy will be enacted or even suggesting it is the right policy. But it’s worth thinking about an America in which the vast majority of black people were given $267,000 tomorrow or over the next year.
4. Idea: Redefining “the resistance”
Author: Scholar Michelle Alexander
“Donald Trump’s election represents a surge of resistance to this rapidly swelling river, an effort to build not just a wall but a dam. A new nation is struggling to be born, a multiracial, multiethnic, multifaith, egalitarian democracy in which every life and every voice truly matters. In recent years, we’ve seen glimpses of this new nation at Standing Rock, in the streets of Ferguson, in the eyes of the Dreamers, in the voices of teenagers from Parkland and Chicago, as well as at L.G.B.T. pride celebrations, the Women’s March and the camps of Occupy Wall Street. Confederate statues are coming down as new memorials and statutes are going up in Montgomery, Ala., and beyond, honoring victims of lynching as well as the courageous souls who fought for the abolition of slavery and the end of Jim Crow.” Alexander, Sept 2018 in the New York Times
Alexander wrote this nearly two years ago. But much of it could have been written today. I recommend you click on the whole column. (It’s quite short.) This is a really compelling and persuasive idea---the tide in America is heading in one direction and the people who are resisting that tide are not the ones we spent 2017-18 referring to as the resistance.
5. Idea: Having black figures in high profile roles (Obama as president, Kamala Harris as vice-president) might in some ways be counterproductive to advancing the broader cause of black equality.
Author: Columbia University professor Fredrick Harris
“The triumph of “post-racial” Democratic politics has not been a triumph for African-Americans in the aggregate. It has failed to arrest the growing chasm of income and wealth inequality; to improve prospects for social and economic mobility; to halt the re-segregation of public schools and narrow the black-white achievement gap; and to prevent the Supreme Court from eroding the last vestiges of affirmative action. The once unimaginable successes of black diplomats like Colin L. Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Susan E. Rice and of black chief executives like Ursula M. Burns, Kenneth I. Chenault and Roger W. Ferguson Jr. cannot distract us from facts like these: 28 percent of African-Americans, and 37 percent of black children, are poor (compared with 10 percent of whites and 13 percent of white children); 13 percent of blacks are unemployed (compared with 7 percent of whites); more than 900,000 black men are in prison; blacks experienced a sharper drop in income since 2007 than any other racial group; black household wealth, which had been disproportionately concentrated in housing, has hit its lowest level in decades; blacks accounted, in 2009, for 44 percent of new H.I.V. infections.” Harris, the New York Times, Oct. 2012
Harris wrote this almost eight years ago, but much of this argument could have been published yesterday. His basic case, which he described in a book called “The Price of the Ticket: Barack Obama and the Rise and Decline of Black Politics,” is that Obama’s presence in the White House, his intense support among black voters and the strong desire of both black voters and black political elites for him to succeed left Obama facing little pressure to enact major policies that benefited black people and little criticism when he did not. This general dynamic (black politicians who black people can’t really hold accountable) is arguably a pattern in a lot of places with black mayors and black members of Congress.
Obama’s second term did feature more policies focused on reducing racial inequality. And I’m quite aware (as is Fredrick Harris) of the potential electoral dangers of a black Democratic politician seeming to cater too much to black interests.
That said, when I hear politicians, particularly white ones like Sen. Amy Klobuchar, imply that a woman of color must be picked as Joe Biden’s running mate to heal the nation,I worry we are repeating the 2009-16 cycle over again. The people on the streets protesting are talking about wholesale changes to American public policy, not anointing one black person to a very prominent job. It’s not that we shouldn’t have more black elected officials. We should. It’s that those officials’ prominence shouldn’t be viewed as necessarily representing broader progress for black people overall.
Thanks for reading.
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