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April 3, 2021 - February 12, 2022
Such financial malfeasance was allowed to flourish because the people who were its first victims didn’t matter nearly as much as the profits their pain generated. But the systems set up to exploit one part of our society rarely stay contained.
described option ARMs as “the rich man’s subprime loans.”
SUSAN’S STORY OF cascading loss and downward mobility has been replicated millions of times across the American landscape due to the financial industry’s actions in the 2000s. While the country’s GDP and employment numbers rebounded before the pandemic struck another blow, the damage at the household level has been permanent. Of families who lost their houses through dire events such as job loss or foreclosure, over two-thirds will probably never own a home again.
There is no question that the financial crisis hurt people of color first and worst. And yet the majority of the people it damaged were white. This is the dynamic we’ve seen over and over again throughout our country’s history, from the drained public pools, to the shuttered public schools, to the overgrown yards of vacant homes.
Wall Street had recruited the brightest technological minds—those who a generation ago would have been putting a man on the moon or inventing vaccines—to engineer a way to completely insulate wealthy people and institutions from the pain inflicted by their profits. Ultimately, they failed,
The first mortgages and collateralized debt instruments in the United States weren’t on houses, but on enslaved people, including the debt instruments that led to the speculative bubble in the slave trade of the 1820s. And the biggest bankruptcy in American history, in 2008, was the final chapter of a story that began in 1845 with the brothers Lehman, slave owners who opened a store to supply slave plantations near Montgomery, Alabama. The brothers were Confederate Army volunteers who grew their wealth profiteering during the Civil War, subverting the cotton blockade, buying cotton at a
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WOW.
Even as defaults on mortgages began to skyrocket across the country, the company’s leadership held on to the idea that it could endlessly gain from others’ loss.
A company born out of a system that treated Black people as property died from self-inflicted wounds in the course of destroying the property of Black people.
Lehman’s fate provides no justice for the enslaved people whose misery the company enabled in the nineteenth century, nor for the dispossessed homeowners ruined by Lehman-owned mortgages in the twenty-first century, but it is a reminder that a society can be run as a zero-sum game for only so long.
The result was jobs with better pay, benefits, and safety practices and upward mobility for generations of Americans to come. These victories were possible only when people recognized their common struggles and linked arms. And linking arms for those workers usually meant forming a union.
IN THE TWO-HUNDRED-YEAR history of American industrial work, there’s been no greater tool against collective bargaining than employers’ ability to divide workers by gender, race, or origin, stoking suspicion and competition across groups.
Competition across demographic groups was the defining characteristic of the American labor market, but the stratification only helped the employer. The solution for workers was to bargain collectively: to band together across divisions and demand improvements that lifted the floor for everyone.
When the Knights began organizing in the volatile years of Reconstruction, they recruited across color lines, believing that to exclude any racial or ethnic group would be playing into the employers’ hands.
The victories these unions won reshaped work for us all. 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. And the power to win these benefits came from solidarity—Black, white, and brown, men and women, immigrant and native-born.
Almost half of adult workers are classified as “low-wage,” earning about $10 an hour, or $18,000 a year, on average. Less than half of private employers offer health insurance. Only 12 percent of private-sector workers have the guaranteed retirement income of a traditional pension.
The share of workers in a union has directly tracked the share of the country’s income that goes to the middle class, and as union density has declined, the portion going to the richest Americans has increased in step.
labor’s breaking point came less suddenly than that single blow: over the course of the late 1970s, businesses had begun to freely flout the laws protecting workers’ rights to organize, accepting fines and fees as a tolerable cost of doing business.
A backdrop of economic insecurity makes these tactics more powerful. A job—no matter what the pay or conditions—can seem better than the ever-present threat of no job at all. And it’s true that labor’s enemies were aided and abetted by new rules of global competition and technological change that made American jobs less secure.
Where was this new antiunion narrative among white people coming from? The right-wing media echo chamber made the auto rescue an explicit racial zero-sum story: to them, it was a racially redistributive socialist takeover.
When Wisconsin governor Scott Walker attacked the collective bargaining rights of public employees in 2011, the rhetoric about taxpayers paying for teachers’ bloated benefits was redolent of the “welfare queen” charges.
the antiunion forces won in part by turning the union into a sign of weakness, a refuge for the “lazy.”
They think that unions, period—not just UAW—they just think unions, period, are for lazy Black people….And a lot of ’em, even though they want the union, their racism, that hatred is keeping them from joining.”
is this what happened with Amazon ?
to this day, the region that is the least unionized, with the lowest state minimum wages and the weakest labor protections overall, was the one that had been built on slave labor—on a system that compensated the labor of Black people at exactly zero.
The company was able to redraw the lines of allegiance—not worker to worker, but white to white—for the relatively low cost of a few perks.
