If all the racists in this country had a genuine change of heart, and stopped being racists, would systemic racism still exist? You might say: Of course not, because systemic racism is caused by individual racism!
But I beg to differ. I contend that individual racism is not the cause of systemic racism, although it certainly supports it. Systemic racism is part of the system, obviously, and it’s there because it benefits wealthy and powerful people. Even if ordinary citizens have a come-to-Jesus moment and cleanse their hearts of racism, our rulers will almost certainly cling to the benefits of systemic racism. We might have to re-name it, of course, and it might change its tactics, but it would still be there.
To say otherwise is to imagine that the system is value-neutral, and it only works harm because bad people control it. And yet capitalism has never been value-neutral. The incentives and the socialization that make capitalism work always tend to devalue human life.
But what are these benefits, you might ask? At the risk of getting ahead of myself, racism “stabilizes” the class structure, that is, racism makes it less likely that the different classes will coalesce against billionaire capitalism.
But before going into detail about the class structure, let’s start with some basic observations:
- Unorganized individual racism cannot explain everything, and it definitely cannot account for the complexities of systemic racism.
- Extra-judicial killings by the police are central to this discussion. About a thousand people are killed each year by police, and of course some of these homicides are justified—this is America, after all, where any sociopath can purchase a firearm, or twenty.
But hundreds of these killings are highly questionable. About 50 police are killed by citizens every year, a suspicious 20:1 ratio. In a close-quarters fight, the aggressor has a distinct advantage. Of course American police wear bullet-proof vests and train endlessly with their weapons, but 20:1 still implies that some police are shooting first and cooking up their stories later. If they were only defending themselves, that ratio would be lower.
The killing of unarmed suspects is especially troubling, but armed suspects are also killed without justification.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/
3. White racism is not a constant. It varies from time to time, place to place, and individual to individual. Its persistence in American life should not be confused with permanence.
4. White nationalism is not a mass movement. If there were two or three million whites longing to join the Klan, the White Aryan Resistance or the Boogaloo Boys they would have done so after Charlottesville—and they didn’t. The mass support for right-wing violence does not exist. On the other hand, there is mass support for an end to police violence, as evidenced by the hundreds of thousands in the streets today.
Although there’s not much support for white nationalism as a movement, white racism is still common. This apparent contradiction is key to understanding what is going on.
Given these observations, let’s ask some basic questions, which are in boldface below:
Why does racism still exist? What’s the motive? White people seldom get any benefit that they notice from racism; neither voting nor land-owning is reserved for whites anymore. If racist policies no longer have the force of law, and if average whites see little material benefit to being racist, then why do racist practices persist?
American life by any measure is less publicly racist than it was in my youth, before the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Although de facto school segregation still exists, many middle-class high schools are integrated to some extent. Inter-marriage is legal and in some communities inter-racial couples live more-or-less normal lives.
Even Hells Angels have accepted black and Asian members:
Job discrimination on the basis of race is illegal and most large employers manage to avoid being sued for it—and that’s not to understate the difficulty of proving discrimination.
And the discourse between white people is strikingly less racist than it used to be. In the Jim Crow South, many whites had no other mode of conversation than obsessive racist drivel. But nowadays it is rare for whites to make racial remarks to each other.
So why are blacks still the target of extra-judicial killings and other violence? Why are they harassed by both white police and civilians for legal behavior of all kinds?
Why is the crisis in race relations the worst we have seen since Dr. King’s assassination?
Let’s note first that “Why is there an underclass?” is closely related to the question of why racism still exists. Race and the class structure are tightly inter-woven.
History is full of harmful practices and institutions which nevertheless persist for ages. Slavery, human sacrifice, and cannibalism are examples. And ordinarily this persistence is because some people believe they benefit from these practices. There are benefits—real or perceived—to alcohol consumption, for example, and so Demon Rum is still with us. Slavery mostly belongs to the past, but it was an immense effort to destroy it, and likewise with child labor, cannibalism, and human sacrifice.
So, a refinement of the question “Why does racism still exist?” is this: what are the benefits of racism, and who reaps them?
And we can ask the same question about poverty. Jesus taught that the poor would always be with us—and he’s been right so far—-but nevertheless the elimination of poverty remains an honorable dream. The most recent effort in America was the War on Poverty, which was meant to drastically reduce the size of the underclass or to eliminate it entirely.
