The deep roots of American racism
The damage from slavery and Jim Crow is still far from fixed
If there's one thing that unites liberal Americans at this fraught moment, it's disgust at the racism rooted in the South. A new breed of white leaders, many of them from wealthy Southern suburbs, have brought back explicit white supremacy — if not actual neo-Nazism — to American politics.
But the rest of the country should not be so sanguine. America's overall record of accounting for its history of vile racism is poor at best.
For starters, there are a surprisingly large number of KKK members in non-Southern states — including Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. For another, of the nine most segregated cities in the country, five are outside the South — including Boston, in supposedly deep-blue Massachusetts. White rioting driven by violent bigotry — to keep blacks out of white neighborhoods in Chicago, for example — features heavily in the history of many non-Southern states.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
And all of this is a reflection of the fundamental structure by which all American states, and the federal government, have chosen to organize themselves.
In the airbrushed and sanitized history of the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King, Jr. had his marches, people were beaten by racist Southern cops, the government jerked awake ("Whuh? By Jove, look at all this racism!") and passed various civil rights legislation — the Civil Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, and the Voting Rights Act — and then Jim Crow was dead. Granting some lingering disadvantage, that was the end of really horrible racism in this country.
This narrative leaves much out. The legacy of Jim Crow and overt racism built into federal policy was still being rooted out by the 1980s, and then incompletely. Mass incarceration was and remains a deeply racist enterprise.
But even if we suppose the most generous version of this narrative were true, it still leaves the task of atoning for American racism badly incomplete. If one group of people is subject to overwhelming economic exploitation by another for hundreds of years, after which the direct exploitation is wholly removed, the former group will still of necessity be much, much poorer than the latter. Without concerted and consistent efforts to bolster the resources of the poorer group, they will remain so, because of the way advantage is transmitted across generations. Most obviously, richer parents have money and assets they can pass down to their offspring. But they also have access to cleaner environments, better schools, better connections to elite schools and high-paying jobs, and scads of other advantages. That is why a child born into the top income quintile who does not go to college is two and a half times more likely to stay there than a child born into the bottom quintile who does.
Conversely, removing barriers to economic exploitation — by "free market" policy like tight money, austerity, welfare cuts, bashing unions, exposing lower-class workers (but not upper-class ones) to overseas competition, and so forth — is effectively racist in result, if not in intent. That is the policy program of neoliberalism, and it amounts to top-down class war. It concentrates incomes and wealth at the largely white top of the income ladder, and spreads poverty, unemployment, and desperation around the disproportionately black and brown bottom half.
All that holds even if the policy is absolutely perfectly free of personal prejudice. Perfectly race-blind top-down class war conducted on a demographically class-biased population will necessarily have a racist outcome.
But as economist Marshall Steinbaum argues, ostensibly race-neutral free-market policy has in fact been used to mask a baldly racist backlash to ages of egalitarian advances. This happened in the 1870s under the Liberal Republicans ("liberal" at this time referring to the classical liberalism of Adam Smith and David Ricardo), who advocated right-wing economics and that black Republicans in the South be stripped of their protection by federal troops. Result: 90 years of a Jim Crow police state in the South.
Similarly, the neoliberal turn in the 1970s was to a great degree fueled by backlash to the New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement. Now, the New Deal had many racist elements built into it. But compared to the previous status quo, it was a large relative advance for African-Americans, as shown by both the sharp narrowing in gaps of life expectancy and other indicators, and the fact that blacks (who could see easily enough which party was the better electoral bet) were a key pillar of the New Deal coalition. Rolling back the populist New Deal structures was racist both in intent and effect.
All that can be seen in the fact that since the neoliberal turn, the economic gap between blacks and whites has gotten worse in many ways. Black Americans today have an unemployment rate steadily about twice that of whites, as well as 27 percent smaller average wages and a mere 8 percent of whites' median wealth.
So let us remember that simply keeping neo-Nazis out of polite society will not remotely suffice to fix America's bigotry problem. It will take consistent federal action to protect minority rights and due process. And it will also take decades of aggressive social-democratic policy to roll back American inequality, and finally cut black Americans in on a fair share of income and wealth.
Create an account with the same email registered to your subscription to unlock access.
Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.
-
Today's political cartoons - September 14, 2024
Cartoons Saturday's cartoons - a second debate, Europe on the menu, and more
By The Week US Published
-
5 cleverly clashing cartoons about the presidential debate
Cartoons Artists take on a deepfake debate, winners and losers, and more
By The Week US Published
-
The Pélicot case: a horror exposed
Talking Point This case is unusually horrifying, but the misogyny that enabled is chillingly common
By The Week UK Published
-
How could J.D. Vance impact the special relationship?
Today's Big Question Trump's hawkish pick for VP said UK is the first 'truly Islamist country' with a nuclear weapon
By Harriet Marsden, The Week UK Published
-
Biden, Trump urge calm after assassination attempt
Speed Reads A 20-year-old gunman grazed Trump's ear and fatally shot a rally attendee on Saturday
By Peter Weber, The Week US Published
-
Supreme Court rejects challenge to CFPB
Speed Read The court rejected a conservative-backed challenge to the way the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is funded
By Peter Weber, The Week US Published
-
Arizona court reinstates 1864 abortion ban
Speed Read The law makes all abortions illegal in the state except to save the mother's life
By Rafi Schwartz, The Week US Published
-
Trump, billions richer, is selling Bibles
Speed Read The former president is hawking a $60 "God Bless the USA Bible"
By Peter Weber, The Week US Published
-
The debate about Biden's age and mental fitness
In Depth Some critics argue Biden is too old to run again. Does the argument have merit?
By Grayson Quay Published
-
How would a second Trump presidency affect Britain?
Today's Big Question Re-election of Republican frontrunner could threaten UK security, warns former head of secret service
By Harriet Marsden, The Week UK Published
-
Trump’s rhetoric: a shift to 'straight-up Nazi talk'
Why everyone's talking about Would-be president's sinister language is backed by an incendiary policy agenda, say commentators
By The Week UK Published