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February 8 - March 23, 2022
“making the changing national racial demographics salient led white Americans (regardless of political affiliation) to endorse conservative policy positions more strongly.”
In the mid-1960s, the American Dream was as easy to achieve as it ever was or has been since, with good union jobs, subsidized home ownership, strong financial protections, a high minimum wage, and a high tax rate that funded American research, infrastructure, and education.
“It turns out that the average white person views racism as a zero-sum game,” added Sommers. “If things are getting better for black people, it must be at the expense of white people.”
One might assume that this kind of competitiveness is human nature, but I don’t buy it: for one thing, it’s more prevalent among white people than other Americans. If it’s not human nature, if it’s an idea that we’ve chosen to adopt, that means it’s one that we can choose to abandon.
Recounts economic historian Caitlin Rosenthal, “Thomas Jefferson described the appreciation of slaves as a ‘silent profit’ of between 5 and 10 percent annually, and he advised friends to invest accordingly.”
The zero sum was made quite literal when, by the same law, the church in each parish sold the slaves’ confiscated property and gave the “profits to the poor of the parish,” by which they meant, of course, the white poor.
White women in slaveholding communities considered their slaves “their freedom,” liberating them from farming, housework, child rearing, nursing, and even the sexual demands of their husbands.
When it comes to per capita government spending, the United States is near the bottom of the list of industrialized countries, below Latvia and Estonia. Our roads, bridges, and water systems get a D+ from the American Society of Civil Engineers.
The primary source of plantation wealth was a completely captive and unpaid labor force. Owners didn’t need more than a handful of white workers per plantation. They didn’t need an educated populace, whether black or white; such a thing was in fact counter to their financial interest.
The value of northern land was more than five times the value of southern land per acre, he calculated, despite the South’s advantage in climate, minerals, and soil. Because the southern “oligarchs of the lash,” as he called them, had done so little to support education, innovation, and small enterprise, slavery was making southern whites poorer.
Unable to countenance the idea of sharing the pool with black people, city leaders eventually formed a private “Park Association” whose sole job was to administer the pool, and the city leased the public asset to the private association for one dollar.
It’s often unconscious, but their perception of the Other as undeserving is so important to their perception of themselves as deserving that they’ll tear apart the web that supports everyone, including them. Public goods, in other words, are only for the public we perceive to be good.
Women and people of color are demanding a seat at the table, ready to join the contract for shared prosperity. But no longer able to see themselves reflected in the other signatories, the leaders of government and big business walk out, leaving workers on their own—and the Inequality Era was born.
“First, fear people of color. Then, hate the government (which coddles people of color). Finally, trust the market and the 1 percent.” This type of modern political racism could operate in polite society because of the way that racial resentment had evolved, from biological racism to cultural disapproval: it’s not about who they are; it’s about what some (okay, most) of them do.
(An emblematic line from President Reagan, “We’re in danger of creating a permanent culture of poverty as inescapable as any chain or bond,” deftly suggests that black people are no longer enslaved by white action, but by their own culture.)
To this day, even though black and brown people are disproportionately poor, white Americans constitute the majority of low-income people who escape poverty because of government safety net programs.
The majority of white voters have voted against the Democratic nominee for president ever since the party became the party of civil rights under Lyndon Johnson.
in 1947, veterans made up 50 percent of U.S. college admissions. (Racist program administration and educational segregation left black veterans in the South largely excluded from these opportunities, however.)
Students of color comprised just one in six public college students in 1980, but they now make up over four in ten. Over this period of growth among students of color, ensuring college affordability fell out of favor with lawmakers.
The federal government for its part slowly shifted its financial aid from grants that didn’t have to be repaid (such as Pell Grants for low-income students, which used to cover four-fifths of college costs and now cover at most one-third) to federal loans, which I would argue are not financial aid at all.
Eight out of ten black graduates have to borrow, and at higher levels than any other group.
In fact, white high school dropouts have higher average household wealth than black people who’ve graduated from college.
A third of developed countries offer free tuition, and another third keep tuition lower than $2,600.
The country’s first ambitious free college system, in California, was created in 1868 on a guarantee of no tuition and universal access; this public investment helped launch California’s rise as an economic giant and global hub of technology and innovation.
White and black people are equally likely to use drugs, but the system is six times as likely to incarcerate black people for a drug crime. Sentences for possession of crack cocaine, which is more widely used by African Americans than whites, are about eighteen times harsher than penalties for the powder version
whites with higher levels of racial resentment and more anti-black stereotypes grew more opposed to healthcare reform after it became associated with President Obama.
“The experiments…revealed that health care policies were significantly more racialized when they were framed as part of President Obama’s plan than they were for respondents told that these exact same proposals were part of President Clinton’s 1993 reform efforts.”