And the War on Poverty was partly successful—the rate of poverty among those over 65 was 28.5% in 1966 and is 10.1% today. But the late ‘60s and ‘70s were a time of rising crime and economic problems—inflation and extremely high interest rates. In that context, the expansion of welfare pushed all the racist buttons, and dovetailed perfectly with Nixon’s Southern Strategy. “Welfare Queens,” who had babies just to increase their benefits, became an enduring political myth.
The Southern Strategy was a turning point in our history because it gave Republicans a political incentive to attack the underclass. They started by opposing policies that would help the underclass, and they ended by systematically harming it at every turn. The political incentive became by degrees political necessity.
Their efforts moved beyond policy to attacks on the underclass itself—particularly blacks. Rhetorically, there was the attempt to normalize hate speech online, on campus and in political campaigns (e.g. the Willie Horton ads); racist pseudo-science was revived, e.g. The Bell Curve. Policy-wise, there were broad-ranging measures designed to reduce the standard of living and the stability of the underclass: mass incarceration, refusing to raise the minimum wage for long periods, weakening unions, making healthcare harder to get, and reducing enforcement of fair housing laws. And policing was intensified—with “stop and frisk” as an example—and militarized. There was also an organized campaign against affirmative action, especially in university admissions.
And of course public education was undermined.
And I would even say that exporting jobs to China and other countries served this purpose as well, because without a robust manufacturing sector most members of the underclass (and working class) had little chance to improve their condition.
As social policy, the Southern Strategy was a disaster, but as a political strategy it worked well. But it had a weakness: driving the poor down didn’t directly benefit anyone.
So alongside the Southern Strategy, Reagan also made huge tax cuts a centerpiece of the Republican agenda. But as with attacking the War on Poverty, the tax-cuts became steadily more destructive over time. Reagan’s tax cuts were much more broad-based than the tax cuts we’ve seen since. Of course the billionaires and the wealthy saw most of the benefit, but the effect on middle-class tax returns was also significant. For example, making IRA contributions deductible did help the middle class, although that benefit disappeared later in the Reagan administration.
Compare that to the 2017 tax cut, which was so narrowly focused that the net result may have actually harmed the wealthy, by capping the mortgage interest rate deduction. In any case the millionaires didn’t get much, and the other classes got nothing. In 1981 the wealthy were ecstatic, and the middle-class was content.
To separate the underclass from the working and middle classes, their problems had to be made more severe and uniquely different, to avoid anyone identifying with them. But many of the measures taken hurt the working class and even the middle class as well—exporting jobs, undermining public education and weakening unions were blunt-instrument policies that could have resulted in a broad coalition against the billionaire class.
And this is not hypothetical: the middle and lower classes did in fact unite during the Progressive Era and during the New Deal, and the results were inconvenient for the plutocrats of the day.
But there were other policies that could be used against the underclass without affecting the working class too much—-particularly policing. The militarization of the police and mass incarceration during a period of falling crime rates is often presented as an example of mindless racism and paranoia—and there is some of that—but if that was the only reason then the money spent on riot gear and prisons would have been diverted to tax cuts for the rich long ago.
The ridiculous APCs, the SWAT teams sent to arrest low-level drug dealers, the automatic weapons and all of that—are a non-verbal argument that the underclass is extremely dangerous, that they are different from the rest of us. Every time a black man is stopped and frisked in public the same message is sent.
While this campaign against the poor was in full swing, billionaire capitalism was riding high. From 1980 to 2008, the concentration of wealth and power proceeded with only minor delays due to the EIC and Clinton’s tax increases.
But with the Great Recession, capitalism began to lose credibility with members of the educated middle-class, especially the young. Before 2008, the middle class was under pressure due to health care costs, student loans and stagnant salaries, but their home equity and 401k balances largely made up for it. The Great Recession changed all that. Before, there was a broad consensus among the middle class that capitalism worked, but afterwards it was seen—even by conservatives—as a racket, at least in its current incarnation. But there weren’t alternatives that most people considered credible.
Another important sea-change was the rise of the African-American and Hispanic middle-class. It was a problem for billionaire capitalism that middle-class blacks and Hispanics were unconvinced that the underclass was a dangerous enemy, rather than human beings in bad circumstances. The fond false hope that the black and Hispanic middle class would go Republican was repeatedly disappointed.
Worse, the white middle-class began to accept and be influenced by their black and brown neighbors. This situation was clearly intolerable to billionaire capitalism, and the solution was to use the policing methods developed for the underclass on the black and brown middle-class. This was intended to humiliate, of course, but also to drive a wedge between the white middle-class and their black and brown neighbors.
