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April 3, 2021 - February 12, 2022
Considering the astonishing revelations that are flying at you that quickly, the whole experience of a MacLean conversation can leave you feeling like you’ve just been picked up by a twister and dropped in an entirely different universe. Sadly, though, the universe she describes is ours.
influential movement of radical right-wing libertarians opposed to the very idea of democracy. Through five decades of money and organizing, this movement has permeated conservative media and the Republican Party with its fringe, self-serving vision of an undemocratic society. Its goal is a country with concentrated wealth and little citizen power to levy taxes, regulate corporate behavior, fund public goods, or protect civil rights. The obstacle to this goal is representative democracy.
That’s why the hundreds of millionaires in the Koch network have taken aim at the rules of democracy, funding think tanks, legal organizations, public intellectuals, and advocacy groups to promote a smaller and less powerful electorate and weaker campaign finance laws.
The scale of their organization is as large as a political party, but they use front groups and shell companies to keep their funding mostly secret.
Professor MacLean says they’re about “property supremacy.” But racism has long been useful to the movement.
or wealth supremacy
Their unpopular ideas include lowering taxes on the wealthy (64 percent of Americans want higher wealth taxes), slashing government spending and eliminating public transit (70 percent want a big infrastructure plan paid for by a wealth tax), and drastically minimizing the government’s role in health insurance (56 percent support a fully public single-payer system). This is where racism becomes strategically useful.
Adherents to this belief system “see democracy as essentially infringing on economic liberty, and particularly the economic liberty of the most wealthy and corporations,”
And this older generation of white conservatives…understand[s] that young people are not liking these ideas….That young people are…raising questions about the inequities in the way that capitalism is operating.
The fear that drives the violence and mendacity of American voter suppression is rooted in a zero-sum vision of democracy: either I have the power and the spoils, or you do. But the civil rights–era liberation of the African American vote in the South offered a Solidarity Dividend for white people as well.
After the civil rights movement knocked down voting barriers, white as well as Black registration and turnout rates rose in former Jim Crow states. And a fuller democracy meant more than just a larger number of ballots; it meant a more responsive government for the people who hadn’t been wealthy enough to have influence before.
IN ORDER TO prevent a thriving multiracial democracy, the same movement that puts up barriers to voting has hacked away at the safeguards against money flooding into elections. It’s not very often thought of this way, but the current big-money campaign finance system is a linchpin of structural racism, and the stealth movement to create it has been driven by people who often also work against government action to advance civil rights and equality.
structural racism in elections: voting restrictions up; campign finance restrictions down.
people “in the bottom one-third of the income distribution have no discernable impact on the behavior of their elected representatives.”
Connecticut’s Solidarity Dividend was almost immediate. In the first legislative cycles after public financing, the more diverse (by measures of race, gender, and class) legislature passed a raft of popular public-interest bills, including a guarantee of paid sick days for workers, a minimum wage increase, a state Earned Income Tax Credit, in-state tuition for undocumented students, and a change to an obscure law championed by beverage distributor lobbyists that resulted in $24 million returning to the state—money that could contribute to funding the public financing law.
A genuine, truly representative democracy is still an aspiration in America, but the vision of it has propelled waves of communities to claim a right from which they were excluded in our founding slavocracy.
government subsidies nurtured wealth inside white spaces and suppressed and stripped wealth outside,
No governments in modern history save Apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany have segregated as well as the United States has, with precision and under the color of law. (And even then, both the Third Reich and the Afrikaner government looked to America’s laws to create their systems.)
refusal to lend to Black families under the original 1930s redlining maps is responsible for as much as half of the current disparities between Black and white homeownership and for the gaps between the housing values of Black and white homes in those communities.
Richard Rothstein, author of the seminal book on segregation, Color of Law: How the Government Segregated America, reminds us that there is no such thing as “de facto” segregation that is different from de jure (or legal) segregation. All segregation is the result of public policy, past and present.
Before the 1948 racial covenant Supreme Court decision, 80 percent of the city of Chicago carried racial covenants banning Black people from living in most neighborhoods, a percentage that was similar in other large cities around the country, including Los Angeles.
In Boston, Black meant poor in a way I simply had never realized. The everyday sight of Black doctors and managers (particularly native-born) was a rarity in that old-money city where Black political power had never gained a hold and where negative stereotypes of Blackness filled in the space.
although we knew about white people even if we didn’t live with them—they were co-workers, school administrators, and of course, every image onscreen—segregation meant that white people didn’t know much about us at all.
In 2016, three-quarters of white people reported that their social network was entirely white. This white isolation continues amid rising racial and ethnic diversity in America, though few white people say they want it to—in fact, quite the opposite.
PUBLIC POLICY CREATED this problem, and public policy should solve it. Because of our deliberately constructed racial wealth gap,
By reducing the segregation between white and Latino residents, the researchers found, Chicago could increase life expectancy for both.
industry and government decision makers are more likely to direct pollutants, ranging from toxic waste dumps to heavy truck traffic, into neighborhoods where people of color, especially Black people, live. This injustice has typically been understood as a life-and-death benefit of white privilege: white people can sidestep the poisoned runoff of our industrial economy.
But less well known is the fact that segregation brings more pollution for white people, too. It turns out that integrated communities are less polluted than segregated ones. It’s a classic racial divide-and-conquer, collective action problem: the separateness of the population leaves communities less able to band together to demand less pollution in the first place, for everyone.
White communities tend to draw their district boundaries narrowly, in order to make ultra-local and racially and socioeconomically homogenous districts, enabling them to hoard the wealth that comes from local property taxes. Meanwhile, areas with lower property values serve greater numbers of children of color with fewer resources.