Texas politicians’ government-bashing is both ideological and strategic; they benefit politically by stopping government from having a beneficial presence in people’s lives—as white constituents’ needs mount, the claim that government is busy serving some racialized other instead of them becomes more convincing.
Texas is considered a majority-people-of-color state (41 percent non-Hispanic white, 40 percent Latinx, 13 percent black, and 5 percent Asian in 2018), but the legislature is two-thirds white and three-quarters male.
That’s a late-stage benefit of a forty-year campaign to defund and degrade public benefits; in the end, they’re so stigmatized that people whose lives would be transformed by them don’t even want them for fear of sharing the stigma.
In the latter half of the 1990s, the share of mortgages that were subprime nearly doubled. By 2000, half of the refinance loans issued in majority-black neighborhoods were subprime.
The exclusion of free people of color from the mainstream American economy began as soon as black people emerged from slavery after the Civil War. Black people were essentially prohibited from using white financial institutions, so Congress created a separate and thoroughly unequal Freedman’s Bank, managed (and ultimately mismanaged into failure) by white trustees.
In 1933, during the Great Depression, the U.S. government created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. Debby explained, “Its role was to buy up mortgages that were in foreclosure and refinance them, and put people back on their feet.
“But the FHA would not make or guarantee mortgages for borrowers of color,” she said. “It would guarantee mortgages for developers who were building subdivisions, but only on the condition that they include deed restrictions preventing any of those homes from being sold to people of color.
In 2016, the most recent available authoritative data, the typical white family in America had about $171,000 in wealth, mostly from homeownership—that’s about ten times that of black families ($17,600) and eight times that of Latinx families ($20,700).
Of all the African Americans in the United States during the decades between 1930 and 1960, fewer than 2 percent were able to get a home loan from the Veterans Administration or the Federal Housing Authority.
For instance, although the Fair Housing Act of 1968 outlawed racially discriminatory practices by banks, it would take another twenty-four years for the Federal Reserve System, the central bank of the United States, to monitor and (spottily) enforce the law.
Unlike a conventional mortgage, land contracts did not allow buyers to build equity; indeed, they owned nothing until the final payment was made.
But 1978 also saw an ominous sign of a coming wave of deregulation when a Supreme Court decision interpreted the National Bank Act to mean if a lender was in one of the few states without any limits on interest rates, it could lend without limits nationwide, effectively invalidating thirty-seven states’ consumer protections—and Congress declined to amend the law. That’s why, today, most of your credit card statements come from South Dakota and Delaware, states with lax lending laws.
Individual racism, whether conscious or unconscious, gives greedy people the moral permission to exploit others in ways they never would with people with whom they empathized. Institutional racism of the kind that kept the management ranks of lenders and regulators mostly white furthered this social distance. And then structural racism both made it easy to prey on people of color due to segregation and eliminated the accountability when disparate impacts went unheeded.
Never mind that most of the predatory loans we were talking about weren’t intended to help people purchase homes, but rather, were draining equity from existing homeowners. From 1998 to 2006, the majority of subprime mortgages created were for refinancing, and less than 10 percent were for first-time homebuyers.
Exclusion of black workers was so prevalent in many AFL unions that whites in early unions saw black people as synonymous with strike breakers; because unions rejected black workers, employers routinely brought them in as substitute workers to cross picket lines.
The forty-hour workweek, overtime pay, employer health insurance and retirement benefits, worker compensation—all these components of a “good job” came from collective bargaining and union advocacy with governments in the late 1930s and ’40s.
Economists have calculated that if unions were as common today as they were in 1979, weekly wages for men not in a union would be 5 percent higher; for noncollege-educated men, 8 percent higher. If that bump sounds small, compare that to the fact that, since 1979, wages for the typical hourly worker have increased only 0.3 percent a year. Meanwhile, pay for the richest 1 percent has risen by 190 percent.
As immigrants, these groups had an opportunity to ally themselves with abolition and, later, equal rights and to fight for better social and economic conditions for all workers. They chose instead, with few exceptions, the wages of whiteness.
Roediger uses the term “Herrenvolk republicanism” to describe American society as a representative democracy only for those considered, like Aryans under Nazism, to be part of the master race.
Norton and his colleagues would call the psychology behind DiAngelo’s mother’s warnings “last place aversion.” In a hierarchical system like the American economy, people often show more concern about their relative position in the hierarchy than their absolute status.
people who were in the second-to-last place in the money distribution to begin with. These players more often gave their money to the people above them in the distribution so that they wouldn’t fall into last place themselves.
Three out of four Republicans agreed that “it is hard to trust the results of elections when so many people will vote for anyone who offers a handout,”
James Madison believed that direct election would be the most democratic, but to secure slave states’ ratification of the Constitution, he devised the Electoral College as a compromise to give those states an advantage.