The result was a sustained pushback on policing practices that continues as I write, exemplified by Black Lives Matter.
Given this background, we can answer the question, “Why does racism still exist?” It exists because the billionaires need a class structure in which all the other classes are frozen in place, unable to envision a better future or unite to achieve it. And racism is an important part of that class structure.
And to illustrate that, consider this: American society was once famed for its ability to solve problems. In the 19th century, we suffered from poor transportation infrastructure, low agricultural productivity, slavery, lack of education (especially on the frontier), an unsafe food supply, loss of wilderness, the need to integrate millions of immigrants, a corrupt and ineffective civil service, and widespread drunkenness and violence.
And yet, from 1821, when the Erie Canal opened, to 1916, when the National Park Service was established, some of these problems were solved, and there was significant progress on the rest.
By contrast, Americans today face significant problems with the quality of public education and the cost of higher education, health care availability, air and water pollution, unhealthy food, drug addiction to both legal and illegal drugs, mass incarceration, growing poverty, declining birth rates and life expectancy, policing, obesity, climate change, integrity of elections, school and workplace shootings, homelessness, and a complete failure to deal with a dangerous pandemic. Some of these problems have come to light recently, but many of them have been around for decades.
On some of these, we made initial progress only to see it rolled back or undermined: civil rights, pollution, healthcare, and climate change. However, on most of these issues, no progress has been made.
We are stymied on almost every major problem we face, and that isn’t because we are much worse citizens than our predecessors in the 19th century. It is instead because we have a class system that prevents broad consensus on major issues—and a political system that mirrors the class system.
The contrast with the 19th century (and the 20th century until 1980), could not be sharper.
We are no longer a dynamic society because billionaire capitalism has re-wired our class structure to allow only one kind of change: the concentration of wealth and power.
And racism supports this class structure.
What is the American class structure? In the preceding section, I didn’t discuss many specifics about the American class structure, and of course it’s a complex topic. However, it is possible to outline the basics.
I’ll define 5 classes: the billionaires and near-billionaires; the wealthy; the middle-class; the working class; the under-class.
The middle-class today is characterized by higher education, often including graduate school in fields that pay a good salary; the working class is usually not college-educated, or not educated in fields that pay well. (This is not to say that the middle-class doesn’t include people who didn’t graduate from college—it does—but that the broad defining difference between the middle-class and the working class is higher education.)
For purposes of this discussion, however, the underclass is most important. Members of the underclass struggle to access basics, like food and medical care. Many of them live in “food deserts,” where the stores lack fresh vegetables, fruit or meat. Often doctors and clinics refuse to accept Medicaid, and dental care is generally unavailable. Public education is often sub-standard. In some poor neighborhoods, police do not answer calls unless there’s a body in the street.
Chronic diseases like diabetes and hypertension often go untreated, and life expectancy is much lower than for the population at large. The difference in life-expectancy for American men in the top 10% by income versus the bottom 10% is about 11 years. This is comparable to the difference between Norway and Bangladesh.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4866586/ (estimated from Figure 2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy
I should mention housing. The housing available for the poor is either sub-standard, in dangerous neighborhoods, too far from employment, or too expensive—-or all four at once.
And the above deprivations are broadly the same for both the urban and rural poor.
Also, members of the underclass can be killed with impunity by police—that is, by the state.
Furthermore, a member of the underclass who is falsely accused of a crime is often unable to make an effective defense and commonly pleads guilty to a lesser charge, of which they are also innocent.
And even the guilty are frequently sentenced more harshly than is reasonable.
How does the condition of the underclass fit into the system of billionaire capitalism? First, people who aren’t in the underclass will do almost anything to avoid falling into it. They refuse to live in the same neighborhoods and go to the same schools as the underclass—-and this is not just a black vs. white phenomenon. The “seg academies” of the South also exclude the poorest whites, who cannot pay the tuition.
Second, the underclass can be scapegoated for all the social maladies of billionaire capitalism. Crime, drug addiction, unemployment and suicide can all be attributed to the cultural peculiarities of the underclass, and not to the policies of exporting jobs, denying people healthcare, concentrating wealth and power at the top, and so on. In other words, we blame the symptoms for the disease.
Race plays a big role in this scapegoating. Although there are plenty of whites, Hispanics and Native Americans in the underclass, they tend to be more rural and therefore ignored by the media. The underclass in most cities is largely African-American and Hispanic, and the only part of the underclass that has found a cultural voice (through the arts and activism) is the urban black underclass.