If we recall how much of white wealth is owed to racist housing subsidies, the decision to keep allowing local property taxes to determine the fate of our children becomes even less defensible.
Increasingly, public education has been hollowed out by the way that racism drains the pool in America:
The pricing up and privatization of public goods has a cost for us all—most white families included.
Paying a 77 percent premium may be fine for white families with plenty of disposable income and job flexibility, but it’s a tax levied by racism that not everyone can afford. That’s why so many families feel like they’re in an arms race, fleeing what racism has wrought on public education, with the average person being priced out of the competition.
Families who can afford a house near a “good” school, in turn, get set up for a windfall of unearned cash:
Compared to students at predominantly white schools, white students who attend diverse K–12 schools achieve better learning outcomes and even higher test scores, particularly in areas such as math and science. Why?
their minds are also improved when it comes to critical thinking and problem solving. Exposure to multiple viewpoints leads to more flexible and creative thinking and greater ability to solve problems.
Dr. Deborah Son Holoien cites several studies of college students—the largest of which included more than seventy-seven thousand undergraduates—in which racially and ethnically diverse educational experiences resulted in improvements in critical thinking and learning outcomes, and in the acquisition of intellectual, scientific, and professional skills. The results were similar for Black, white, Asian American, and Latinx students. All this untapped potential. All these perverse incentives pulling us apart, two generations after segregation’s supposed end.
many of the behaviors of both students and parents that she found off-putting were expressions of white privilege. “I feel like there’s a way in which we upper-middle-class parents…want [our kids] to be unencumbered in their lives,” including, she feels, by rules. “It’s this entitlement. And it’s this feeling of…is there a rule? I don’t need to respect this rule. It doesn’t pertain to me.”
Those who say we can’t sacrifice economic growth for environmental protection are failing to account for the economic costs of climate change that are already upon us: an estimated $240 billion a year in the United States currently, due to increased extreme weather. That figure represents nearly half the average annual growth of the U.S. economy from 2009 to 2019.
even when one controlled for partisanship, racial resentment (“a general orientation toward Blacks characterized by a feeling that Blacks do not try hard enough and receive too many favors”) was highly correlated with climate change denialism.
“The economy” that they were referring to was their economy, the economic condition of people like them, seen through the lens of a zero-sum system of hierarchy that taught them to fear any hint of redistribution. Value-neutral admonitions about protecting “the economy” allowed them to protect their own status while resting easy knowing that they were not at all racist, because it wasn’t about race—it was about, well, “the economy.”
social dominance orientation isn’t about people who have a dominant personality; rather, it’s people who express beliefs about the way things ought to be that are “learned in society through socialization.
maybe more useful term than white supremacy culture
people who score high in social dominance orientation…tend to see the world as a competitive triangle, where it’s natural and inevitable that hierarchies exist. And so, society shouldn’t do anything to reduce [those hierarchies], because there’s probably something in these groups who have a lower position that has caused their lower position.”
I mean, we do also have class inequality in Sweden. But people who are poor, they are guaranteed to have their own apartments. They have food. And they have treatment if they have mental health issues, physical health issues. It’s not like people are left, just thrown out from the system.”
“Racial resentment goes through government for us. For most of our history, the government was the racist. But many white people now believe, consciously or unconsciously, that the government has taken the other side and is now changing the ‘proper’ racial order through social spending, civil rights laws, and affirmative action. This makes the government untrustworthy. And so, racial resentment by whites and distrust of government are very highly correlated. And then distrust of government and not wanting government to do anything about climate change…”
On my rush-hour subway ride home, I was packed in tight with a cross-section of New York City: faces in every human hue; multiple languages within earshot; a kid I’d seen hop the turnstile for lack of the $2.75 fare holding the same pole as a woman in $800 shoes. Was Kirsti Jylhä on a train like this for the first time when she thought, “Wow, I’m white?” Or was she on a subway platform watching everyone give a wide berth to an unhoused man asleep on a bench?
It was sad for me to hear that a short time in my country had brought this idealistic Nordic academic a deeper understanding of the social dominance theory she’d been writing about: what it looks like when a group of people demonstrate little empathy for the suffering of others. But of course, it did. The Nordic countries’ social-democratic policies—generous subsidies for housing, education, and retirement and, newly relevant to me, 480 days of parental leave in Sweden—are almost unimaginable in today’s America, because the dominant American political culture would say that people lacking
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Racism has a cost for everyone. And with the environment and climate change, many white people’s skeptical worldview, combined with their outsize political power, has life-or-death consequences for us all.
climate change opposition is sold by an organized, self-interested white elite to a broader base of white constituents already racially primed to distrust government action.
Like the zero-sum story, it’s all an illusion—white men aren’t truly safe from climate risk, and we can have a different but sustainable economy with a better quality of life for more people. But how powerful the zero-sum paradigm must be to knock out science and even a healthy sense of self-preservation. And how dangerous for us all.
dominant U.S. approach to environmental risk, which has been to shunt off the pollution by-products of industry to what’s known as “sacrifice zones.”
For nearly fifty years, grassroots activists living in these sacrifice zones—Richmond, California; Ocala, Florida; South Bronx, New York; Youngstown, Ohio, and many more—have been proving how racism shapes environmental policy. Collecting soil samples and keeping diaries of hospital visits, mapping the distance between incinerators and neighborhoods of color, they have built a damning record of environmental racism—and a movement for environmental justice. Dr. Robert Bullard is a sociologist considered by many to be the father of that movement.
