American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise

by Eduardo Porter

Following the ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, many jurisdictions have started requiring voters to present official identification. Others have purged voter rolls, culling mostly nonwhite voters. They have reduced polling locations in poor minority neighborhoods and curtailed early voting. Many have required documentary proof of citizenship, which poor black and brown voters often lack.

In 1940, a time when Jim Crow laws imposed discrimination at work, segregated schools, and clove neighborhoods, the median black man earned the same as a white man at the twenty-fourth percentile of the white earnings distribution. In 2014, following over half a century of laws and court rulings designed to end such discrimination, the median black man’s earnings had climbed all the way to the twenty-seventh percentile of white men.

the white man didn’t want the black man inside the tent because he “did not believe in him as a man.”

“We would rather be absolute slaves of capital, than to take the negro into our lodges as an equal and brother.”

workers had already been asked to make many sacrifices for the war effort. Allowing blacks into the union was a sacrifice too far.

From the end of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, the journal of the United Mine Workers of America would warn about the “yellow peril” and the “hordes of black, brown, yellow and striped workers…who have not the slightest idea of the meaning of organization.”

The great paradox of the American experience is how its exceptional diversity—ethnic and racial, religious and linguistic—a well of inexhaustible vim and unparalleled creativity, has also stunted its development as a nation.

building perhaps the most uncaring, least empathetic state in the Western world.

America’s vast ecosystem of jails and prisons was designed, mainly, to lock out of sight the unpleasant human consequences of our social dysfunction.

And they were racist, in that vague, matter-of-fact way bred of custom rather than reflection.

In many respects, the United States today is a pariah, an outlier at the bottom of the industrialized world’s ladder of well-being. It is a country where too many babies die before having a solid shot at life and too many men and women die of despair, where too many children are mothers and too many men are locked away. And if you think minorities are alone the victims of America’s many pathologies, you might want to think again.

White Americans concluded that if public goods had to be shared across ethnic borders, with people of other races, they would rather not have them.

I find it hard to wrap my head around how any voter could side with a thoughtful, African American intellectual with a profound grasp of policy and swerve, four years later, into the embrace of an anti-intellectual, old, white, racist demagogue.

They don’t just want the manufacturing jobs of the 1950s back. They want the entire 1950s package, in which women were women, men were men, gays were banned, and minorities were, at best, a nuisance.