So there’s a perception that the underclass is black, or mostly black, although it’s definitely multi-ethnic. The rural white underclass mostly escapes notice except when they suffer catastrophic losses, for example due to the opioids marketed by billionaire capitalism.
Third, having an underclass resets the expectations and ambitions of the other classes. The working class, instead of pressing for higher wages or universal healthcare, focuses its energy on keeping its children off drugs or finding a neighborhood with no drive-by shootings—-in other words, on not falling into the underclass.
The middle class is similar; they want schools that have few students from the underclass, and they want police protection for their neighborhoods. Under other circumstances they might be pressing for better schools and safer neighborhoods for all. The middle class is in less danger of falling into poverty, but they want to avoid the effects of poverty on others—their fellow citizens and human beings. This is sometimes characterized as “privilege” but that understates the damage wrought by the deprivation and exclusion of the underclass. Who would want their child to suffer even indirectly from such tragedy?
The underclass itself, of course, is forced to somehow survive with the legal and the economic systems dead set against it, without healthy food or dental care, (mostly) without good education and medical care, and with the other classes shunning it in horror and scapegoating it for every social problem in America.
Is the underclass angry or alienated or despairing? Of course. Surviving poverty is a severe challenge, and it takes its toll; poverty is not just about material deprivation, it’s also about psychological damage.
On specific issues, it’s easy to see how class divides and paralyzes us. Gun control is a fraught issue. The working class and part of the middle class are armed out of fear of the underclass, and in much of the country, this means the black underclass.
On the other hand, many middle class and working-class white people—including gun owners—would agree that we’d be better off as a society with fewer guns.
And the underclass would probably agree. Certainly middle- and working-class blacks are strongly in favor of fewer guns on the streets—but they don’t want to be completely disarmed, either. No one wants to be disarmed in the midst of enemies, and for much of America the underclass is the enemy.
So, although a significant majority wants fewer guns on the streets, it doesn’t happen because of our class structure—particularly the isolation and desperation of the underclass.
And likewise with school desegregation. This is often sold as a self-evident Good, but there is in fact a specific reason why desegregation is desirable. Namely, if a school is mostly attended by underclass children, there’s a tendency to simply warehouse the kids. The parents, if they complain, have little political leverage. This isn’t universal, of course, due to dedicated teachers and principals and parents, but warehousing happens often enough for the “school to prison pipeline” to have entered the English language.
But what can be done? For nearly three generations—since about 1950—the answer has been integration. But integration only works sometimes; it can definitely work if the students are all middle-class, but otherwise the picture is mixed. And we cannot ignore the harm done when integration doesn’t work. I’ll take Chris Rock as an example. His parents finally gave up on the mostly white working-class schools he attended, and pulled him out. He later got a GED, but in an even slightly better educational environment, Chris Rock would have gone to college. And there are thousands of children of all races who experience the same. For a bright kid like Rock, even warehousing might have been better than being beaten up all the time.
To put middle-class kids in the same classrooms with underclass kids usually doesn’t work either—although there are no doubt exceptions. The social classes have diverged too much, their needs are too different. The middle-class has come to see its future in education, which is now the focus of all their class anxieties. The parents will not accept any slowing of the pace or simplification of the content, both of which might be necessary. And of course the middle-class kids are usually better prepared and better supported than the underclass kids.
One thing you definitely don’t want is for underclass kids to become discouraged and tune education out. And yet, sitting in a classroom with motivated middle-class kids can definitely discourage you; you may know the answer, but someone else often answers more quickly. And if you don’t know the answer, then you probably won’t get a chance to ask a question about it later.
It seems to me that underclass kids need good solid education where the pace moves right along, but there’s enough time for the teachers to fill in context and improve basic skills where needed. And where the kids can build confidence based on their hard work and their achievements.
And what I described in the last paragraph was the norm for all children before about the ‘70s—thorough, moderately-paced education that ensured that even the children of illiterates could read, write, and do sums. Yes, some kids were bored to death and other kids could have benefited from better music and art programs. But the system was designed for the average child, and everyone got something out of it. I am not pretending the old system was perfect by any means—but there was no large group of children that was left completely behind, either; warehousing was unheard of. The system was not designed to worsen social differences.
You might say that the segregated schools of the South were the exception. But although they were starved for funding, they functioned along the same lines as the white schools. The teachers taught and the students mostly showed up. Many a future teacher, pastor, doctor and lawyer attended those schools and went on to college. Whatever the intent of Southern state legislatures, those schools did nurture the future black middle class.