They could be satisfied with a slightly better job that set them just above the Black guys on the line, more satisfied by a taste of status than they were hungry for a real pension, better healthcare, or better wages for everyone.
the wages of both classes could be kept low, the whites fearing to be supplanted by Negro labor, the Negroes always being threatened by the substitution of white labor.
du Bois 1935
European immigrants were sold membership to the top category of the racial caste system. The price they paid was acquiescence to an economic caste system.
The ones that hate you the most are the ones that you fight for the most. And you care about ’em the most. You keep ’em close to you. You keep ’em close to you. But this is how you deal with your white co-workers. They are people, too. Hey, look, they got kids, you got kids. Y’all just find that common ground.”
we’ve got to have a new identity for the working class. What do we do every day in this country? All of us get up and go to work. We make this country run. And now, more than ever, workers are producing more wealth than we’ve received, you know? We’re being exploited across the board,”
cross-racial solidarity was the point. Racial Unity Now: We Won’t Fight Each Other, read one sign. Black, White, Brown: We Fight Wage Slavery and Racial Division, read another. And another, Black, White, Brown: Defeat McPoverty, Defeat Hate.
the UAW’s message about race had invoked civil rights for Black workers, but the fast-food message explicitly included white people in the coalition and named division, not just racial oppression, as a common enemy.
“In order for all of us to come up, it’s not a matter of me coming up and them staying down. It’s the matter of, in order for me to come up, they have to come up, too—because we have to come up together. Because honestly, as long as we’re divided, we’re conquered. The only way that we’re going to succeed is together.”
By inviting white workers to see how the powerful profited from selling them a racist story that cost everybody (“whether brown, Black or white,” as workers so often said), the Fight for $15 had managed to win the support of whites as well.
employers could have afforded it all along. There was no drop in employment in places with wage increases, and in fact, many places have found the opposite.
Working alongside voting rights lawyers and experts on campaign finance rules, I learned how our democracy is even less equal than our economy—and the two inequalities are mutually reinforcing. When I think about the nice things we just can’t seem to have in America, a functioning, representative democracy is probably the most consequential.
Democracy is a secular religion in America; faith in it unites us. Even when we are critical of our politics, we wouldn’t trade our form of government for any other, and we have even gone to war to defend it from competition with rival systems.
Yet our sacred system allows a Larry Harmon to lose his opportunity for self-governance as easily as one lets a postcard fall in with the grocery circulars and wind up in the trash. The truth is, we have never had a real democracy in America.
the antidemocratic concept of minority rule—and rule by only the wealthiest of white men, in fact—was the original design of American government, despite any stated “self-evident truths” about equality to suggest the contrary.
the framers left holes in the bedrock of our democracy from the outset, in order to leave room for slavery.
Possibly the most consequential of the founding racist distortions in our democracy was the creation of the Electoral College in lieu of direct election of the president.
The three-fifths clause became moot after Emancipation and Black male suffrage at the end of the Civil War, but the Electoral College’s distortions remain. An Electoral College built to protect slavery has sent two recent candidates to the White House, George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump, who both lost the popular vote. The Electoral College still overrepresents white people, but in an interesting parallel to the free/slave tilt from the original Constitution, not all white people benefit. The advantage accrues to white people who live in whiter, less-populated states;
The ruling class fought against the cross-racial populists with a campaign for “white supremacy,” promising material and other advantages to whites who broke with Blacks—and violent intimidation to those who didn’t. When they won, the white supremacists attacked the franchise first.
One of the top barriers to voting, the registration requirement kept nearly 20 percent of eligible voters from the polls in 2016.
Over six million Americans are prohibited from voting as a by-product of the racist system of mass incarceration. (The only states that allow people with felony convictions to vote even while they’re in prison are Maine and Vermont, the two whitest states in the nation.)
“Some crimes were specifically defined as felonies with the goal of eliminating Blacks from the electorate,” as legal scholar Michelle Alexander wrote. These included petty theft in Virginia and, in Florida, vagrancy, which was a notorious catchall used to send into prison labor any Black person in a public space without a white person to vouch for him.
In reaction to Amendment 4, Florida’s Republican governor and legislature passed a state law that required people with a felony history to pay all outstanding fines and fees before voting.
2019
Our election system is full of unnecessary hurdles and traps—some set by malice and some by negligence—but I would argue that all are a product of the same basic tolerance for a compromised republic that was established at our founding, in the interest of racial slavery.
To see what U.S. democracy would be like without the distorting factor of racism, we can look to the states that make it easiest to vote, which are some of the whitest. Oregon, for example, was judged the easiest state in which to vote by a comprehensive study.
Mississippi, the state with the highest percentage of Black citizens, is dead last of the fifty states in terms of ease of voting.
There is a playbook of anti-voting tactics drawn up by a connected set of benign-sounding organizations such as the legislation-drafting network of conservative lawmakers, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and the legal organizations Project on Fair Representation and the Public Interest Legal Foundation, all of which are funded in turn by a group of radical right-wing millionaires and billionaires, chief among them fossil fuel baron Charles Koch.