Having answered the questions in boldface, let’s circle back and look at the issue of extra-judicial killings again. This long-standing practice is a denial of the humanity of the underclass, and it is not unique to America. The helots of ancient Sparta could also be killed with impunity, and likewise the Untouchables of India.
In fact, the serfs or slaves of most ancien regimes could be killed with impunity, especially if they were rebellious in any way. Today’s American underclass is seen as being in a constant state of rebellion which justifies the unending violence and harassment against them—and policies like mass incarceration, using heavily militarized SWAT teams for ordinary arrests, mandatory minimum sentencing, and so on.
As with the serfs and slaves of the past, killings of the American underclass signify that the poor are our mortal enemies, or that they are not human at all. When Rayshard Brooks was killed, the policeman who shot him kicked him, and the other officer stood on Brooks’ chest; Brooks was not yet dead. Undisciplined soldiers in combat might do the same—but this was not combat, this was an ordinary police task: dealing with a drunk. Drunks commonly fight or run from the police and go to jail for doing so; but if they’re executed on the spot that is not justice.
What is the result of these extra-judicial killings? Where the underclass has a sense of community, the result is profound demoralization; they cannot get justice, and it’s a short logical step to the conclusion that there is no justice. This is not just a matter of police misconduct; if the prosecutors and judges wanted to hold the police accountable, then these killings would have stopped long ago. The entire system is complicit in a campaign of extra-judicial executions.
The underclass has lost confidence in the police and courts, and by contrast the drug dealers somehow don’t seem as bad—not quite like Robin Hood, but still.
There’s a deep despair that settles over these communities when the police get away with yet another unjustified killing or assault. And for the other classes—underneath the denial—there’s a sickening sense that our society is neither civilized nor Christian, and that we are making the limitless suffering of the poor even worse.
This fear, shame and despair are exactly the feelings that Al Qaeda was attempting to instill in Americans with the 9/11 attacks; what the legal system does to the underclass is what terrorists also do.
These killings, and the complicity of the entire criminal justice system, drive a wedge between the underclass and the rest of the community, which usually—not always—is policed better.
Our society is in essence waging war against the underclass, and one casualty is the legitimacy of the legal system. One of the great achievements of the Enlightenment was the principle that everyone is subject to the same law; but America has created a horrible exception for its underclass, particularly African-Americans.
At every turn, billionaire capitalism divides classes and races. And the underclass is the foundation of this strategy of division. If the underclass didn’t exist, it would be extremely difficult to separate the working-class from the middle-class, since they share an interest in good education, health care and higher wages.
Billionaire capitalism needs an underclass, and if the underclass is mostly black, so much the better—-then they can use the individual racism of whites to maintain class divisions. The large number of working-class and middle-class African-Americans does become a problem in maintaining the class structure, but by subjecting them to the same policing that the underclass experiences, they somewhat neutralize them and—this is a brilliant flourish—they make the problems with the class structure appear entirely racial.
In many parts of the country there are few blacks, but this is only a minor inconvenience for billionaire capitalism. To maintain the underclass, police violence is actually intensified: the highest rate of police shootings occurs in Alaska, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. Alaska and New Mexico have small African-American populations, and only 7.4% of the Oklahoma population is black.
So, where the underclass is mostly white, what does it accomplish to shoot first and ask questions later? Poor, socially isolated white men are often seen as potentially violent (think serial killers, or school shooters) and they do have their problems. When the policing against them is intensified, shootings are bound to occur. And the shootings themselves intensify the separation between the white underclass and the other classes. The shootings are a kind of performance that emphasizes the danger the underclass poses to the rest of society. And of course it terrorizes and demoralizes the white underclass itself. This is the same method used with the black underclass.
Much—not all—-racism in this country stems from fear. Fear of losing status and of falling into the underclass, fear of crime or bad schools, fear of the other. This is why racist whites in general have scant enthusiasm for white nationalism; they don’t want to violently dominate non-whites, they just want to avoid them. The bulk of racist whites are older people with little surplus energy or money; they may arm themselves out of fear, but they aren’t signed up for an aggressive struggle against anyone. Their day-to-day struggle to survive is about all they can manage. Of course they support harsh measures by the police against non-whites—again, out of fear.
This fear is carefully nurtured by the existing class system, of course. The underclass must be always be an object of fear, whatever the color of its members.
The Socialist Investor 
Whew! That’s a long one
Sent from my iPhone
>
LikeLiked by 2 people